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

Stunningly Unintelligent

"Why Smart People Hurt" simply is an incredibly poorly written book. Firstly I got through an hour of this garbage and the word "smartness" is repeated around 10 times. Seriously, for a book with this title the writer couldn't demonstrate a greater vocabulary? Intellect, intelligence, native cognitive ability or capacity none of these words come to mind?...I would consider the irony funny if it weren't so aggravating. That's just the verbiage, the tone of the books is cloyingly ingratiating. I found myself increasingly irritated with this patronizing and evasive material but it tracks with other "self help" genre books. Writers like this are the snake oil salesmen who comes to town, spouts a bunch of trumped up nonsense and gets out before it's fully realized how fraudulent and meaningless their rhetoric is.

The book goes on to not define "smartness" in any particular way. Wouldn't that be a natural place to start, to define some parameters however broad they might be? My suspicion is the author avoids this potentially murky territory in part because he simple doesn't have the insight to speak with any authority. Secondly avoiding defining "smartness" is simply a better sales tactic, why potentially alienate readers by describing boundaries on this concept? I WOULD recommend for those curious about this territory "The Drama of the Gifted Child" it's more of an academic essay but light years beyond this book.

disappointed

feels like cognitive behavioral therapy for the chronically bored, burnt out average person who was taught that television is a panacea. People, and capitalism are the thing that most often make smart people bored and depressed. We already know to make meaning. This is why gifted programming allows more freedom. Meaning Making is a natural impulse. Then society kills our souls.

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.

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.