Health Care and Clinical Research

For centuries, we have viewed viruses as simple parasites—mindless invaders to be fought and eradicated. But when SARS-CoV-2 swept across the globe, adapting with seeming precision to evade our defenses, a deeper question emerged: How do entities without brains, without consciousness, without any capacity for thought, achieve outcomes that appear so intelligent?

What if everything you know about stress is incomplete? The pressure you feel at 3 AM, the tension before a crucial meeting, the weight of demands that seem impossible to meet—this experience is universal. But stress is not merely a human affliction. It is one manifestation of a fundamental law governing all systems capable of maintaining their existence over time.

How close are you to the edge? Closer than you think. Every human mind operates on a landscape of valleys and ridges. The valley is your sanity—the deep, stable equilibrium of a mind that can absorb the shocks of life and return to balance. But the valley is not permanent. It can be eroded by chronic stress, sleeplessness, isolation, and trauma, until the ridge between health and illness is so low that a single bad day can send the entire system over the edge.

Why does addiction look the same everywhere — whether the substance is heroin or the behavior is scrolling a screen? Why does recovery follow the same agonizing cycle of hope and relapse, regardless of what a person is addicted to? And why does the boundary between "addicts" and "everyone else" feel so uncomfortably thin? Boris Kriger spent three decades in the world of addiction — as a young paramedic in the Soviet Union, a rehabilitation worker in Jerusalem, and a clergyman running a shelter in Canada.

Why are some people who suffer terribly not unhappy — while others, whose lives look perfectly comfortable, are miserable? In this groundbreaking book, Boris Kriger reveals a single mechanism that explains most human unhappiness: a mental act he calls negative self-determination — the moment when your mind takes a bounded experience of pain and converts it into an unbounded verdict about who you are. "This hurts" becomes "I am broken." "I failed" becomes "I am a failure." "She left" becomes "I am unlovable.