Most people diagnosed with depression today aren’t depressed, according to Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry, in his latest book How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown. 

Specifically, about 1 in 5 Americans will receive a diagnosis of major depression in their lifetime. But Shorter believes that the term major depression doesn’t capture the symptoms most of these individuals have. “Nervous illness,” however, does.

“The nervous patients of yesteryear are the depressives of today,” he writes.

And these individuals aren’t particularly sad. Rather, their symptoms fall into these five domains, according to Shorter: nervous exhaustion; mild depression; mild anxiety; somatic symptoms, such as chronic pain or insomnia; and obsessive thinking.

“I used to think hope was just a warm, vague feeling. It was that sense of excitement that I got before Christmas when I was a child. It lingered a while and then disappeared,” writes author and Gallup senior scientist Shane J. Lopez, Ph.D, in his book Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe hope has a fleeting quality for you, too. Maybe you also associate hope with childhood, a kind of effervescence that didn’t survive the transition into adulthood.

Today, Lopez, who’s a leading researcher of hope, has a different perspective. He views hope like oxygen. “We can’t live without hope.”

Why is hope so important?

Applying self-compassion to parenting can be incredibly valuable, according to psychologist and author Kristin Neff, Ph.D, in her book Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind.

It’s especially helpful if you’re raising a child who’s under 5. As Neff writes, “Raising infants and toddlers, with their constant need for supervision, picky food habits, tantrums, not to mention dirty diapers, has to be one of the most challenging jobs around.”

In Self-Compassion, Neff shares the work of Australian psychologist Rebecca Coleman, Ph.D. Coleman has developed a parenting program called Mindful Awareness Parenting (MAP). It teaches parents mindfulness and self-compassion skills and helps them make good decisions in tough situations.

Therapy is highly effective for treating adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

For instance, psychotherapy can help you better understand how ADHD affects your life. And it can help you develop the necessary skills for managing symptoms, being successful and having healthy relationships.

But in order for therapy to be most effective, you’ll have to work at it.

In his excellent and comprehensive book More Attention, Less Deficit: Success Strategies for Adults with ADHD, clinical psychologist Ari Tuckman, Psy.D, features valuable tips for getting the most out of therapy. Here are five tips from his book.

We have a complicated relationship with change. On the one hand, we crave change. On the other, we shun it.

As author and psychologist John C. Norcross, Ph.D, writes in his newest book Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions, “We have a love-hate relationship with the idea of changing our behavior. Change is desired and dreaded, venerated and vilified.”

One reason we fear change lies in its perception. “After all, we’ve been led to believe that change entails an unrealistic regimen of self-sacrifice that frequently meets with failure in the long run,” he writes.

According to Norcross, changes fall into four categories: bad habits, such as smoking and over-spending; new goals, such as playing the guitar and gardening; relationships, such as improving your marriage and getting along with your co-workers; and life satisfaction, such as wanting to be a better person and deepening your spirituality.

“Anger can destroy marriages, business partnerships and countries,” said Joe Shrand, M.D., an instructor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the valuable, practical and science-based book Outsmarting Anger: 7 Strategies for Defusing Our Most Dangerous Emotion with Leigh Devine, MS.

Fortunately, each of us holds the power to defuse our own anger and even others,’ Dr. Shrand said. This is especially critical because often it’s not our own fuse that hinders our success; it’s someone else’s, he said.

The key in cooling anger lies in respect. As Dr. Shrand said, when was the last time you got angry with someone who showed you respect?

“Anger is designed to change the behavior of someone else. Being respected feels great, so why would we want to change that?”

“The practice of creativity and knowing who you are go together. You just can’t express one without the other,” writes author, artist and textile designer Marisa Anne Cummings in her beautiful book Creative Thursday: Everyday Inspiration to Grow Your Creative Practice.

In it, she features valuable questions to help readers keep rediscovering ourselves. “Your creative voice lies within the answers,” she writes.

That’s because curiosity is king in creativity. We’re ever-evolving. So it’s important to check in with ourselves on a regular basis. Every question may uncover a different and even surprising response.

Asking these questions helps us better understand the kinds of projects and practices that truly light us up. It helps us find new ideas, methods and even mediums. In other words, the answers to these questions help to inform our creative practice.

We’re all too familiar with the adage, “Money can’t buy happiness.” But according to author Laura Vanderkam, in her empowering and thoughtful book All The Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, “If money can’t buy happiness, perhaps we aren’t spending it right.”

Vanderkam encourages us to rethink how we view money.

Rather than money being “evil or soulless” or a point of comparison, she suggests we start seeing it as a tool for “acquiring, doing, and taking care of things that bring us joy.”

Let’s find out how.

In his book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, author David K. Randall calls sleep “one of the dirty little secrets of science.” That’s because despite spending almost a third of our lives sleeping, we don’t really know much about the process of sleep.

In fact, Randall, a senior reporter at Reuters, notes that sleep is one of the youngest fields in science. Until the 1950s, researchers believed that our brains remained quiet during slumber.

But the discovery of the stages of sleep shattered this perspective. For instance, our brains are just as active in REM sleep — aptly named rapid eye movement because our eyes shift rapidly against our lids — as they are when we’re awake.

In Dreamland, Randall shares a slew of these fascinating, surprising and eye-opening facts, anecdotes and research studies. These are a few curious tidbits from his book.

It’s impossible to feel joy every minute of the day. Life is often a roller-coaster. Amid the good times are the inevitable stressors and tough moments. Our emotions also naturally wax and wane.

However, it is possible to rejoin joy, according to professor and psychologist Gerald Young, Ph.D. It is possible to keep returning to joy even after experiencing something difficult. It is possible, he said, to get on a path that leads to joy.

And creating that path is something all of us can work on. “In our efforts to rejoin joy, we can be the source of much of our change process,” Young said. And those changes can be anything from being a more sensitive partner to working harder to switching jobs to becoming more compassionate overall, he said.

Below, Young offered several suggestions on creating positive change in 2013.

There is magic in ordinary moments, in the mess of life. It’s just that sometimes we miss it.

Sometimes we’re so focused on the future or so buried in the past that we neglect the present. Sometimes we crave something so badly that we want time to speed up. And in that yearning, we gloss over the glory of today.

Other times we get so overwhelmed by daily pressures that we assume we don’t have time for the activities that feed us and bring us joy.

In her beautiful book A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in Present Tense author Christina Rosalie shows us how to take notice, and take action, to live a mindful, passionate, truthful life amid the inevitable challenges and stressors.

Courage has very little to do with fearlessness. In fact, courage is all about fear. Courage is acting in the company of fear. It’s feeling fear, and doing it anyway.

Courage “is the ability to confront fear, pain, risk, danger, uncertainty or intimidation,” write authors Nina Lesowitz and Mary Beth Sammons in their book The Courage Companion: How to Live Life with True Power.

Courage isn’t just heroic acts. Courage is many things. And often courage is quiet, spoken in hushed tones, like the well-known and beautiful quote from Mary Anne Rademacher: “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.”