Quotes from Tom Butler-Bowdon

Barry Schwartz's distinction between maximizers and satisficers has given us the counterintuitive insight that restricting our choices in life can actually lead to greater happiness and satisfaction, and

Burns lists ten "cognitive distortions," such as all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and giving ourselves labels. By understanding these distortions, we are led to the awareness that "feelings aren't facts," they are only mirrors of our thoughts.

of how upset, nervous, worried, anxious, or stressed we have a tendency to be.

They had no idea what was or wasn't appropriate behavior, no concept of the usual give and take of normal relationships.

Burns notes the catch-22 nature of depression: The worse we feel, the more distorted our thoughts become, and this thinking plunges us even lower into black feelings about ourselves. Nearly

Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Burns points out that the basic idea of cognitive therapy—that our thoughts affect our emotions and mood, not the other way around—goes back a long way: The ancient philosopher Epictetus rested his career on the idea that it is not events that determine your state of mind, but how you decide to feel about the events. This

Frankl's brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It

By the laws of probability, most decisions made under pressure should be flawed ones, yet psychologists have found that people routinely make correct judgments most of the time, even with limited information. One

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters.

But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.

As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone's dignity intact.

William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, but it could equally be defined as the science of human nature.

we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology. In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick.

Before turning his mind to creativity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-sent-me-hi) wrote a celebrated book called Flow. Its insight was that it is a mistake to pursue happiness itself. Rather, we should recognize when we are genuinely happy—what we are doing when we feel powerful and "true"—and do more of those things. Flow

The common route to this knowledge is life experience

Ilya Prigogine, chemist; John

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the common idea of a creative individual coming up with great insights, discoveries, works, or inventions in isolation is wrong. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture, and also depends on timing.

First, love your work

What drives them, more than rewards, is the desire to find or create order where there was none before.

Creative people take their intuition seriously, looking for patterns where others see confusion, and are able to make connections between discrete areas of knowledge.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack.

Only 10 percent were middle class. The