Why Smart People Hurt

A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

By: Eric Maisel

Narrated by: Seth Podowitz

Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

Make your gifted life meaningful.

Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter - from scientific researchers and genius award winners to best-selling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics - often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, natural psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.

Find meaningful success. Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn’t, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart People Hurt, Dr. Maisel will teach you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.

Learn from a truly thought-provoking personal growth book. In Why Smart People Hurt, you will find:

• Evidence that you are not alone in your struggles with living in a world that wasn't built for you or your intelligence
• Logic- and creativity-based strategies to cope with having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat
• Questions that will help you create your own personal road map to a calm and meaningful life

Consumers of true, natural self-help books for gifted people struggling with life, anxiety, and depression, like Living with Intensity, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, and Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart People Hurt by Dr. Eric Maisel.

©2013 Eric Maisel (P)2020 Vibrance Press

Wonderful book about making meaning

Taught me how to focus on using my available personality to transform how I produce meaning in my life using every moment I have.

Insightful - find your peace

Incredible useful insights to understand where you come from and how to manage. It could be more direct in some parts, but gets ti the (right) point.

Great Perspective

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I've personally struggled with everything the book covered and the new perspective it offered has already benefited my life greatly.

very relatable

This book describes many of my life challanges and good ways to be findful and recognize solutions.

A lot of what you should think and not how

I agree with most of the author's points, and getting more reinforcement that there are people out there like me experiencing the same level of neuroticism is comforting. However, as is my problem with most self-help books and therapy, the book does not offer any great techniques of how to stop your brain or change your perception. My problem isn't identifying the problem, as I would imagine is the case with most people who would choose this book.

I agree with the author on this point so it did not bother me; however, if you are religious this book will not be for you. The author clearly does not respect religious people and calls them " mystics", and speaks about the frustration of having a society where a significant portion of the population does not accept evolution. I agree, but I guess I still respect religious people enough to warn them off from reading something that will be insulting.

Human Psychology

This book provides great perspective on the need to understand human psychology, but can seem a bit repetitive

Yes and No

A good practical introduction to Natural Psychology. The three personalities is a useful concept for pursuing authenticity through an integration of the original, formed, and available. A fair guide to dealing with shifting life values and finding meaning.

But I think the title is misleading. He begins with an accurate list of issues that had me nodding, and promptly shifted to making me cringe at examples of imbalance, anxiety, addiction, and personal dishonesty. These are what you call smart people? Perhaps the problem is defining "smart". Damasio suggests that without emotion to give meaning to choices otherwise intelligent people can't function. So yes, meaning is key to applying all those smarts, but this is more of a book on the possible pathology of an immature and/or imbalanced intelligence.

The pain that I know, and why people join intelligence clubs, is the extreme difficulty in sharing the things we see with those who do not see, will not see, and worst, think they see but are not self critical. There is pain in seeing eyes glaze over when we talk about ideas rather than events or people. Pain when we assume we are among equals but discover that we are alone and will not receive reciprocity. It is the loneliness a parent feels when they cannot connect with their teen to share a precious understanding. No love or rationale will open their ears. The pain of being utterly unable to understand the value system and behavior of crowds. The sheer disconnect with a self destructive world. What can we offer those who are so different?

That's what I hoped this book would talk about, even if only to say he understood it too, but again I remain alone.

Interesting Ideas

The book has a fairly nihilistic tone and is quite rooted in the author’s aetheist beliefs. So if any of that is something you can’t tolerate, the book may not be for you.

While I may disagree with the author’s core ideas, the book certainly has some interesting ideas and some broad ideas about how they might be implemented to help you manage the daily “meaning crisis.”

You know that horrible place where you wonder why you even try because your life is going nowhere and has no point? If you are prone to those moments then it is definitely worth a read.

Not what I expected

When I purchased this book, I expected to figure out a little more about why I struggle with anxiety and overthinking. However the author placed an emphasis on existential meaning instead of why the brain ruminates. The author also made an assumption that the readers do not believe in creationism and that’s the only rational conclusion to how life began is through evolution. This was disappointing, and I think he made too big of a week here.

Outdated, Unscientific, Dangerous

In chapter 4, I was skeptical. In chapter 5, I lost all respect for this “natural” psychologist. He attempts to discredit all that we know about mental health and particularly bipolar disorder (without any real evidence, mind you) and entirely mischaracterizes manic episodes as just a racing mind - ignoring all of the other aspects of mania that define it - and ignoring all of the other symptoms of bipolar disorder.

The scientific consensus on mental health disorders is that real biochemical and physical differences exist in the brains of those with mental health disorders. Where does this “natural” psychologist even get off with trying to rationalize away people having mental health disorders as simply being smart?

It’s offensive and dangerous, as anosognosia is a common feature of bipolar disorder that can lead people to real danger during their manic periods.