Published By: Watkins
Pages: 224
Released On: 06/01/2026
The Anger Professor Dr Ryan Martin shares easy research-driven hacks to help you manage your emotions and improve your day-to-day life. His goal is to show that small changes to lifestyle, diet, sleep and ways of thinking will create real and beneficial changes in the way you experience fear, sadness, anger, happiness and the other emotions. This step-by-step guide to great emotional management will enable you to:
– Understand the science of emotions: to enable you to hack them
– Interpret emotions as signals that guide behaviour and decision making
– Learn how emotions develop in stages: 1. the stimulus; 2. your pre-existing mood; 3. your appraisal; 4. feelings; 5. actions – so you can intervene
– Manage other people’s emotions
– Deploy 50 easy and effective emotion hacks that will enable you to deal with any challenging situation
Rooted in psychological research and everyday experience, How to Feel Better Fast will enable you to work with the science of happiness. It’s all about establishing healthy emotional habits: small changes that will lead to seismic changes in your state of mind.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Watkins for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
Oh I do love a little self-help book.
This is quite heavy and involved and intense. The first 10% or so if Ryan explaining the science behind emotions and our reactions, touching upon the fight and flight response. I already know a lot about this, but I know this may be new to some. It can feel overwhelming at times but overall I think he’s got the right balance. He’s written it in a way we can understand but without dumbing it down too much, and it helps make more sense out of the main crux of the book, which is the fifty hacks.
The hacks are split into themed sections, which I thought was good because it means you can just dip in and out when you want, relating to the particular topics you need at that moment.
It’s not really a book you pick up and read over to cover like a novel, and I think that was my problem. I sat there and I read it through and I just think it was too intense and negative. He’s not negative in the sense that he thinks everything is bad or wrong, but the majority of the hacks he provides are for negative or confusing emotions, and so by reading it in one go, all those negative emotions piled on top of each other and I ended up not enjoying it as much as I think I would if I’d read it bit by bit.
I think it would be helpful for a medical student, particularly those working in mental health or psychiatry, or life coaches. But as a general minion looking for something to read? It was interesting but just a bit too much for me.
Books By Your Bedside 