SIMPLE

Yesterday’s Brain, Today’s World, and the Forgotten Science of Living Well.

What They’re Saying

For years, I’ve argued that our bodies hold wisdom our minds have learned to override. Dr. Kristina Durante makes the same case for our entire evolved psychology. SIMPLE is impossible to put down. Kristina writes with the authority of a scientist and the candor of someone who has lived what she’s studying. Once you see her secrets to living well in these pages, you won’t be able to unsee them.

Amy Cuddy, New York Times bestselling author of Presence and Bullied

We have been told that wellness is something we can optimize and cold plunge our way toward. Dr. Durante offers a far more hopeful truth: that much of what we need has been wired into us for hundreds of thousands of years. Smart, generous, and beautifully written, SIMPLE helps us understand why modern life can leave us feeling so unwell and points us towards a more human path back to connection, mattering, and joy.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Mattering

Why, despite all the conveniences of modern life, do so many of us feel stressed, disconnected, and unfulfilled? In Simple, Dr. Durante draws on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and well-being science to offer a compelling answer. Filled with illuminating research, memorable stories, and practical insights, this book will help readers create lives that better fit the minds we inherited.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness

Kristina Durante Featured in Fox News Health

Hi, I’m Kristina.

I help people understand why self-help doesn’t work.

If you’ve ever felt like something’s missing, even when life looks fine on paper, you’re not broken. Your brain just hasn’t caught up to the world you’re living in.

I’m an evolutionary psychologist who spent years studying why the modern wellness industry keeps failing the people who try hardest to use it. SIMPLE is what I found: our brains weren’t built for the world we’re living in. Once you see that mismatch, everything else starts to make sense.

“We’ve built a $8 trillion-dollar wellness industry on a flimsy foundation—SIMPLE is the missing first step that makes everything else actually work.”

Kristina Durante

About SIMPLE

Yesterday’s Brain, Today’s World, and the Forgotten Science of Living Well

The wellness industry keeps failing people because it’s missing a first step. The human brain evolved for a village of roughly 150 people and it is built to track that scale of relationship and threat. It now runs inside cities of millions, constant technology, and on-demand everything. That mismatch, not a shortage of self-help techniques, is why wellness advice so often doesn’t stick: the brain won’t use a coping tool until it feels safe enough to try one.

Dr. Kristina Durante reveals six principles built into the brain’s original design that each restore something modern life has stripped away. Drawing on her own decades-long path back from rock bottom (eviction, job loss, divorce, grief) alongside evolutionary and brain science, she maps the steps that help the brain feel safe enough to find belonging and purpose again. SIMPLE doesn’t ask readers to abandon modern life. It offers a blueprint for building a psychological greenhouse inside it: the missing precondition that makes the rest of wellness actually work.

We’ve built an $8 trillion dollar wellness industry on a flimsy foundation. SIMPLE is the missing first step that makes everything else actually work: a science-backed framework built on six principles your brain was designed to run on. A secure base, meaningful roles, empathic balance, interdependence, pleasure at the beginning, and serendipity. Skip the first step, and the rest of the wellness industry can’t fix what’s actually wrong.

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