How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living

Deary, a professor of applied health psychology at Northumbria University, continues his How to Live trilogy (after How We Are) with a cerebral look at how people “break” amid life’s “turbulence” and the ways they might traverse “its difficult straits with a little more ease.” Genetics, environmental exposures, trauma, and other factors contribute to the body’s allostatic load—the “wear and tear that happens when the turbulence is too much”—according to Deary, and if the system tips into “allostatic overload,” body and brain can “unravel” into such ailments as insomnia, anxiety, and chronic pain. His thesis sets the stage for complex philosophical meditations on the ways humans metabolize suffering, how language’s “system of categorisation” begets self-critique, the nature of the self, and the ways in which people form attachments to their pain. Deary’s flexible, “dimensional” approach makes room for varied individual experience (“Our breaking, like our world, will be our own”) and lays fertile ground for sensitive, analytical musings, though this looseness may frustrate those seeking direct guidance (vague questions for readers include, “how precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?”). Still, it’s an empathetic and searching meditation on some of humanity’s deepest psychological questions. (May)