Change Psychology

Say you want to start going to the gym or practicing a musical instrument. How long should it take before you stop having to force it and start doing it automatically? The surprising answers are found in Making Habits, Breaking Habits, a leading psychologist’s popular examination of one of the most powerful and underappreciated processes in the brain. Although people like to think that they are in control, the vast majority of human behavior occurs without any decision-making or conscious thought.

Codependency is not a diagnosis, but rather an unhealthy, one-sided relationship dynamic. It can range from very subtle to quite extreme, when a person makes terrible sacrifices just to earn their partner’s approval. Codependency can be hard to recognize. This is why you need to know its early signs so that you can take action immediately - especially if your partner is a narcissist. Recovering from a codependent relationship with a narcissist can take years and seriously undermine your mental health, so run away as soon as possible! 

Do you ever feel overwhelmed and powerless after watching the news? Does it make you feel sad about the world, without much hope for its future? Take a breath. The world is not as bad as the headlines would have you believe! In You Are What You Read, campaigner and researcher Jodie Jackson helps us understand how our current 24-hour news cycle is produced, who decides what stories are selected, why the news is mostly negative, and what effect this has on us, as individuals and as a society.

Over his long career as witness to an extreme 20th century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind" - what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens.

When Özlem Cekic became the first Muslim MP in the Danish Parliament, her email inbox was inundated with hate mail and threats, and her gut reaction was to delete and ignore each abusive message. But eventually, she decided to take a risk. She started replying to each message and inviting the senders to meet and engage in dialogue over coffee. And with time, understanding, and patience, she began to make a difference, both in the lives of those who hated her before even meeting her, and in her own life.

In the popular imagination, hypnosis is misconstrued as something done to people, as if the hypnotist hypnotizes them. And hypnotherapy is similarly misconceived as something done to clients' problems, as if the therapist could unilaterally counter or cure them. In a refreshing departure from conception-as-usual, Douglas Flemons offers another view. He explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unraveling of knotted strands of experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labeled afflictions.

In Why Therapy Works, Louis Cozolino explains the mechanisms of psychotherapeutic change from the bottom up, beginning with the brain, and how brains have evolved - especially how brains evolved to learn, unlearn, and relearn, which is at the basis of lasting psychological change. Listeners will learn why therapists have to look beyond just words, diagnoses, and presenting problems to the inner histories of their clients in order to discover paths to positive change.

Una brillante y valiente investigación de Michael Pollan, autor de cinco best sellers de The New York Times, sobre la revolución médica y científica en torno a las drogas psicodélicas, y la fascinante historia de sus propias experiencias psicodélicas que le cambiaron la vida.

In response to educators who are already fans of her best seller Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Marilee Adams, the originator of Question Thinking, presents a compelling model for creating a classroom environment infused with curiosity, creativity, and caring. Through a moving story of a teacher on the verge of burnout, Adams demonstrates the powerful influence our mind-sets have on how we interact with our students, our colleagues, and ourselves.

We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Our old postwar alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does it mean to have children - nothing if not an act of hope? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on Earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell is consumed by these questions - and, as the father of two young children himself, he finds them increasingly urgent.

Mary Aiken is the world's leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - a discipline that combines psychology, criminology, and technology to investigate the intersection where technology and human behavior meet. In this, her first book, Aiken has created a starting point for all future conversations about how the Internet is shaping development and behavior, societal norms and values, children, safety, security, and our perception of the world.

What if you could easily and joyfully resolve the in-the-moment conflicts that often derail your eating and exercise goals? Much of what we’ve been taught about creating change in eating and exercise is simplistic, outdated, and for many, misguided. Sustainable-behavior-change researcher and lifestyle coach Michelle Segar has devoted decades to the study of how to achieve lasting changes in eating and exercise and other self-care behaviors. Segar explains the surprising reasons why our eating and exercise plans so often crash when they come up against real life.

Drawing on humorous examples, true stories, and playful analogies, Connection Mode shows how our nervous system—including a surprisingly common missed opportunity to finish our lower brain development—often interferes with our lives in ways we don’t even realize. Connection Mode distills decades of compelling information from the Brain Highways program, which has guided 20,000 kids and adults to improve their lives by changing their brain and nervous system. The book offers a simple, time-tested trifecta approach for restoring our nervous system’s flexibility.

Do you struggle with your relationship with food? Are you tired of chasing diets and feeling like a failure? Emotional eating (stress eating, binge eating) can feel like a never-ending cycle of guilt and shame. You turn to food for comfort or stress relief, but the relief is only temporary, and the weight gain and health consequences can be long-lasting.

One of the nation's leading psychologists asks why today's corporate leaders desire but reject creative solutions - and finds some surprising conclusions.

We live in troubled times: climate crisis, war and authoritarian ‘populism’ are just some of the challenges we are currently facing. Never has there been such a need for a new approach to politics – nor such an opportunity for one.

If you are someone facing the anxiety issue or are associated with someone who is, this book is a perfect guide to help you understand the problem. Moreover, it will also help you learn techniques and ways to deal with such situations immediately on the long-term basis. 

Drawing on a wide variety of influences, from literature to Zen Buddhism, biology to neuroscience, Enough Is Enough lays out the habits anyone can develop to turn them into just the kind of hard-working, deep-thinking ideal they’ve always wanted to be. Written with passion, wit, and knowledge gained as much from life as from literature, Enough Is Enough promises to be just the book you’re looking for if you want to run headlong into the future and never look back.

In this inspirational fable, Bob Flanagan represents the voice of old school grit. A legendary college basketball coach who thinks like John Wooden and talks like Mike Ditka, Flanagan is entering the final days of his coaching career. While his team tries to advance through the NCAA postseason tournament, Flanagan uses his last days as a coach to write his grandchildren letters revealing the rules for a successful and happy life. The rules of grit.