Books and Me

by Anders Hansen (2017) This is the book I'd been waiting for:  all that walking and running and jumping up and down, which yes, you know it is good for the body, but what about the soul?  There have been hints before, snippets garnered here and there, but sometimes when you don't feel like donning the trainers, you need a veritable peon to the merits of getting out there in the rain and doing that little bit more.  And here it is:  a smorgasbord of reasons to get off the sofa. It really isn't just about endorphins or even endo-cannabinoids either.  There's all the other stuff you will have heard of like dopamine and BDNF and the effects on cortisol, but there's much more, like kynurenine and CCK, that meant absolutely nothing to me, but which only pile on the reasons to get out there. And it works.  It really does.  We should all be doing this.  It is good for the soul. Rating 10/10

by Katie Hurley (2019) With news that 9/10 teens are worried about their mental health, and that a third state that they feel helpless, sad and or fearful frequently and this problem far outstripping any help that is offered by others, these sorts of work books would seem to have a big and important function. This one does the job efficiently enough. There isn't anything you won't already have read before in other places, but it puts all the strategies in one neat place succinctly and clearly, and even if you don't have any mood disorder, often seems to offer very sensible strategies for life. Whether a teen would actually engage with it in the first place, let alone actually benefit from it, is another matter altogether. Rating 6/10

by Martin Meadows (2015) There is nothing startlingly new here.  If you've read around a bit in the self-help category, you will recognise most of the ideas in here, but it is nonetheless helpful to have them all bunched neatly and succinctly into one place and almost all of what he says makes very good sense.  A useful precis. Rating 6/10

by Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015) Where to start?  This book is monumental, being vast in scope, beautifully argued and hugely significant all at once.  It is also deeply humane and potentially healing.  It would have been very easy for Bessel to have turned out an angry diatribe but instead he quietly makes his case, and you only gradually begin to clock, whilst reading between the lines, that his argument represents a huge challenge to current psychiatric, schooling and social services. His argument is that the epidemic of unhappiness which is currently so often attributed to snowflakery/lack of resilience is actually, often as not, a response to deeply traumatic events which for whatever reason, we do not really want to acknowledge or confront. So instead of blaming the victim or imposing deeply cruel methods of treatment (he gently explains why CBT so often fails),  Bessel gets about delineating the effects of trauma upon the mind, brain and body, an...

by Dr. Michael Mosley  (2017) The fact that this is my third Michael Mosley book so far this year is a pretty strong clue that I am a dedicated fan of this doctor-turned-journalist. He churns out these books on similar subjects and I read them all avidly.  This is yet  another  book primarily on the microbiome and the latest (as of 2017) ways to improve it, which of course is predominantly through diet (a lot of tasty though often meat based recipes are provided), but also through fasting, exercise, getting a good night's sleep and minimising stress. It might seem like reinventing the wheel, given all the other stuff I have read on this subject in the recent past, but actually, I am constantly grateful for the revision as well as the updates. For example, it is easy to fall off the fasting wagon and a little reminder of why it is worth it, particularly when coupled with the advantages of  HIIT,  is always a good thing.   And of course the ...