Mind Over Matter - Top Reads - Bracebridge Library

Have you ever given thought to how your mind works? Your response to different situations, for better or worse? These books help readers connect with their mind and learn new strategies that will help tackle anxiety and stress. Explore new thoughts that can increase performance, make better decisions, become braver, and learn interesting facts about the rhythm of life. All are interesting in their own right; find which book is right for you.

The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

By Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik, becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. He shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up-of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel. Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life-and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place”

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Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Many of us feel trapped in a grind of constant change: rolling news cycles, the chatter of social media. We feel fearful and tired, not quite knowing what has us perpetually depleted. For Katherine May, this low hum of fatigue and anxiety made her wonder what she was missing. Could there be a different way to relate to the world, one that would allow her feel more rested and at ease? In Enchantment, May invites the reader to come with her on a journey to reawaken our innate sense of wonder and awe. With humor, candor, and warmth, she shares stories of her own struggles with work, family, and the aftereffects of pandemic, particularly the feelings of overwhelm as the world rushes to reopen. Craving a different way to live, May begins to explore the restorative properties of the natural world, moving through the elements of earth, water, fire, and air, and identifying the quiet traces of magic that can be found only when we look for them.

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**Glow in the F*cking Dark**

By Tara Schuster

For the past decade, Tara Schuster worked like hell to repair the emotional wounds inflicted during what she refers to as her neglected, “mess-wreck disaster” of a childhood. She brought radical self-care, healing rituals, and self-love into her life, and on most days, she was a grateful, happy, and stable adult. But then she lost her job, the one on which she had staked her entire adult identity. Isolated at home during a global pandemic, she experienced piercing loneliness and a lack of purpose like she had never known. Finally, after a particularly dangerous dissociative episode while driving down the highway, she realized that enough was enough; she needed to slow down and pull over, to stop the relentless hustling that had gotten her this far, and to recover her innermost self.

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No Regret Decisions: Making Good Choices During Difficult Times

By Shannon Lee Simmons

Everyone can expect to face an unexpected personal crisis at some point in their lives. From death, divorce, job loss, and illness, No-Regret Decisions will guide you through trying times with practical advice and wisdom that will help you come out of the crisis stronger than before. Learn how to approach your decision making methodically, step by step–through the initial shock of Panic Mode, the uncertainties of The Messy Middle, and finally, the acceptance of Your New Normal–so you can make the best decisions for your life even when you’re under pressure. Navigating you through the emotional, psychological and financial upheaval that comes with personal crisis, No-Regret Decisions ensures that, once your crisis passes, you are proud of the choices you’ve made; you have hope for the future; and you are confident that you can handle anything unexpected that comes your way again.

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The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

By Katherine Morgan Schafler

Psychotherapist and former on-site therapist at Google, Katherine Morgan Schafler believes that you don’t have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy. Which of the five types of perfectionist are you? Classic, intense, Parisian, messy, or procrastinator? As you identify your unique perfectionist profile, you’ll learn how to manage each form of perfectionism to work for you, not against you. Full of stories and brimming with humor, empathy, and depth, this book is a love letter to the ambitious, high achieving, full-of-life clients who filled the author’s private practice, and who changed her life. Ultimately, this book will show you how to make the single greatest trade you’ll ever make in your life, which is to exchange superficial control for real power.

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Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

By Jenny Odell

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries–physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives–or the life of the planet–is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, “saving” time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us.

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