AS HEARD ON THE DIARY OF A CEO PODCAST WITH STEVEN BARTLETTFrom the Sunday Times bestselling author of The School of Life This is a book about how to optimise your mental health. Written with kindness and sympathy, it is a practical guide to emotional well-being, calm and psychological maturity. Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of mental challenges, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we can get overly anxious or low; how we can best understand our pasts and how they shape us; and how we can build resilience, so as to live wisely alongside certain difficulties.At heart this is a book about psychological happiness about discovering equilibrium and meaning, and finding our way to connection and joy. This book does a wonderful job of making you realise that the thing you re going through, and the way that you are, isn t evidence of your inadequacy. It s actually evidence that you are perfectly human Steven Bartlett, author and host of The Diary of a CEO’One of our most consistently illuminating writers on contemporary culture’ John Gray, New Statesman