Nudge Your Way to Happiness: The 30 Day Workbook for a Happier You (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781530042609)

In some ways Jon Cousins is an unlikely person to have come up with a groundbreaking way to manage low mood and depression, but perhaps in other ways his whole life has prepared him for this mission.

Cousins has created an entirely new approach to self-managing a condition that afflicts millions worldwide.

He began his career in advertising, starting and running - as its creative director - a successful London agency with big-name clients and a shelf full of awards.

Even though the business was thriving, he made a radical career decision to close the agency on his 40th birthday so he could spend a year traveling the world on a "global voyage of discovery," then returned to the UK in 1997 to co-found a series of online startups in areas as diverse as kids' education, dating and a TV advertising archive.

However, despite outward success and high achievement, Cousins eventually admitted that ever since his twenties (following a year of post-graduate study in California) he'd struggled with debilitating depression.

His efforts to manage his condition led him to invent an online tool called Moodscope which, characteristically for someone so driven, became yet another start-up company that was recognized by the British National Health Service, and rated #1 in a public poll run by the U.K. Department of Health.

His work and methods have been examined and reviewed by the BBC, The New York Times, The Times of London, and scores of others.

Moodscope was announced to the world when Cousins spent an hour performing on a stone column in London's Trafalgar Square as part of the capital's year-long "4th Plinth" art project. During his 60 minutes, he invited people to text him their moods, which he wrote, along with their names, on dozens of brightly colored flags displayed around the plinth (there's a YouTube video of this escapade).

Cousins was a founder member of the London branch of the Quantified Self movement and has frequently spoken at QS meetings around the world, once about a self-experiment that involved him weighing his shaved whiskers every day for a month.

In 2014 the U.S. Government awarded him "extraordinary ability" status to further his pioneering emotional health work in the United States, so he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now lives. He spends a lot of his working time at Stanford University.