Showing results by narrator "Adam Alter" in All Categories

Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a crisis, wrestling writer’s block, trapped in a thankless job, or trying to remedy a friendship, the resulting emotion is a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Break Free is the roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction. Adam Alter has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. Here he reveals the formula he and other researchers have uncovered.

Anatomy of a Breakthrough is a groundbreaking guide to optimising your life, overcoming obstacles, and reaching your full potential. All of us go through episodes of simply being stuck, whether we're trapped in a thankless job, wrestling writer's block, muddling through a midlife crisis, or fixing a fraying friendship. The resulting malaise is often chronic, dangerous to our mental health, and with severe consequences to our success and development. What if there was a proven plan to get unstuck and break through?

Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction - an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.

How many times have you checked your phone today? Why are messaging apps, email and social media so hard to resist? How come we always end up watching another episode? In recent years, media and technology have perfected the lucrative art of gaining and holding our attention. This extraordinary feat has changed the behaviour of billions of people, and especially the young: by current medical standards, we are experiencing an unprecedented global pandemic of addiction.