Macmillan
How We Break : Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
How We Break : Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
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—Sophie McBain, New Statesman
Vincent Deary works in a fatigue clinic and specializes in interventions that help people cope with whatever life has thrown at them, in particular burnout, stress, and trauma. 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 systems that enable us to navigate life become dysregulated. But if we better understand how turbulence and overwhelm affect us, then we have a better chance of overcoming life’s 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 compassionate new vision of everyday human struggling, and it makes a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation.
| Vincent Deary is a practitioner health psychologist and professor of health psychology at Northumbria University, where his research focuses on the development of new psychosocial interventions for people with a variety of health issues, including cancer survivors and the elderly. A clinician in the UK’s first transdiagnostic fatigue clinic, he works as part of a multidisciplinary team to help people for whom fatigue is a disabling symptom. He is the author of How We Are, the first book in the How to Live series. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the North of England. |
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