The Happiness Trap

How to Stop Struggling and Start Living

By: Russ Harris

Narrated by: Russ Harris

Free yourself from depression, anxiety, and insecurity, and instead build a rich and meaningful life with the updated and expanded edition of the world’s best-selling guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Over 1 million copies sold!

In The Happiness Trap, Dr. Russ Harris provides a means to escape the epidemic of stress, anxiety, and depression, unlocking the secrets to a truly fulfilling life.

Updated and expanded by 50 percent in its second edition, this empowering book presents the insights and techniques of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), covering more topics and providing more practical tools than ever before. Learn how to clarify your values, develop self-compassion, and find true satisfaction with this bigger and better guide to:

• Reducing stress and worry
• Handling painful thoughts and feelings more effectively
• Breaking self-defeating habits
• Overcoming insecurity and self-doubt
• Building better relationships
• Improving performance and finding fulfillment at work

New topics include activating self-compassion; how to deal with loneliness, grief, and trauma; how to work with difficult behaviors like people-pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination; and how to make difficult decisions.

The Happiness Trap is for everyone. Whether you’re lacking confidence, facing illness, coping with loss, working in a high-stress job, or suffering from anxiety or depression, this book will show you how to build authentic happiness, from the inside out.

©2008 Russ Harris (P)2022 Shambhala Publications

Great book with helpful applications!

I thought this book was well balanced between theory/science and personal examples and practical application.

Really great practical book

Loved the author’s candor and encouragement. Helps break things down into digestible pieces. I am planning on reading his book on relationships too!

wonderful book!

Great content, performed well. I use a lot of these principles and techniques in my coaching practice

Amazingly useful book with a great and seamless reading

The book is amazingly useful with lots of information regarding the underlying structure of the ACT framework and how it is meant to be used and improve your well-being.

While I loved the content and personally have been recommended this book by my therapist I gotta admit, the book is so filled with practices and "exercises" that need your full attention that it might get annoying at times (since you often have to pause it to wait for the time to focus on them).

Also while those exercises are very useful, they might seem funny, evident or even silly. I, as Russ, would advise the listener/reader to do them as described without skipping. At least try them, most of the times they do have a small impact and you start to understand the logic behind them (even if they seem irrelevant); even when they seem to be useless, at least you can find some fun in having done them, and maybe that's a way to tell the "reason-giving machine" that not everything has to be done for productivity and sometimes silly stuff is fun.

Super helpful

this book has valuable tools that can help you get unstuck from your negative mindset and step into the better future version of yourself; this author uses easy to understand concepts and steps in order to obtain this objective and i would recommend to anyone struggling with depression or even perfectionism! the tools taught in this book can be used in many aspects; I have read it 3 times and would 100% recommend it to everyone!