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