Book Review — Mindset Medicine: A Journaling Power Self-Love Book

Mari McCarthy has done it again: she’s written a book of inspiration for living your best life. The author of several journaling workbooks and the website www.CreateWriteNow.com, she is prepared to lead you on the journey to being your best self. One route to feeling fulfilled, confident, and content is through journaling, and Mari loads her book with plenty of info and prompts to help you get there. In her introduction she promises, “If you’re tired of being manipulated by an establishment mindset that desperately wants to dictate what you should value, you’ll love this book. You’ll love it because you’ll discover how to cleanse your mind, love yourself more, and set yourself free.”

This is the focus of her book, that self-acceptance and a healthy dose of self-respect will lead you to find your best self. Through explanation and prompts, following her lead can indeed help you find yourself free of societal expectations and self-deprecating behavior.

Of all the chapters in her book – there are 14 to step you up from living a fear-filled existence into a life of joy, my favorite is Chapter 7: “Focus on Joy and Laughter.” Early on in the chapter, she says we should work toward an existence filled with joy and laughter. This may be difficult because fear, she explains, is hardwired into our very beings. Back when we lived in caves, following the law of the wilds, we had to learn fear and being scared to survive. While we may have found safety in our caves, venturing outside left us open to predators, those animals that could and would make us their next meal.

That mindset of fear no longer serves us. Instead, Mari advises that we make joy and laughter a priority. And just how do we do that? We look for humor in whatever situation we find ourselves in, and we seek ways to make each moment a “10” on the scale of existence. To illustrate her point, she uses the example of comedians who look at life’s situations as an opportunity to find the funny. They live in such a mindset, and we can follow their example by changing our attitude, by finding the opportunity to change our default mentality from one of stress, drama, and tension to one of joy and laughter. Should we choose to make this our key mindset, then surely we can find that positivity can be life-changing.

If you take nothing else from this book, and there are many lessons here, learn that you can indeed shift from the fear and trembling mindset into an attitude of gratitude. It is not a simple fix she promises, but if you read the book, take what she says to heart, and do her journaling prompts, you may find that you too can live with joy and laughter in your soul. I know that will make a difference in my life. Now, how about yours? Are you ready to make the mindset shift? Pick up the book, read it, and do the prompts. You just may find yourself well on your way to living at your peak. After all, her book is, as she says, “the ultimate lifestyle guide for evolving who you really are at your mental, physical, and spiritual levels.” That’s a promise I want for my life.