Reading Emotional Ignorance, Cardiff author Dean Burnett’s superb delve into the scientific explanations of how emotions work has helped my own self-care rituals: it understands that these matters are complicated, and aids the reader’s understanding too.

Emotional Ignorance‘s introduction, for one, vividly describes how I suspect all writers feel when they actually sit down and write. It goes on to examine how pleasure and pain tread a fine line (one reason, Burnett suggests, why 50 Shades Of Grey was so popular – and so badly written), in the process expelling various myths around BDSM practises. Taboo feelings are questioned, then explained, in a way laypeople can understand; the importance of dreaming, even nightmares, to one’s memory is put into context.

Much like Adam Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt, Burnett links humorous and touching personal stories with scientific knowhow. I found myself dipping into chapters rather than reading through in novel-esque fashion; to that end, the segment I found hardest to swallow concerned emotional relationships. Burnett questions all empathetic notions and posits that everything you consider unique about yourself are chemical processes that happen to each individual. As the author states in his introduction, Emotional Ignorance is not a book he planned to write – but I’m very glad he did.