Book cover for "Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health", by Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD.

Making choices about your health is as hard as it is important, but there’s no reason you should have to do it alone.

Your Life Depends on It teaches you how to make those choices, so you can live a healthier and happier life. Written by an expert with extensive academic and industry experience, the book weaves unforgettable stories with cutting-edge scientific insights, to explain the barriers that you face when making health choices, and give you practical guidance on how to make better ones.

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“People who expect to stay healthy forever need not read this wonderful book. The rest of us should. With a fine combination of humor, compassion and vast knowledge, Talya Miron-Shatz offers clear and useful guidance for the hardest decisions of life.”

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and author of ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’

We make health choices every single day. We choose to take a vitamin supplement, go for a run despite a sore tendon, forego birth control pills, or ignore that cancer screening our doctor recommended. The more important these decisions are, the more vulnerable we are, and the tougher choosing becomes. Still, nobody teaches us the skills for choosing.

Despite our doctors’ best efforts, these high-stakes choices are riddled with psychological traps: they often require us to decide without knowing (much less understanding) all the facts. As a result, we’re likely to misuse medication, fall for ‘magical’ cure-alls, and undergo unnecessary procedures.

In Your Life Depends on It, Talya Miron-Shatz uses her extensive academic and industry experience to show how the medical system can set us up for success or failure, and maps a new model for truly helping us choose. She first reveals the barriers preventing us from making good choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from fertility treatments to end-of-life care. Then, she presents cutting-edge techniques from psychology and behavioral economics that we can use to overcome those barriers and own our health choices.

Full of insights and actionable take-aways, Your Life Depends on It is the definitive guide to making a good choice when you can’t afford to make a bad one.


“The past year has shown that confusion exists prominently in our medical conversations. We need a new guide to navigating these complex decisions, and psychology professor Miron-Shatz is here to provide one.”


About the author

Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, is an expert in medical decision-making, and has multiple academic publications on this topic. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York, a professor at Ono Academic College in Israel, and a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge. She has worked at Princeton University and taught at Wharton and regularly consults for major pharmaceutical and health companies.

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