SHERMAN, Conn. - s4story -- Aran Dadswell helps people build strong minds and healthier perspectives.

With her new book, "Better: Boost Your Mental Fitness," published by Emerald Lake Books®, Dadswell offers a guide on how to explore, understand, and cultivate mental fitness.

"Mental fitness is how you navigate through life," she writes. "It consists of five cornerstones of human experience (togetherness, meaning, resourcefulness, resilience and wellbeing) that, when nourished, may prevent mental health deterioration or, better yet, increase contentment and fulfillment."

Better introduces the author's approach to mental fitness (as a partner to mental health), with a blend of science, lived experience, and practical tools called "boosters" to provide a guide to help readers feel better about who they are and what they do.

Following an 18-year corporate career in banking technology, she shifted her focus from optimizing processes to empowering people.

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The result, she says, is an approach to mental fitness that offers readers a way to alternate between "human doing" and "human being."

Dadswell wrote the book to help mainstream mental fitness, which at a macro level can be good for humanity, providing a simple framework to understand mental fitness. At a personal level, it helps readers understand and cultivate mental fitness in a manner that addresses "the messiness of being human."

Dadswell emphasizes that she does not advocate trying to achieve perfection or to be best. It's about being better and making progress. She says she gained "a spirited determination" to help people feel better about themselves through her personal challenges and her efforts to mainstream mental fitness.

That determination, she adds, "really stemmed from a stark personal contrast. It came from the raw, brutal experience of being in such a dark place mentally and emotionally, and comparing that to where I was just a couple of years later. Making that profound shift — which was really hard to do — is what made me want to mainstream mental fitness."

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Dadswell described it as a gradual transition, but one that was punctuated by sudden lightbulb moments.

"In one sense, things like togetherness, meaning, resourcefulness, resilience, and wellbeing are universal," Dadswell says. "They are how every single human navigates life, just as we all breathe oxygen. Yet, how we actually make sense of those things and experience them is deeply individual. It is profoundly shaped by our culture, society, community, and family. It's truly one of those 'same, but beautifully different' things."

Better is available starting June 30. Books published by Emerald Lake Books®, in Sherman CT, may be ordered through your favorite booksellers or by visiting emeraldlakebooks.com.

To contact Aran Dadswell for an interview or to schedule a book talk, contact Paul Steinmetz at Paul@EmeraldLakeBooks.com.