In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.

The world's greatest bodybuilder. The world's highest paid movie star. The leader of the world's sixth largest economy. That these are the same person sounds like the setup to a joke. But this is no joke. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this did not happen by accident. Arnold's stratospheric success happened as part of a process. As the result of clear vision, big thinking, hard work, direct communication, resilient problem-solving, open-minded curiosity, and a commitment to giving back. All of it guided by the one lesson Arnold's father hammered into him above all: be useful.

For decades, the medical community has looked to a variety of reasons for why we age, and the consensus is that no-one dies of old age; they die of age-related diseases. That's because ageing is not a disease - it is inevitable. But what if everything you think you know about ageing is wrong? What if ageing is a disease? And that disease is curable. In Lifespan, Dr David Sinclair, one of the world’s foremost authorities on genetics and ageing, argues just that.

When we think about muscle, we tend to think about strength or aesthetics, but in reality, muscle accounts for so much more than that. As the body's largest endocrine organ, muscle actually determines everything about the trajectory of health and aging. Many of the conditions Dr Lyon's patients were experiencing were actually symptoms of underdeveloped or unhealthy muscle. Now, Dr Lyon offers an easy-to-follow food, fitness, and self-care program anchored in evidence and pioneering research that teaches you how to optimize muscle - no matter your age or health background.

At the very heart of all the success and failure I've been exposed to - both my own entrepreneurial journey and through the thousands of interviews I've conducted on my podcast - are a set of principles that can stand the test of time, apply to any industry, and be used by anyone who is search of building something great or becoming someone great.

There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Money - investing, personal finance, and business decisions - is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money.

Nobody needs telling that there isn't enough time. We're obsessed by our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Yet we rarely make the conscious connection that these problems only trouble us in the first place, thanks to the ultimate time-management problem: the challenge of how best to use our 4,000 weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of this problem.

Are we hardwired to crave more? From food and stuff to information and influence, why can't we ever get enough? Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis and one of the world's leading experts on behaviour change, shows that the problem isn't you. The problem is your scarcity mindset, left over from our ancient ancestors. They had to constantly seek and consume to survive because vital survival tools like food, material goods, information, and power were scarce. But with our modern ability to easily fulfil our ancient desire for more, our hardwired "scarcity brain" is now backfiring.

We live in a world that's obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn't knock, there are ways to build a door.

A revolutionary system to get one per cent better every day. People think when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered another way. He knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions – doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call. He calls them atomic habits.

The Japanese phenomenon that teaches us the simple yet profound lessons required to liberate our real selves and find lasting happiness. The Courage to Be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future.

The evidence is clear—almost half of all cases of dementia and cognitive decline are preventable. But sadly none are treatable. So what are the lifestyle changes that really make a difference to our brain health? And what can we do right now to preserve our quality of life as we age? Save Your Brain answers all these questions and more. As we age, dementia and Alzheimer's pose a serious threat to our health and wellbeing. To give us a running start in the fight against cognitive decline, Dr. Ginni Mansberg presents the latest evidence-based research on how to protect your most valuable asset.

This audiobook is about pleasure. It's also about pain. Most importantly, it's about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We're living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting. The increased numbers, variety and potency are staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. 

This is a 150-year detective story with a cast of unrecognized heroes who may, finally, become known for their work on the true causes of heart disease. Exploring the truth about cholesterol—the apparently tried, and convicted, cause of millions of deaths from heart disease—with billions spent each year on lowering cholesterol with diet and drugs.