A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention: Discovering the Beauty of My ADHD Mind - A Memoir


Book Description

Now in paperback: A captivating, heralded memoir, "unflinching and full of truth" (Katherine May), of a woman making a home on a small farm while grappling with an unexpected ADHD diagnosis “When you think about ADHD . . . do you picture a woman in the bucolic English countryside, raising her children along with an assortment of animals and vegetables? Why not?”—Salon Moving to a small farm is Rebeca Schiller’s dream come true. But as her young family adjusts to a new life in the countryside, her dream is threatened by something within. I’m aware of everything, all at once, which is too much. As Rebecca’s symptoms mount—frequent falls, rages, and strange lapses in memory—her doctors are baffled and her family unmoored. Finally comes a diagnosis: severe ADHD. For Rebecca, it is the start, not the end, of a quest for understanding. As she scrambles to support both family and farm, her focus spirals: from our current climate crisis to long-extinct lynx in the shadows of ancient oaks and the forgotten women who tended this land before her, their stories hidden just beneath the surface of history. In this luminous, heralded memoir of one woman’s newfound neurodivergence, attention is not deficient—but abundant. Publisher’s Note: A different version of this book has been published under the title Earthed in the United Kingdom.




Seven Thousand Ways to Listen


Book Description

In Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, Nepo offers ancient and contemporary practices to help us stay close to what is sacred. In this beautifully written spiritual memoir, Nepo explores the transformational journey with his characteristic insight and grace. He unfolds the many gifts and challenges of deep listening as we are asked to reflect on the life we are given. A moving exploration of self and our relationship to others and the world around us, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen unpacks the many ways we are called to redefine ourselves and to name what is meaningful, as we move through the changes that come from experience and ageing and the challenge of surviving loss. Filled with questions to reflect on and discuss with others, and meditations on how to return to what matters throughout the day, this enlightening book teaches us how to act wholeheartedly so we can inhabit the gifts we are born with and find the language of our own wisdom. Seven Thousand Ways to Listen weaves a tapestry of deep reflection, memoir and meditation to create a remarkable guide on how to listen to life and live more fully.




A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention


Book Description

With the narrative propulsion of Brain on Fire and the lyrical candor of The Collected Schizophrenias, here is an inside-out view of one woman putting down roots on a homestead in the English countryside while also digging for the truth of her own neurodivergent mind




Seven Thousand Ways to Listen


Book Description

"Known for his penetrating books on resilience and suffering, poet, philosopher, and cancer survivor Mark Nepo continues to go deeper into what matters and to sift the wisdom that comes from confronting and recovering from the physical and spiritual challenges of life. In Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, he offers new lessons and insights on the importance of giving our full attention to all that life has to offer. Written in Nepo's beautiful, lyrical style, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen traces the story of his own hearing loss while unfolding a deeper understanding of how to listen to the world around us and to honor its connections to our internal life and callings. A moving exploration of self and our relationship to others, the book unpacks the many ways we are called to redefine ourselves and to name what is meaningful as we move through the changes that come from experience and aging and the challenge of surviving loss. "Listening is the way we befriend the life we're given," Nepo writes, and he has structured the book around three lasting friendships: our friendship with wisdom, with experience, and with each other. By listening and tending to each, he explains, we can awaken to life and restore our vitality. Filled with helpful instructions on how to return to what matters throughout the day, this enlightening book explores the many chances we have to listen and to be enlivened by what we hear. Ultimately, Nepo teaches us how to act wholeheartedly, so we can inhabit the gifts we are born with and find the language of our own wisdom."--Publisher's description.




Four Thousand Weeks


Book Description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.




Help for Women with ADHD


Book Description

This short book, written by a journalist, is filled with stories about how it feels to have ADHD and what you can do to make things better. Woven into the anecdotes of frustration and chaos are various tried and true tools, strategies, and supports (printed in bold text) that have helped her - and thousands more -- tackle a handful of classic ADHD challenges. Each chapter covers a different issue, and the clickable Table of Contents makes it easy to fly to the parts of the book that interest you the most.Along with encouraging you to work with the challenging parts of your amazing mind, the book will help you recognize and appreciate its extraordinary parts. Many woman with ADHD are amazingly intuitive, perceptive, creative, authentic, innovative, and bright. Help for Women with ADHD will show you how women with ADHD can excel -- beyond those without ADHD -- when they learn to manage their curious abilities to focus. It will also help you realize that your issues are not unique - that you're not alone - and that awareness will motivate you to work at unlocking your gifts.Everybody experiences everything that ADHDers experience, but to a lesser extent. So, even if you haven't been formally diagnosed, you may be dealing with attention deficit symptoms as a result of any number of stressors, including postpartum hormones, PMS, menopause, multitasking, too much screen time, or dietary sensitivities. If that's your situation, Help for Women with ADHD can help you, too, with any of the following issues:Difficulty prioritizingFeeling overwhelmedGetting distracted by ideas and sensations that disrupt your concentrationDifficulty following through on what you were so excited about yesterdayMisplacing important itemsRunning late, losing track of timeDifficulty deciding and choosingImpulsive ideas or actionsChanging your mind all the time




Stolen Focus


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back. “The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again “Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, Mashable, Mindful In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity. Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.




Earthed


Book Description

In 2017, Rebecca Schiller turned fantasy to reality and moved her family to a countryside smallholding for a life of sowing and growing. But as the first few years go by, and the ever-expanding list of tasks builds to a cacophony, it becomes clear that this is not going to be simple. Another January comes in, and with it the threat of a mental health crisis, and so Rebecca turns to the garden where she has made her home, and to the women of this place's past. Here, she stumbles on a wild space of imaginative leaps, where she begins to uncover the hidden layers of her plot's history - and of herself. The ground under Rebecca's boots offers hard lessons as the seasons shift, delivering unflinching glimpses of damage done to peoples and the planet and regular defeats in her battle with the slugs. Yet as the New Year returns, carrying a life-changing diagnosis and then a global pandemic, Rebecca begins to move forwards with hope: the smallholding has become her anchor, her teacher and her family's shelter. Because when we find ourselves in an unknown land, we all need something small to hold on to and a way to keep ourselves earthed.




Memoirs of an ADHD Mind


Book Description

A woman who has lived with ADHD since childhood shares the coping interventions and insights acquired for success within a spiritual context. Attention deficit disorder/ hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) can make learning difficult for sufferers who struggle to cope with the affliction. They are usually in constant chaos until coping skills are put into place to create the “systematic information filter” that they need in order to process information. This book will help people with ADD/ADHD by way of teaching educators, parents, and others how to help the sufferers cope with the stress that often times disrupts learning. It will help those with the disorder achieve higher-level learning and success.




How to Do Nothing


Book Description

** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.