Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

Good book

this book is must read. atleast once

Goed voor nieuwe inzichten

This book has helped me look at people including myself with a better perspective. I recommend this book to everyone!

Good book

Muito bom, para saber como não se sentir vítima nem deprimido

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.