📚 Books for what ails you
Bibliotherapy “prescriptions” for all the feels — from an AI 👩💻
How we feel is a result of what we take in from the world around us.
Reading can change our feelings, by adding new ones or emphasizing what’s already there. I read somewhere recently that we can only feel one feeling at a time, whatever is the strongest out of our current soup of emotions. 🥘 Reading can change which feeling that is — by introducing something new and urgent that rises above the rest, or by nurturing something that was already within us but perhaps lost in the flotsam.
Bibliotherapy — the idea of using books and literature as therapy — is built on reading’s ability to make us feel differently. We can find a new perspective, see our life in a different light, or make sense of something tangled within us.
The question is: what book to read? 📚
It’s easy to assign nonfiction —
- Having relationship problems? Pick up The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work or The Five Love Languages, and throw in an Esther Perel podcast.
- Overcome with existential dread? Try some Buddhism or Stoicism.
- Feeling uninspired? Open up a Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci.
