Bad news: the United States is no longer among the top 20 happiest countries in the world, more Americans need therapy than therapists can see, and medication like anti-depressants (though great for some) aren’t the cure that many people assume they are. In short—these are troubling times for mental health, and Dr. Heidi McKenzie has written a book to help. A licensed clinical psychologist, as well as a marriage and family therapist, Dr. McKenzie presents us with a book whose striking title derives from what people often tell her at the beginning of their private sessions: I JUST WANT TO BE HAPPY. Subtitled “How to Get More of the Life You Want (And Less of the One You Don’t),” this self-help book introduces itself with a Kurt Vonnegut epigraph to set an uplifting and determined tone that the text itself effortlessly maintains throughout.
Readers might get the wrong idea of what joy really entails and how consistently it can be maintained, so the author quickly sets expectations in the intro: “happiness is not a place to which you arrive and once there, you need to do nothing more. It’d be nice if it worked that way, but happiness is an emotion like any other in that it’s fleeting and doesn’t last forever.” While making sure we have no illusions about what this (or any other) book can do, Dr. McKenzie provides hope in that “we can rewire our brain pathways by incorporating certain evidence-based activities” like cooking or bird-watching “into our daily lives.” Self-help has proven cheap and effective at relieving anxiety and depression for countless people in different situations, so the target audience includes readers considering therapy, those already in therapy without medication, patients on meds but who wish to improve further, and more.
I JUST WANT TO BE HAPPY’s easy-to-follow structure is one of its biggest assets. Each chapter is about a simple strategy you might have already heard of but haven’t dug into—beginning with a personal anecdote of McKenzie’s, transitioning to what the science says, and ending with what you can do. The subsection “Why Should I Try This?” makes the case for each method, while subsections like “Beginning Steps” and “Levelling Up” ground the science in a way that meets people where they are with instructions that differ based on how much each reader is willing to do. This book doesn’t need to be read in any particular order, either. The Table of Contents lets us choose which section to try out on any given day. Appendixes at the back of the book provide happiness questionnaires, basic info on the essential D.O.S.E. chemicals, and other exciting places to look for mental health assistance.
Dr. McKenzie strikes the tonal balance between friendly, upbeat, and sincere that one would expect from an experienced therapist. Moreover, her advice is varied and motivating, from explaining how singing activates the brain in unique ways to how you can train yourself to stop repeatedly jumping to worst-case hypotheticals in your head. Specific contexts are provided, too. While you may not agree with every situation (“Spill a glass of water at a restaurant and don’t say ‘thank you’ after the server wipes it up” is supposed to help you overcome your social anxiety, but it sounds kind of mean), most of them feel quite doable. Even for readers skeptical of data that claims to know the exact percentage of how much each part of our lives accounts for our happiness, the notion that these activities can help still comes through.
A few minor quibbles. It may be hard to connect each source to its corresponding sentence, as the endnotes aren’t numbered and there are many different sources (another big positive). Meanwhile, the prose struggles with its commas and dashes in more ways than one (missing commas, extra commas where they shouldn’t be, hyphens replacing dashes, etc.).
Nevertheless, I JUST WANT TO BE HAPPY proves a short and highly approachable guide whose main intended takeaway never falters: “You are more powerful than you think.”
~J.S. Gornael for IndieReader