Summary of Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The philosophy of positive thinking is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled. If you decide to think happy and successful thoughts, and banish the spectres of sadness and failure, happiness and success will follow.
#2 The Get Motivated! seminar is a global industry of positive thinking. It is staged roughly once a month in cities across North America. It features celebrity speakers, special effects, and many attendees take advantage of the event’s extra day off work.
#3 We seem to be extremely inept at achieving happiness. The modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness is self-help books, which apparently don’t help us become happier.
#4 The idea of seeking happiness is flawed to begin with. It's impossible to define happiness in words, and it seems that trying to find it reduces your chances of ever achieving it.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Bien-être émotionnel
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Bien-être
• Personal development
• Happiness

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669372097
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The philosophy of positive thinking is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled. If you decide to think happy and successful thoughts, and banish the spectres of sadness and failure, happiness and success will follow.

#2

The Get Motivated! seminar is a global industry of positive thinking. It is staged roughly once a month in cities across North America. It features celebrity speakers, special effects, and many attendees take advantage of the event’s extra day off work.

#3

We seem to be extremely inept at achieving happiness. The modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness is self-help books, which apparently don’t help us become happier.

#4

The idea of seeking happiness is flawed to begin with. It's impossible to define happiness in words, and it seems that trying to find it reduces your chances of ever achieving it.

#5

The effort to feel happy is often the thing that makes us miserable. We constantly try to avoid negative emotions, but that just leads to insecurity, anxiety, and depression. We must learn to enjoy uncertainty, embrace insecurity, and stop trying to think positively.

#6

The negative path to happiness is not about embracing contrarianism at all costs. It is about rejecting the dichotomy between optimism and negativity, and instead finding the happiness that arises from negativity.

#7

The negative path to happiness is not a single, comprehensive philosophy. It involves developing skills of indifference towards positive feelings and situations, and instead focusing on unpleasant experiences and emotions.

#8

The problems with positive thinking are a result of a simple and intensely irritating parlour game called the white bear challenge. You can try it now, and try not to think about a white bear for one minute.

#9

The white bear challenge is a metaphor for life’s many obstacles. We often find ourselves attracted to the thing we’re trying to avoid, and this phenomenon is called irony. It is the imp of the perverse, a nameless but distinct urge that sometimes plagues us when we walk along a precipitous cliff edge or climb to the observation deck of a tall building.

#10

Wegner’s research has shown that our efforts to control our thoughts often backfire and make us think about them even more. When we try not to think of a white bear, for example, we may experience some success in forcing alternative thoughts into our mind, but at the same time, a metacognitive monitoring process will crank into action and scan our mind for evidence of whether we are succeeding or failing at the task.

#11

The problem with positive thinking is that it can lead to self-sabotage through self-monitoring. As you try to eliminate negative thoughts from your mind, you may fail as a result of the very act of monitoring your success.

#12

The cult of optimism is the idea that you can’t be successful unless you are positive and happy. But research shows that being positive can make you feel worse.

#13

The Bush administration’s foreign policies might have been dangerous, but so was the American business culture in which even thinking about the possibility of failure had come to be considered an embarrassing faux pas.

#14