*This is a book review of The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions into My Best Life by Lauren Martin.
“I realized moods were not some rare disease only I was afflicted with. Moods were part of being a woman.”
– Lauren Martin
Quick Facts
Author: Lauren Martin
Release Date: December 8, 2020
Genre: Self-help, nonfiction
Number of Pages: 288
SJ Rating: 93%
The Synopsis
Are you tired of the long lines? Delayed flights? Sleepless nights? Do you ever find yourself at a lull in life where nothing can make you happy and bring you out of your perpetual bad mood? Lauren Martin, founder of Words of Women, explores the perpetual bad mood and more as she teaches the ability to change your perception about life’s lulls.
The Good
The topic of anxiety and the way she talked about it stays with me. Lauren Martin said, “When we’re anxious, we’re not really living. We’re surviving.” Oof. Ouch. Wow. Got me right in the heart.
She explained anxiety in a way I had never heard before by saying it’s “rapid, untrained thinking.” To summarize, she said it’s a push of both the past and future that causes us to leave reality and lose precious moments, moments that can be great memories.
Another thing that really struck a chord is her stance on chasing happiness. She makes the point that we are constantly chasing happiness, a happiness that will last forever, which is unrealistic. We should chase after a never-ending self-love, and this sentiment really opened my eyes.
Lauren discusses so much in this book; there are so many good quotes and hard, but necessary, truths that I had to pull out the highlighter and start annotating, which I rarely do.
A lot of the things talked about in the book overlap with things my previous therapist once told me. There was actual research behind some of the things discussed in the book, which was such a pleasant shock. For example, when she explained women’s intuition.
I absolutely love that it’s a nonfiction book with several elements written like an excellent fictional work.
The Bad
Though I applaud her for having actual research to back up some elements of the book, there is a portion where she uses generic terms like “researchers” and “psychologists”. It would be nice if she named the specific researchers and psychologists; I feel like it would add more legitimacy to her words.
This is the third book I’ve read this year that mentions Flannery O’Connor, and I genuinely don’t know how I feel about it.
The Overall
If you couldn’t tell, this is a very female focused book, which she points out in the disclaimer.
Lauren Martin provides good reminders of what all the Pinterest quotes and motivational Instagram posts say. I experienced a summer where a lot of bad things happened, and this book, especially the latter half of it, was read at the perfect time, “…the greatest things that happen are usually the result of something worse that happened before.”
There’s tons of information from this book that I wanted to include in this review so you simply have it, but since there’s so much, I’m just going to recommend reading it.
Next book to be read and reviewed: Happy Place by Emily Henry
“Stress of the mind is manifested in the body.”
– Lauren Martin
