Social Media Wellness

As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences, learning how to talk civilly to people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Famously "nice", she even gave a TED Talk about what she termed emotional correctness. But these days, even Kohn has found herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. It was time, she decided, to look into the ugliness erupting all around us.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found - Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators - and surveys the science of human navigation.

Ageism is too often an accepted form of bias, even though the facts support the value of aging. Airline pilots forced to retire at the arbitrary age of 65 are usually at the top of their game. Forced retirement in most organizations remove highly skilled performers as well as role models and trainers for newer generations. Instead of revelling in who we are, we begin to try to look younger as soon as possible. People have become inured to "losing" abilities as they age instead of appreciating new abilities that only age can bestow.

Each of us is endowed with an inheritance—a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights. But now, for the first time, it’s failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction. In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperiled its future.

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard - only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right - or is there another possibility?

When a loved one passes unexpectedly, the person left behind can lose their bearings. After the sudden loss of her mother, Chelsea Hanson, a nationally recognized grief educator and founder of With Sympathy Gifts and Keepsakes, didn't know where to turn for help, what to do next, or how to put the pieces of her life back together. Hanson's The Sudden Loss Survival Guide gathers everything that she learned during her own recovery process and provides an indispensable road map to aid those who've experienced a life-changing loss.

Human nature hasn’t changed. Dating has! Dr. Duana Welch and science are back to help. Still the only fact-based book to take men and women from before-you-meet until you commit, Love Factually blends heart, soul, and science in this fully revised and updated edition. Listen to the international best seller Dr. David Buss calls “gripping, science-based, and brimming with actions to improve your love life". In a genre long on opinion and short on proof, Love Factually puts all the evidence in your corner for the most important and daunting task of our lives.

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

In this hilarious and life-affirming memoir, Rob explores what it will take for him to become a little less Bear (Pooh) and a little bit more Bear (Grylls) and how mild-mannered, anxious rule-followers can get their own share of (gentle) adventure from time to time.

Brunschweiger posits women have the right to be happy and, if they choose to, feel comfortable rejecting the societal conventional pressure of having children. Our author suggests that women and their partners will have more freedom and enjoyment if they are childfree. Brunschweiger doesn’t want humanity to go extinct as some may suggest; rather, she wants the Earth and its inhabitants to have an enjoyable and sustainable future.

Many of the prices we pay seem to make little sense. We shell out $2.29 for a coffee at Starbucks when a nearly identical brew can be had at the corner deli for less than a dollar. We may be less willing to give blood for $25 than to donate it for free. Americans hire the cheap labor of illegal immigrants to fix the roof or mow the lawn and vote for politicians who promise to spend billions to keep them out of the country.

By explaining how the human brain works and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment. Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled.

What are we going to do with those 20 or 30 years we didn’t expect? Due to unfounded fears of unhappiness and regret, many intelligent, otherwise rational people, even into their 40s and 50s, are so convinced that old age is a time of misery that they simply deny any other outcome and refuse to plan their own destiny. This optimistic and highly informative guide to smart aging will detail for listeners the steps they need to take to ensure that long life becomes synonymous with good life.

A study of individuals who miraculously recovered from terminal illnesses draws on medical, genetic, psychological, and spiritual profiles to argue that the key to healing lies in the functioning of the immune system.

Marc Freedman, hailed by the New York Times as “the voice of aging baby boomers [seeking] meaningful and sustaining work later in life”, makes an impassioned call to accept the decades opening up between midlife and anything approximating old age for what they really are: an entirely new stage of life, which he dubs the encore years. The whole 60- to 80-year-old period is simply new territory, he writes, and the people in this period constitute a whole new phenomenon in the 21st century.

What happens when we accept that everything we feel and think stems not from an immaterial spirit but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? In this thought-provoking narrative - drawn from professional expertise as well as personal life experiences - trailblazing neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland grounds the philosophy of mind in the essential ingredients of biology. She reflects with humor on how she came to harmonize science and philosophy, the mind and the brain, abstract ideals and daily life.

Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

In 2010, pioneering sociologist Catherine Hakim shocked the world with a provocative new theory: In addition to the three recognized personal assets (economic, cultural, and social capital), each individual has a fourth asset - erotic capital - that he or she can, and should, use to advance within society. In this bold and controversial book, Hakim explores the applications and significance of erotic capital, challenging the disapproval meted out to women and men who use sex appeal to get ahead in life.

The Facebook Narcissist is the first book dedicated to exploring the relationship between narcissism and social media. Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist certified in Imago therapy, delves into how social media enhances individual and cultural narcissism and how it may create or exacerbate toxic narcissistic tendencies in people who use it. Social media is here to stay, but with education and awareness on how it makes us and the world more narcissistic, we can change the narrative and focus on the ways in which social media can be positive, and even improve the world.