Kevin Brannick, Psy.D earned a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, a Master's Degree in Clinical Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Religions. Kevin offers health and wellness seminars and has a health and wellness blog. Kevin and his clients work together to find purpose and meaning in their lives by identifying and expanding personal strengths, increasing spiritual awareness, and developing patterns of reasonable and responsible living.Kevin’s doctoral dissertation, "Norms of the Mind: Applying Lonergan’s Analysis of Human Consciousness to the Epistemological Crisis in Psychology Theory and Clinical Practice", identifies theories of human mental functioning that can explain our objective and subject mental experience and unify them in the structure and operation of the human mind.
Kevin is heavily involved in the daily parenting of his two children and volunteers in a number of community activities.
Dr. Michelle Brannick, ND, DC earned a doctorate degree in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University in Washington State. She is licensed in the state of Vermont as a Naturopathic Physician and is also a licensed Chiropractic Physician in Illinois. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, where she minored in Physics and Statistics.
Michelle offers seminars on health and wellness, has recorded many health and wellness podcasts, and has written many health and wellness articles. Dr. Brannick is also an adjunct clinical instructor with National University of Health Sciences in Lombard, Illinois. She also provides professional public speaking seminars on health and nutrition.
Our nation is in the grip of a severe health care crisis which fuels and sustains our seemingly endless financial crisis. Both crises are complicated by our politicians. Our political leaders, who are elected to serve all of us “we the people” instead pander to the extreme elements of their parties fearing that special interest groups will run them out of office if they act reasonably and responsibly. All three crises are symptoms of a much deeper and more pervasive problem. The underlying cause of our troubles is our indiscriminate pursuit of happiness. Our indiscriminate pursuit of happiness obscures our sense of what is reasonable and responsible. Our desire to be happy, happy, happy is leading us down a path that can only end in our becoming more miserable than Pinocchio became as he was morphing into a happy, happy, happy Jackass on Pleasure Island.Our obsession with happiness has an addictive quality. Our relentless search for our next happiness fix fuels Madison Avenue, which sells all its wares based on the promise of delivering the happiness we so desperately seek and believe we are entitled to. Our addiction to pursuing happiness is apparent by the fact that, as of this writing, there were 42 titles on Amazon that claim to hold the secret to happiness. Moreover, happiness road map books are usually at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. There are also thousands of Internet sites and articles that claim to have a pill or a process that is certain to make us happy 24/7. Lastly, the pharmaceutical industry markets and sells over 279 billion dollars’ worth of drugs all based on explicit and implicit claims that the drugs will not only protect us from the unhappiness of illness and death, they will turn our lives into happy walks on the beach. Most of these drugs and virtually every other legally addictive “happy” product sold on the corner of “happy and healthy” will lead us to the misery and despair of skid row if they don’t kill us first. In reality the happy market has a lot more in common with Pinocchio’s journey to Pleasure Island than with health and genuine happiness.
Our book takes a different approach. Our book will confirm that we humans have the capacity to live deeply meaningful and genuinely happy lives without the happy pills, happy sugar drenched, happy additive filled, and happy GMO’d products, happy “secrets,” and happy egocentric me, me, me guidelines that are in reality discussing excuses for healthcare treatments, food, and Pleasure Island utopías. Our book will also offer an invaluable, yet non-prescriptive, path to health and genuine happiness. Our book will argue that the counterweight to Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island happiness is reasonable and responsible action. Reasonable and responsible action, while often accompanied by discomfort and the sacrifice of the immediate experience of pleasure, is our exclusive path to health and genuine happiness. Moreover, as will be shown, reasonable and responsible action is the essence of both our DNA and spirituality.
Our book will not anchor its argument on concepts or guidelines that might define reasonable and responsible behavior. Instead, this book will identify the fixed laws and patterns of biology which, moment to moment, seek optimal health by pursuing, grasping, and sustaining healthy connections which are nature’s inbuilt demands for reasonable and responsible action. Optimal connectedness to ourselves, others, and our environment, irrespective of our emotional experience---pleasant or painful---defines genuine happiness. Thus, if we shift our focus from Pleasure Island happiness to achieving optimal connectedness through reasonable and responsible action we can eliminate our political gridlock, solve both our healthcare and financial crises, clean up our life-sustaining planet, and create a culture of genuine happiness.
The path to genuine happiness has little to do with our common beliefs about happiness. In fact, as will be shown, our common beliefs and experiences of happiness are the primary cause of our fall from the mountaintop of genuine meaning and purpose into the dark and lonely canyon of misery and despair.
As indicated above, in presenting an invulnerable path to genuine happiness we will not offer a series of exercises or prescribed daily activities or “to do lists” as a path to happiness. Such formulas for happiness are counter-productive and are doomed to fail because they do not, and cannot, consider the unique make-up of our individual life and the circumstances of our moment-to-moment situations. Moreover, the bulk of such formulaic approaches to happiness base their claims on sentimental and ill-defined or undefined concepts of what it means to be human. For example, authors often claim that human happiness is based on some unexplained spiritual entity that exists outside of us. They often suggest our spirit is not human. They claim that while our “mystery” spirit is within us, it is not part of us. Thus, we are told to ultimately base our lives on an undefined and unknowable “spirit” that plays a critical role in our experience of happiness. We are led to believe we can plug into this unknown “spirit” or energy, which will provide us with a happiness utopia for no discernible reason. However, the great spiritual leader Thomas Merton cautioned us about such assumptions of happiness fearing that what we perceive as good might indeed be evil. In other words, relying on an unknown spirit or energy as the source of happiness often becomes a quicksand pit of misery and despair. Others offer “magic” pills, herbs, or prescriptive lifestyles. Rarely is there any attempt to ground these claims and any foundational understanding of what it is to be human or the basic demands of the biology from which we humans have emerged.
