Most Replayed Moment: Why You’re Never Satisfied! The 4 Pillars of Lasting Happiness

In This Naked Mind, Annie Grace reveals the real reason it’s so hard to quit drinking: We often see alcohol as a drink that enhances life experiences and makes us happy, relaxed, and confident. Although in reality, alcohol does none of these things, Grace explains that our unconscious minds still cling to these false beliefs that alcohol is good. To break free from alcohol dependence, you must change your unconscious beliefs and see alcohol as it truly is: an addictive drug that poisons your mind and body. When you change your beliefs, you’ll overcome addiction by no longer wanting to drink, and you’ll enjoy a fulfilling life free of alcohol.

In this guide, we’ll explain how alcohol affects your brain and body, how addiction works, and how to change your false beliefs about alcohol. We’ll also compare Grace’s advice with that of other addiction experts and provide more practical tips for applying her recovery approach to your life.

In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown—a popular public speaker, bestselling author, and professional social worker—provides a guide to the many emotions and mental states that people feel. Brown says many people can only recognize and name three emotions: happiness, sadness, and anger. This lack of vocabulary blocks us from being able to fully experience and share our feelings with others.

Atlas of the Heart provides descriptions and explanations of 87 emotions, along with the situations where you’re likely to encounter them. With a deeper understanding of emotions, you’ll be able to talk about them more openly and accurately, and thus form deeper connections with the people around you.

This guide provides actionable advice for handling negative emotions and embracing positive ones. It will also provide some biological and psychological background for why we have certain feelings and why those feelings are so powerful.

We take it as a given that we want to be happy, but how do we achieve happiness, or even define it? Derren Brown suggests that the answers can be found in the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers for whom the quest for a happy, well-lived life was a practical problem to be solved. Brown says that by adopting a philosophy based on those of the Stoics and Epicureans, we can lead thoughtful, balanced, and more well-rounded lives.

As a magician, Brown isn’t a stereotypical self-help guru. However, his understanding of how stories misdirect us led to his belief that we can reshape our own narratives to be happy in the here and now while maintaining a positive outlook toward our own mortality. This guide will examine Brown’s definition of happiness and the philosophical building blocks he claims can achieve it. We’ll compare Brown’s ideas to those of modern psychology and contrast his views with those of other happiness experts, some of whom he argues directly against.

The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.

In From Strength to Strength, management expert Arthur Brooks says that as we get older, our professional skills start to decline, and we can no longer succeed in our current jobs. Despite this, with the right mindset, the second half of your life can be even happier and more meaningful than the first. If you find a job that suits your changing skill set, and if you change your idea of “success” from career achievement and material wealth to happiness and fulfillment, you can continue to thrive.

In this guide, we’ll first explain how and why you lose your job skills as you get older. We’ll then discuss solutions: how you can find a job that suits your changing brain, and how to achieve a meaningful life instead of fruitlessly chasing success in your former field. In our commentary, we’ll discuss whether this professional decline really is inevitable and explore some methods to keep your mind sharp. We’ll also offer strategies for making the most of your life as you age.

Just about everyone dreams of wealth, but why do so few people turn that dream into reality? Self-made millionaire Felix Dennis wrote How to Get Rich to teach you the mindset and the skills you need to start a business and build a fortune, and to explain why so many fail at doing so.

In this guide, we’ll start with Dennis’s warnings about how difficult it really is to get rich and what you might lose in the pursuit of wealth. From there, we’ll discuss how to start and run your own business. Finally, we’ll examine Dennis’s advice about how to live a healthy, happy, and satisfying life with your newfound riches.

Our commentary will compare and contrast Dennis’s ideas with those from other business guides such as Purple Cow and Start With Why. We’ll also discuss which of Dennis’s principles are backed by scientific evidence and which are currently not. Finally, we’ll provide some actionables to help you start your journey to wealth.