Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

Make Your Gifted Life Meaningful

"This book will make a smart person even smarter." ―Dr. Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career

#1 Bestseller in Counseling & Psychology, Attention-Deficit Disorder, and Mood Disorders

Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter―from scientific researchers and genius award winners to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics―often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, 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 teaches you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.

In Why Smart People Hurt, you will find:

• 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 help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life

Readers 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, or Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart People Hurt.

Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is the author of more than 50 books in the areas of creativity, psychology, coaching, mental health, and cultural trends. He is a psychotherapist and the founder of the creativity coach profession, regularly working with lawyers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters, businesspeople, and folks from every walk of life. They include folks settled in a profession as well as folks struggling to find an outlet for their intelligence and looking for work that will allow them to be as smart as they are. They include individuals who are successful in their careers and those who, because of the realities of the marketplace, struggle to achieve success. And through his books, they could include you.

Sought after as an expert in his field, Dr. Maisel regularly contributes to Mad in America, writes a monthly print column for Professional Artist Magazine, and writes the "Rethinking Mental Health" blog for Psychology Today. He has been the keynote speaker at a many conferences and leads Deep Writing workshops worldwide.

Dr. Maisel currently resides in Walnut Creek, California. Visit him at www.ericmaisel.com.