This book is organized in a friendly manner and gives innumerable suggestions to improve your mental and physical health. Also provides basic education about the mind body connection. It is a basic text for anyone with interest in self improvement and healthy coping skills.

This book is awesome, It mentions great ways to reframe our toxic way of thinking in an optimistic approach. I would love to teach this material in a class because it affects all of us 100%. The concepts and ideas are staggering and if we apply these principles to our daily lives we are going to live longer and more productive lives as well as reduce depression, hostility and divorce. If you can read, read this book, you will not be disappointed! If you are a therapist ot teacher it would be even more beneficial for you to spread this wonderful knowledge like wildfire. thanx :)

I am a psychologist teaching part-time in a family practice residency. I have been using this book for several years to teach resident physicians ideas and skills to help their patients get better faster. The book does a good job of linking the fascinating world of mind-body medical research with practical ideas about how to change. In particular, the authors help everyone get off to a good start by normalizing the process of change and suggesting ways to avoid relapse. Another strength is the emphasis on a variety of methods to increase relaxation and picturing success, two time-tested skills. I recommend this book without reservation.

Healthy Pleasures written by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel is a book about the medical benefits of pleasure, that is longer, healthier life.

The book is divided up into three parts and each of those has chapters relative to the topic. Healthy Pleasures proposes a new approach to the way women and men manage their health. This book is a readers guide through the maze of myths and misconceptions that stand in the way of health.

In the book the reader will find scores of practical suggestions, based on recent scientific discoveries, on how to live in a way that enriches, rather than just maintains, health: ways to mobilize positive beliefs, expectations, and emotions... from cognitive therapy, relaxation training, and successful behavior modification practices.

Because people are naturally drawn by the pleasure principle to many of the things which promote health, this makes the book easy to follow. The emphasis of this book is the importance of pleasing rather than punishing ourselves... food, drink, rest, work, sunrises and sunsets, too... in a refreshing affectionate light found in the brain's pleasure centers.

Great,usefull,open minded,with energy and ideas. Healthy Pleasures is the healthy pleasure of living without fighting with oneself.

Ornstein and Sobel write an entirely readable book about an important topic. Everyone knows that we need to exercise and eat right to be healthy. But not everyone knows that many of the things we ENJOY are healthy. And enjoyment ITSELF is healthy!

The authors go into great detail about the different ways you can enhance your health and enjoyment and they cite research to back up what they're saying. Indulge yourself in pleasure: Music, good scents, good flavors, optimism, naps, fun, pets, good friends, etc. These are some of the healthiest things you can do.

If you are interested in maintaining or improving your health AND interested in having a good time along the way, this is the book for you. I'm the author of the book, Self-Help Stuff That Works, and I'm an expert on what is effective and what is not. The ideas and research behind this book are important and valuable and very much worth reading.

Being interested in learning new things, I decided to pick up a book on psychology from library. I am glad that I picked this one as my first book on this subject.

Robert starts the book with a simple question and starts discussion around the question and ends the book with a similar question. His opinions and conclusions are very well convincing and well supported with facts. Most of the stuff mentioned in the book just make SENSE.

The organization of the book and the style in which the book was written may not be the very best but the contents of the book make it worth reading.

This book is a concise and inspiring introduction to what behaviorists left out of psychology, written by a pioneer in the scientific study of consciousness. Ornstein writes with humor and clarity, discussing with equal ease those questions of psychology that science can in principle answer, and also with those which require experiential, rather than experimental, answers. This is a classic, with much of continuing relevance 30 years after first publication.

Reviewers and readers alike should remember the words of Omar Khayyam quoted in this book: "I am a mirror, and who looks at me, whatever good or bad he speaks, he speaks of himself."

I liked this book very much. Much like Wilber's Spectrum Ornstein does a good job at objectively studing the eastern disciplines. And provides some useful information on how the brain works. This book is quoted in the bibliography of Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness.

A good book that tends to ground much of who we are in our physical brain. He discusses twin study and nature vs. nuture. He uses the computer analogy to describe the brain.

If you would like to understand the most basic elements of individuality in human beings from a light and humorous approach, get down to your bookstore and purchase The Roots of Self, by Robert Ornstein. Through the use of humor, comic illustrations, and yes, a bit of sarcasm, Ornstein takes us away from the textbook and brings "real life reading" to the often dry, scientific, and matter of fact subject of the human brain and the development of the self.

He supports the position that self-development is a result of the combination of nature and nurture; the biological hand we are dealt at birth vs. the environment's influence over our development. He goes on to explain temperament; "the person's predisposition to respond to specific events in a specific way." He says that there are three dimensions of temperament; high and low amplification, deliberate or liberate actions and thoughts, and a positive approach or negative withdrawal from the world around us.

High amplification people have a lot of "stuff" going on in their heads and need to limit stimulation from the outside world. They are happy to sit quietly in a park and enjoy the day. Their low-amplification counterparts, however, need the loud music, the skydiving and cliff climbing challenges to increase their stimulation. Individuals who act deliberately plan their lives and regulate their activities with control and organization. The liberate individual will purchase a plane ticket to Paris on a whim for the long weekend! They are spontaneous and open to new experiences. Finally, a person with a positive approach to the world wants to conquer it, while those who possess negative feelings, want to avoid it.

If you find yourself contemplating which category you fall into and believe it is time for a change, fear not! Ornstein says that most of us possess a little of each. There are however those among us that do tend to be to the extreme in any of these given dimensions. It is these people, Ornstein says, who are at greater risk of psychological disorders; anxiety, panic attacks, and to a greater extent, OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) or schizophrenia, to name a few. Ornstein completes this basic description of self development by discussing the impact of culture and family, and the influence of race and sex.

The Roots of the Self is a great beginner level book for figuring out who we are and how we react to the world. Although at times Ornstein makes gross generalizations about personality types, all in all it is a good resource for understanding the basics of human beings and our nature.

This is a good starting point for people who are beginning to ask why... Why do I feel the way I do, why do I think the way I do, and why do I do the things I do? It isn't all random, and the more we can learn about how we are wired, the more effective we can be in all of our relationships. Reading this book led me to many other simmilar treatises of the same genre (most notably Wilson's Consilience), and I really feel like I'm a better person as a result of the thinking it has forced me to do.

I've always felt psychology has been composed of too much speculation and not enough rigorous analysis. As medical science has advanced, there has been a tendency to specialize into narrower and narrower fields of study. For me, Ornstein's book was satisfying in that it helped me understand, at least a rudimentary level, that there are significant linkages between neurology, physiology, endocrinology,, and psychology. The book reduces many very complex notions borne from the last hundred years of medical learning into some simple theories about why we think, feel and behave the way we do.

I absolutely buy into Ornstein's first notion about the RAS and high gain-low gain characteritics. It makes a lot of sense, there is strong scientific evidence behind it, and it dovetails well with other theories like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for introversion/ extroversion. His other two components of human make-up, I either didn't fully understand, or the chain of evidence seemed less complete. So I enjoyed the first half of the book less than the second half.

I look forward to reading more of Dr. Ornstein's work...