What about the power to switch into a state of intense concentration, but at the same time is completely relaxed? Or even to feel the beginnings of an unwanted emotion, like anger, but be able to choose whether to let it take hold of you or simply make it dissolve and disappear?

One Google engineer managed to do just that. Chade-Meng Tan discovered a way of explaining these secrets in a way that busy, stressed out people could instantly understand. So many fellow Google employees told him that it had changed their life that he stopped engineering to share it with the world.

The course that he still runs at Google is in this book and it's designed in a practical way that anyone can apply to any area of their work or family life. Meng won't ask you to hug a tree or ‘find your center'. He'll use brain scans, modern science and plenty of humor to show you how a miraculous technique called mindfulness can, in just 100 minutes, begin to change our life.