Showing results by narrator "Roger Davis" in Health & Wellness

The urge to be tidy seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far.

 Close your eyes and ask yourself, 'What do I feel?' What was your experience? Did you feel the physical presence of your body - its size, its shape? Did you feel any of your body's needs, like hunger or thirst? You probably also had a sense of whether you were feeling healthy or unwell. All of these sensations are kinds of body feelings, and although many of them are always present, in modern life we don't pay much attention to them.

Are we living in an age of unprecedented anxiety, or has this always been a problem throughout history? We only need look around us to see anxieties: in the family home, the workplace, on social media, and especially in the news. It's true that everyone feels anxious at some time in their lives, but we're told we're all feeling more anxious than we've ever been before - and for longer than we've ever done before. It's even reported that anxiety is a modern epidemic significant enough to challenge the dominance of depression as the most common mental health problem. 

Ever had those moments where you've been pondering a problem for ages, trying to make a decision or come up with a new idea, and then the second you get up to make a cup of tea, call a friend to talk it through, or simply decide 'sleep on it', you suddenly find the answers you're looking for, the solutions are obvious, and the new ideas just won't stop coming? Using this knowledge of how the mind works, Brainhack reveals the ways you can use this brain power to change-up your thinking.

Wry, witty and humane, Goodwin explains mathematical subtleties so painlessly that you hardly need to think about numbers at all. He demonstrates how statistics that are meant to make life simpler often make it simpler than it actually is, but also reveals some of the ways we can use maths to make better decisions. Along the way we learn about fitness tracking, the history of IQ testing, China's social credit system, Effective Altruism, and how someone should have noticed that Harold Shipman was killing his patients years before they actually did. 

What is human happiness and how can we promote it? These questions are central to human existence and Happiness Explained draws on scientific research from economics, psychology, and philosophy, as well as a range of other disciplines, to outline a new paradigm in which human flourishing plays a central role in the assessment of national and global progress. It shows why the traditional national income approach is limited as a measure of human wellbeing.