How We Break
Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 21, 2024
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- $14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Drawing on cutting-edge science and intimate personal stories, an essential and paradigm-shifting book for readers struggling with fatigue, burnout, stress, and trauma—and for all of us who sometimes feel like we have been pushed past our breaking point.
In How We Are, the health psychologist and author Vincent Deary explored the process of habit and change in everyday life. In How We Break, a deeply compassionate and illuminating exploration of suffering, 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 we are subjected to too much turbulence—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 same systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the turbulence and overwhelm of life affects us, then 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 and recuperation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deary, a professor of applied health psychology at Northumbria University, continues his How to Live trilogy (after How We Are) with a cerebral look at how people "break" amid life's "turbulence" and the ways they might traverse "its difficult straits with a little more ease." Genetics, environmental exposures, trauma, and other factors contribute to the body's allostatic load—the "wear and tear that happens when the turbulence is too much"—according to Deary, and if the system tips into "allostatic overload," body and brain can "unravel" into such ailments as insomnia, anxiety, and chronic pain. His thesis sets the stage for complex philosophical meditations on the ways humans metabolize suffering, how language's "system of categorisation" begets self-critique, the nature of the self, and the ways in which people form attachments to their pain. Deary's flexible, "dimensional" approach makes room for varied individual experience ("Our breaking, like our world, will be our own") and lays fertile ground for sensitive, analytical musings, though this looseness may frustrate those seeking direct guidance (vague questions for readers include, "how precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?"). Still, it's an empathetic and searching meditation on some of humanity's deepest psychological questions.