Mind Wellness

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few. So begins this most beloved of all American Zen works....

Ellen Galinsky has spent her entire career studying early childhood development, first at Vassar College, then for 25 years at the Bank Street College of Education, and for the past 20 years as the founder and now president of the Families and Work Institute. What she has found is that there is an enormous gap between what researchers have discovered and what parents have been told about those discoveries. Mind in the Making bridges this gap, bringing the work of more than 100 scientists into a form that parents everywhere can use.

From the author of Clean Green Eats, a Japanese-inspired guide to finding balance, joy, and good health - A Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for wellness - that emphasizes a simple, streamlined method for cleaning up your eating habits and offers modern-day applications of ancient Japanese healing practices and philosophy. Candice Kumai has always treasured the Japanese traditions that shaped her childhood. In recent years, she’s been spending more time in Japan, meeting with relatives and absorbing the culture. It was on one of those trips that she visited a Kintsugi master and found the guiding inspiration for her next book.

Recent years have seen a shocking increase in antidepressant use the world over, with one in four women starting her day with medication. These drugs have steadily become the panacea for everything from grief, irritability, and panic attacks to insomnia, PMS, and stress. But the truth is, what women really need can't be found at a pharmacy.

We are living through one of the most anxious periods any of us can remember. Whether facing issues as public as a pandemic or as personal as having kids at home and fighting the urge to reach for the wine bottle every night, we are feeling overwhelmed and out of control. But in this timely book, Judson Brewer explains how to uproot anxiety at its source using brain-based techniques and small hacks accessible to anyone.

Whether you're new to Reiki or you're a practitioner seeking to deepen your knowledge and enhance your skills, with this guide you'll learn how to use Reiki to heal yourself and others, cultivate and trust your natural intuition, develop your empathic and psychic abilities, work with your spirit guides, and ground and protect yourself as a practitioner of this sacred healing art.

Your autonomic nervous system is responsible for the constant but mostly subconscious communication between your brain and body. When you experience stress, anxiety, or trauma, your nervous system formulates responses to keep you alive. But you can also become trapped in survival mode if you’re consistently exposed to unsafe environments, toxic relationships, or destructive thought patterns. Mind-body practitioners Jen Mann and Karden Rabin now provide the first in-depth look at nervous system regulation, somatic therapy, Polyvagal theory, the vagus nerve, and the mind-body connection.

A bold and fascinating dive into the nuts and bolts of psychological evolution, Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture is part philosophical manifesto, part practical self-development guide, all based on the teachings of legendary thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Abraham Maslow. The ideas and techniques it offers are all integrated into a vital theory for helping individuals scale the heights of self-mastery and lead great lives.

You want to get more out of yourself. You want to know how to take your performance to the next level. You want to uncover secrets to elite performance. You’re in the right place, but the path ahead is not what you think. Mark Mathieson outlines the nine key lessons that enable you to reconnect with your life to take advantage of the hidden, wild systems all around you. Mark will show you how to master these skills to develop grit and passion to re-wild your existence in a way that leads to sustainable high performance.

In Blue Mind, Wallace J. Nichols revolutionizes how we think about these questions, revealing the remarkable truth about the benefits of being in, on, under, or simply near water. Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with compelling personal stories from top athletes, leading scientists, military veterans, and gifted artists, he shows how proximity to water can improve performance, increase calm, diminish anxiety, and increase professional success.

Stress. It is everywhere around us. Even worse, it gets inside us: Sapping our energy, undermining our health, and making us more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and disease. Now, based on Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this groundbreaking audiobook shows you how to use natural, medically proven methods to soothe and heal your body, mind, and spirit. Full Catastrophe Living is an audiobook for the young and the old, the well, the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in today’s world.

In The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot takes us on a thrilling exploration of the nature of influence. We all have a duty to affect others - from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are we at this role, and can we become better? It turns out that many of our instincts - from relying on facts and figures to shape opinions, to insisting others are wrong or attempting to exert control - are ineffective because they are incompatible with how people's minds operate.

Are videogames bad for us? It's the question on everyone's mind, given teenagers' captive attention to videogames and the media's tendency to scapegoat them. It's also - if you ask clinical psychologist Alexander Kriss - the wrong question. In his therapy office, Kriss looks at videogames as a window into the mind. Is his patient Liz really "addicted" to Candy Crush - or is she evading a deeper problem? And when Jack immerses himself in Mass Effect, is he eroding his social skills - or honing them via relationship - building gameplay?

In the 1980s, American psychiatry announced that it was time to toss aside Freudian ideas of mental disorder because the true path to understanding and treating mental illness lay in brain science, biochemistry, and drugs. This sudden call to revolution, however, was not driven by any scientific breakthroughs. Nor was it as unprecedented as it seemed. Why had previous efforts stalled? Was this latest call really any different? In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington offers the first comprehensive history of the troubled search for the biological basis of mental illness.

In The Crowd - A Study of the Popular Mind, social theorist Gustave Le Bon gives historical insight into the political thinking of his era while offering timeless social commentary. Le Bon challenges the listener to contemplate how individual ideas change - often to a destructive end - when employed in a setting of groupthink. As technology and communications innovations make group formation easy and accessible for better or for worse, this book's message is certainly one that will not be lost in the crowd.

Tobacco is bad for us; that’s a given. But even though you may know the negative health effects, nicotine’s hold is strong, subconscious, and emotional: It tastes good, it’s a companion when you’re alone, and it can be a shield against stress. What if none of these things were true, though? What if nicotine actually tasted bad and didn’t make you less lonely? What if it didn’t relax you? It may seem hard to believe, and it’s okay to be skeptical, but coming to a new mindset about smoking and vaping is the key to quitting.

Have you ever felt like your life wasn't real? Have you ever felt like you were trapped in some kind of simulation, or a dream, or a movie, or a game? Have you ever felt like you weren't from this world? The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, “It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” This is your New Beginning. Why “New Beginning?” Because what lies ahead is a radical departure from the old. It's a catalyst to challenge, to question, and to overthrow outdated paradigms.

The idea that “thoughts become things” has become a meme in popular culture. It’s held as a firm proposition in metaphysics, and some spiritual teachers ascribe infinite powers to the mind. But are these claims scientifically accurate? What does the scientific evidence tell us about the scope of the human mind to transform thoughts into reality?

This “incredibly captivating” (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies) portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects—and we’re on the verge of being able to prevent the disease’s onset entirely.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Buddha and the Badass and The Code of the Extraordinary Mind shares the secret weapon of the world’s top achievers: his signature hyper-efficient meditation program that anyone can make time for.