Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques

As a father of a teen with anxiety and depression I started to read this book looking for tools to help My daighter. The boom has helped me to understand better the causes of her mood swings. Her therapists also used CBT to trest her, so I could also understand better the steps they were doing. Thisnis a very useful resource for self help and to help others (at least understand them in a better way). Absolutely recommended.

This book has helped me tremendously. Ever since I read it, I can't stop recommending it to the people I care about who struggle with mood regulation. This book will provide a number of tools to combat the symptoms of depression. Depression is the main ailment the book is designed to treat using cognitive behavioral therapy. What's fascinating about this book is that it is incredibly proficient at using rationality to help the reader escape depressive spirals of thinking patterns. The content is so heavily based on rationality and common sense type of thinking, I wondered why it took so long to try and modify my thinking patterns before I read this book. The tools described in the book, such as the double column technique, the downward arrow technique, the pleasure predicting sheet, and the strategies he offers for avoiding nasty fights with people, are so intuitive and accessible that many situations that would have caused emotional distress for me in the past were effectively disarmed using them. You get the feeling that these techniques parallel the natural thinking pattern of people with healthy and positive outlooks. The techniques are easily retrievable in the book for reference later, too. Throughout the book he emphasizes that your own thoughts create your emotions, this is the basis for cognitive behavioral therapy. As such, he doesn't cop out and say that depression can be defined merely as a chemical imbalance in the brain, but that the disease is much more complex. By the end of the book, though, I felt I had a fairly good grasp of the disease as understood by modern psychology, which also helped to make it easier to manage. Burns does not side-step around the problems with depression treatment, either. He recognizes that there are potentially a myriad of ways to treat depression. In the final couple of chapters, he lays out the pharmacological side of depression treatment. Amazingly, he explains the mechanisms of this medicine in a way that I was able to understand. I liked how balanced the book was in that way, because even though he is a proponent of psychotherapy and counseling, he recognizes and lays out the potential benefits of pharmacological treatment. Navigating through anti-depressant medicine can be daunting and he takes the fear of choosing the correct medicine away by encouraging the reader to inform him or herself about the medicines available for treating depression. The final chapter is an extensive reference guide for anti-depressant medication and features all of the adverse side-effects of each and ways that this medicine may interact with other medicine(s) being taken. It is reassuring that the advice and tools in the book are based in science, rationality, and the experience Burns has in treating depression, not "new ageism" or other "too good to be true" type of explanations for the secret to happiness so commonly seen in other self help books. It is a self help book in a class of its own. This was an extremely empowering book. I would recommend it to anyone who feels their emotions run away from them, who are debilitated by extreme moods, and who want freedom from feelings like guilt, fear, and anxiety.

It works! I used it to get over some criticisms I cannot take before. The criticisms affect my relationship. I got the idea from this book: if you criticize others not meaning to deny all of the good of others, others' criticisms also do not deny all of you. They might want to help you improve from some aspects. Also, I used the if it is true what it means methods to find out my unaware believes in life: eager for others approval--if no approval-not like me-leave me-I am alone-terrible. I realized that this belief make my life very emotional and not stable. I depend on others' approval! I have the fear all the time to be left alone. Then I try to find a better belief in life: I am good my self. I do not need other's approval to feel good. The easy start book is Being Happy by Andrew. It is good to get an overview of human's nature and basic psychology. Two books fundamentally help me to be calm with myself. The first one is The Feeling good therapy, second one is Search Inside Yourself. These books help me to accept myself, accept my own emotions. All changes need to be from inside from self. Then the third book is How to win friends and influence people. After be easy with myself, it is further step to be good with others. Each word in how to win friends is worth to read and listen! It is a master piece. The author use several years and have a team to read most of related topics and successful people's biography. In the end, the Power of Now and The Four Agreements can be considered. The power of now let me realize that I always avoid now, I always want to stay in the future. Also, the power of now suggests that feel accept and be friend with own emotions. It has a lot of information about past. It is consistent with Search Inside Yourself book. Last but not least it the TED talk about growth mindset by Carol Dweck. Coursera Positive Psychology especially ositive Psychology: Resilience Skills by Karen Reivich. Learning how to learn By Barbara Oakley on Coursera. Why these are related to self-help. We can learn any time any where. We can learn from mistakes and grow. So these will help us be calm and learn when we make mistakes or meet problems.

Good: I liked the practical guidance and the exercises, very helpful. 4 stars only because Chapter 10 introduces Dysfunctional Attitude Scale, and it has 7 parts (Approval, Love, Achievement, Perfectionism, Entitlement, Omnipotence and Autonomy). After reading chapters 11, 12, 13 and 14 about the fires four, I was very much looking forward to read about Entitlement - but there was nothing. Chapter 15 is in the next part of the book, and about completely different topic. I'm wondering if Entitlement, Omnipotence and Autonomy are missing from paper edition too, or only from Kindle edition?

I’m usually sceptic when I see a self-help book. The first question I ask myself is that, is it going to be another book with unrealistic view of the world, lots of references to religion, metaphysics and heavenly powers, full of unscientific methods written by a salesperson who wants to get richer by making you buy their cliché positive sentences? This book is none of the above. First of all it’s written by a scientist, and you’d notice the difference if you have read a few other self-help books written by non-scientists (which are the majority of self-help books unfortunately). Contrary to them it doesn’t try to convince you that the world is a heaven in disguise. Nor it doesn’t ask you to do something and rely on god or other heavenly entities to do the rest for you. Instead it tries to teach you methods with which you can better understand your thoughts, and be realistic about them. Keep a note of your thoughts, and if they’re unrealistically negative try to use facts to shift them towards reality. One of the main symptoms of depression is procrastination, and the size of the book (almost 700 pages) might intensify this. If this is the case, please note that the book can be considered as several books bundled together. Chapter 20 is a reference of psychiatric drugs and is almost 150 pages. Since it is a reference you don’t need to read it all. The main gist of the book is the concept called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which is introduced in the first 50 pages of the book. So if you’re frightened by the size of the book, you can start by reading the first 50 pages and get the main idea and start practicing the method. The remaining chapters are more specific to certain problems, and help you better cope with those problems. I found all chapters beneficial, but if you don’t have time for them all, you can instead pick the one that suits you the most. There are chapters focusing on low self-esteem, procrastination, fighting back criticism, handling anger, guilt, suicide, etc. One of the most enjoyable parts of the book was Part 7, chapters 17 to 19, in which David Burns explains clearly and in the most simplistic language, how the nervous system works, and how antidepressant drugs work, and what’s the reason behind their side-effects. It was through these chapters that I learned about a concept called drug interaction in which two or more drugs when taken together increase or decrease their effect or side-effect. Since it’s difficult for all physicians to keep the progressively changing information about all drugs in mind, it’s better for the patients to check them themselves. I found this website in which you can search the drugs you take (including food supplements) and check their interactions (I’m sure there must be more of such websites): https://reference.medscape.com/drug-interactionchecker I started to apply some of the methods myself, and found them beneficial. I may not religiously follow all the methods with the formats specified in the book, though I may not diverge too much from them either. If I can summarise this book in one sentence it would be: Pen and paper are human’s best friends.

I found this book to be very informative and helpful.

Libro eccezionale. Chiarissimo e pieno di esercizi. Prima di rivolgervi ad uno specialista potreste leggerlo. Mi è stato di grande aiuto in in periodo poco sereno.

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