How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living

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In How We Are, Vincent Deary explored the process of habit and change in everyday life. In How We Break, he examines what happens when we are pushed to our limit.

Deary is a practitioner health psychologist who also works in a fatigue clinic and specializes in interventions that help people cope with whatever life has thrown at them. The big traumas in life, he points out, are relatively rare. Much more common is when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to a prolonged period of difficulty or precarity. When the world shrinks to nothing but our daily coping, we become unhappy, worried, hopeless, exhausted. In other words, we break. Breaking, he shows us, is embodied, as our physical and mental distress are linked, and happens when the systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the turbulence and overwhelm of life affects us, we have a better chance of overcoming the challenges.

Drawing on clinical case studies, trailblazing scientific research, intimate personal stories, and illuminating references from philosophy, literature, and film, How We Break offers a consoling and deeply felt new vision of everyday human struggling, and it makes a bold case for the power of rest.

About the Author

Vincent Deary is a practitioner health psychologist at Northumbria University, where his research focuses on the development of new psychosocial interventions for people with a variety of health issues, including cancer survivors and the elderly. A clinician in the UK's first transdiagnostic Fatigue Clinic, he works as part of a multidisciplinary team to research and develop new treatments for people for whom fatigue is a disabling symptom. He is the author of How We Are, the first book in the How to Live series.

The books for this giveaway are being provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  We have 20 copies available. The giveaway will end on May 27th.