HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Mine is comorbid with being bipolar. The only thing that helped was medication and then…

- Learning CBT from a book with the help of a therapist to guide me. https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/... The core of it is in the first few chapters. Never read the later ones once I got the concept.

- Learning how to have realistic expectations about what I can do day after day.

- Prioritize self-care and optimize for long-term performance over short term success. This includes going to bed earlier than I want. :(

- Working with my manager to have the proper accommodations. In my case, strict 40-hour work week, no work interruptions outside of that, and time off as needed.

I’ve needed accommodations less since things have evened out, but I’ll never be able to do on-call.

It is possible to learn it from a book on your own. I recommend The Feeling Good Handbook by David D. Burns. https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/...

This is the book my therapist had me read as part of my “homework” between sessions.

While this is completely anecdotal, it’s helped a number of people I’ve recommended it to and they have recommended it to others, who also have been helped. Learning what emotions are, what they mean, and how to recognize them is empowering.

It's a book, not a website, but I highly recommend "The Feeling Good Handbook." http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452281326

It's also been shown in experiments to be beneficial: see e.g. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/63/4/644/ http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/65/2/324/

I know there's also another study that compared it to a placebo book instead of just a waiting list control group, and it was better than the placebo book too.

I just wanted to reply to give another endorsement to David Burns' Feeling Good (http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/03808...) - I personally use the Feeling Good Handbook (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452281326) which is the exact same thing but a little condensed. It's a big book which can be hard to tackle with depression.

Guys, if you're suffering from depression or anxiety, this is the be all and end all of lasting treatments that works. I actually Ctrl-F'ed for it when I opened this thread.

⬐ jdp23

Agreed, strongly recommended. My Mom's a librarian, and she's given it to dozens of people over the years; back in the 1990s she even bought a dozen paperbacks on sale and would mail them to friends who were having problems.

⬐ danso

Wow, 700 pages for the 4 dollar Kindle edition. Hard to not give it a try http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Mood-Therapy-ebook/dp/B00...

Raganwald's point is well taken - going out and reading some research is much better than head-butting for karma. But I feel that he's not appreciating the value of informal conversation enough.

First of all, depression is characterized by people who have distorted thinking about themselves and rationalizations for avoiding treatment. So that discussion is going to be necessary to have.

Secondly, it's reasonable to be skeptical about psychiatry and self-help books. The industry is saturated with snake oil. One has to rely on one's own judgment or one would be endlessly drowning in research. Judging books by their cover isn't just appropriate, it's mandatory.

Sometimes literally. One of the best-selling self-help books for CBT depicts a guy with a lobotomized smile floating in a dreamy cloudscape with the title "Feeling Good".[1] When it was prescribed to me I was disgusted. It looks like Stuart Smalley.[2]

But people who made the same mistake were corrected by others who had read research, or had personal knowledge. Which leads me to my last point: head-butting has its place. In the wild, animals who butt heads are doing so to determine which is the stronger, without actually engaging in wasteful combat. Similarly we are often arguing to probe which argument might be better, without fully testing it. It's enough, sometimes, to sense someone's confidence, to see a glimpse of the detail of their knowledge, even if they don't cite anything.

That heuristic is highly exploitable by people who have abnormal abilities to project confidence (aka, "confidence men"). But it's all we've got in a world that none of us have time to fully investigate.

At the very least, in that discussion, I hope people learned they couldn't just dismiss CBT out of hand; intelligent and experienced people had decent arguments for it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/0... [2] http://schlegelrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/stuart-sm...

⬐ ddfisher

While I agree that being skeptical about self-help books is a good thing, I think you made a big mistake in your specific example. I have not looked at "The Feeling Good Handbook" that you linked to, but I am quite familiar its predecessor (by the same author), "Feeling Good", which is excellent. It has helped a couple of my friends, and at least one other HN reader.[1] Further, its efficacy is supported by at least one clinical study.[2]

You're right about the image, but the book is worthwhile.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509281

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2738212 (The book is not cited in the abstract, unfortunately, but I believe this is the correct study.)

⬐ neilk

That's what I was trying to say, but I guess I was unclear.

⬐ ddfisher

Re-reading, I can see that now. Oops! (I think the paragraph break confused me.)

Some great advice. I'd like to add:

- Change: change is a sequence of stages you move through according to well-defined processes: (1) pre-contemplation (where you haven't started considering change, or are even aware it's an option), (2) contemplation (where you're considering change but haven't decided), (3) preparation (where you've decided to change and start preparing for the consequences of change), (4) action (where you actually practice change) and (5) maintenance (where you maintain change - going to gym once is change, but doesn't really count :)

That 'instant' you refer to is familiar to me and IMO it is when your brain collects enough awareness of your push/pull factors to move you from preparation (3) to action (4). Many people underestimate how critical preparation is, and for most people steps 1, 2 and 3 are not conscious at all and you will go back and forth over them for years. If you're quitting smoking but smoking gives you a break from your annoying boss, or it's how you socialise, or gives you access to the cute guy/girl you're into, and you go unprepared (unaware) into action and quit smoking you are highly likely to relapse (i.e. go back to stage 1 or 2).

I highly recommend reading Prochaska et al.'s "Changing for Good" (http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Good-Revolutionary-Overcoming...) to understand about the stages of change, how to evaluate where you are w.r.t. a certain change and if you're ready to move forward to the next stage, and the processes that help you move from one stage to the next (taster: 'commitment' is only suitable from the 3rd stage onwards, and can actually hurt your chances of successfully changing if you commit when you're in an earlier stage!).

- Changing the way you think: David Burns' books, particularly the "Feeling Good Handbook" (http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/0...), and Helmstetter's "What to say when you talk to yourself" (http://www.amazon.com/What-Say-When-Talk-Yourself/dp/0671708...)

- Awaken the Giant is a great book, and I get the timing thing you talk about. I read it first over ten years ago and it meant nothing to me. Having gained a bit of experience since then I listened to it recently about a month ago and suddenly I could relate to 90% of what was being said, and Robbins helped solidify a bunch of ideas that had previously just been floating around in my head.