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**From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author** Ordinary. Average. Normal. The everyday is the wall-to-wall humdrum we seek to upgrade, like a fifties carpet we long to replace. More money. A bigger house. A better body. An upgraded career. The ultimate relationship. A highly inconvenient psychological phenomenon called 'the hedonic treadmill' has us eternally questing for more. Catherine Gray was a grandmaster in eye-rolling the ordinary, and the art of everlasting reaching. Until the daemon of depression made her re-think everything. Knitting together personal storytelling and illuminating science, this book probes great minds in neuroscience and psychology.It explodes 'extraordinary-seeking' myths such as big bucks means big happiness, expensive weddingspredict future happiness, high intensity exercise is the best kind, and the workaday is less important than the showreel. This soulful, hilarious and life-affirming book is a manifesto on how to outwit the hedonic treadmill and retrain our negatively-biased brains. But most of all, it's a love letter to an average life beautifully lived. Because maybe, just maybe, an ordinary life is the most satisfying one of all. PRAISE FOR CATHERINE GRAY'S WRITING:"Uplifting and inspiring" The Evening Standard "Not remotely preachy" The Times"Jaunty, shrewd and convincing" The Telegraph "Admirably honest, light, bubbly and remarkably rarely annoying" The Guardian"An empathetic, warm and hilarious tale from a hugely likeable human" The Lancet Psychiatry.
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Learning how to be exalted by the everyday is the most important lesson we can possibly learn. In Catherine Gray's hilarious, insightful, soulful (and very ordinary) next book, you may learn to do just that. We're told that happiness is in the extraordinary. It's on a Caribbean sun lounger, in the driving seat of a luxury car, inside an expensive golden locket, watching sunrise from Machu Picchu. We strive, reach, push, shoot for more. 'Enough' is a moving target we never quite reach. When we do brush our fingertips against the extraordinary a deeply inconvenient psychological phenomenon called the 'hedonic treadmill' means that, after a surge of joy, our happiness level returns to the baseline it was at before the 'extra' event. So, what's the answer? The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary theorizes that the solution is rediscovering the joy in the ordinary that we so often now forget to feel. Because we now expect the pleasure of a croissant, a hot shower, a yoga class, someone delivering our shopping to our door, we no longer feel its buzz. The joy of it whips through us like a bullet train, without pause. Catherine Gray was a grandmaster in the art of eye-rolling the ordinary, and skilled in everlasting reaching. Until the black dog of depression forced her to re-think everything. Along the way, she discovered some surprising realities about the extraordinaries among us: that influencers risk higher rates of anxiety and depression and high-rollers are less happy.
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