How To Stay Sane

Everyone accepts the importance of physical health: isn't it just as important to aim for the mental equivalent?

There is no simple set of instructions that can guarantee sanity, but if you want to overcome emotional difficulties and become happier, psychotherapist Philippa Perry argues that there are four cornerstones to sanity you can influence to bring about change. By developing your self-observation skills, examining how you relate to others, breaking out of your comfort zone and exploring new ways of defining yourself, she demonstrates that it is possible to become a little less tortured and a little more fulfilled. This book is at once a brilliant explanation of our minds and a profoundly useful guide to facing up to the many challenges life throws our way.

About the author

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and writer who has written for the Guardian, the Observer, Time Out and Healthy Living magazine and has a column in Psychologies magazine. In 2010 she wrote the graphic novel Couch Fiction, in an attempt to demystify psychotherapy. She lives in London and Sussex with her husband, the artist Grayson Perry, and enjoys gardening, cooking, parties, walking, tweeting and watching telly.

About The How To Book Series

We need self-help books like never before, and that is why The School of Life, in conjunction with Pan Macmillan, has launched a series of new guides for everyday living: six intelligent, rigorous, well-written self-help books, put together by some of the leading minds in the field. In these, we systematically examine some of the great issues of life – work, sex, money, emotional maturity, digital life and changing the world.

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Reviews

Philippa Perry has come to our rescue with a smart, pithy, readable book that everyone with even a passing interest in their psychological health will find useful. It has a wealth of useful advice based on sound, psychological theories without making the mistake of assuming a one-size-fits-all road map.

The book treads a path towards self-knowledge and self-growth over the pursuit of happiness per se and so places itself firmly at the philosophical end of the the self-help market. She avoids the pitfall of most self-help books by acknowledging that absolute control over our conscious mind is a fallacy and uses the neuroscience of the unconscious to explain this. Nor are we a slave to our unconscious and the final section provides a range of brilliantly simple and easily do-able exercise to help us work mindfully with our unconscious aspects.

- Reader review

Sanity, Philippa Perry shows in this brilliant little book, is not about normality, but about how to maintain a flexible position between rigidity and chaos.

- The Economist
Books of the Year (2012)

How To Stay Sane

About the author

About The How To Book Series

Digital & Audio Editions

Foreign Editions

Watch

Reviews

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