This lightweight and practical introduction to mindfulness can get you started with mindfulness practice today. If you don’t mind a bit of extra wordiness, you may even enjoy it.

Anxiety self-help manuals based on CBT are almost a genre unto themselves, but this is the first such book to bear the name of the field’s creator, Aaron T. Beck, as co-author. Designed as a companion volume for Clark and Beck’s definitive 2009 textbook Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders: Science and Practice, The Anxiety & Worry Workbook also stands exceptionally well on its own.

Centuries ago we learned that lack of vitamin C causes scurvy and now getting enough of this vitamin is known to be a necessity for good health. For good mental health, a nurturing mother figure (“vitamin M”, if you will) is just as important.

Asperger’s as a diagnosis can appear to preclude the existence of fulfilling human relationships for the young people concerned. But Bromfield’s “relationship-based therapy” for his young clients shows that they have the same human needs for relationship as others, they just have trouble expressing them in socially proficient ways.

In stark contrast to the stereotypical Western therapist forever distracting the client from their stories about the world in order to ask “but how do you feel?”, the Other Centred therapist listens carefully to the stories themselves. Indeed, this book presents examples of client work in which the therapist asks the opposite question about a partner whose behaviour the client is complaining about: “but what was that like for him?”.

Brazier reminds us that counselling often goes beyond offering a non-judgemental space in which the client can listen to and experience themselves, to actively encourage a kind of self-preoccupation which can actually make one more isolated and miserable.

This book seems to contain all of human life, from the scientific details through the full range of emotions, including the extremes of love and hate. And it emanates a sense that although we all get shaken sometimes, and life is dangerous, every feeling is expressible and every situation is workable.