How to keep your mind

Product details

How to keep your mind

The book presents four “pillars” for mental well-being. Author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry dedicates a chapter to each pillar.
1. Self-monitoring
Learn to observe your feelings, your physical responses, and your inner dialogue without judgment. This chapter highlights the importance of mindfulness and journaling for freeing yourself from unconscious reactions. This helps you move from emotional responses to compassionate insight.
2. Communicating with others
“We all need secure, trustworthy, and dependable relationships,” the author emphasizes, stressing the importance of building connections with others and fostering honest dialogue. She recommends “reading the daily temperature,” which involves open conversations focusing on mood, appreciation, criticism, and hopes.
3. Tension
Stress isn't always bad. The author therefore urges "benign stress" that drives us to grow and be creative, through physical exercise, learning, and expanding our comfort zone.
4. Autobiographical Narrative
Each of us has a story to live, and our lives are shaped by the stories we learn from. Therefore, “if we recognize the stories we live, we can modify and change them if needed.” The author explains how recognizing, rewriting, or revising these stories can liberate us from limiting assumptions, allowing us to cultivate more optimistic and flexible personal narratives.
The book also includes an appendix of exercises to help readers apply the ideas contained within: breathing and mindfulness practices, relationship behaviors such as temperature measurement, mapping the comfort zone to encourage growth, and building a genetic blueprint to track and rewrite the self-narrative.
These tools represent practical steps towards building a flexible mind and enjoying lasting insight.