Research has shown the tremendous importance of gratitude. People that express genuine gratitude are show less depression symptoms, get along better with others, sleep better, and are physically healthier. In addition, therapists are finding that doing a daily gratitude journal helps suicidal patients reverse their course. My students have noticed that when they are stressed out, thinking about things for which they are grateful helps lower their anxiety. This book can be a great tool for improving your well being.
Positive relationships are essential to improve and maintain positive well being. Barbara Fredrickson, a leading researcher in the power of positivity and positive emotions, dissects the most powerful positive emotion--love. Fredrickson argues that love can occur with anyone--with a spouse, sibling, colleague, or even a stranger. She argues that these moments of connection make life more enjoyable and meaningful. THIS IS NOT A MARRIAGE OR RELATIONSHIP MANUAL. Love 2.0 outlines why we should aim for more of these moments of connection and gives strategies to accomplish more loving interactions in our lives.
The physical benefits of exercise have been preached for a few decades. These are obvious. But what are the psychological benefits of exercise? In Spark, John Ratey delivers a tremendous amount of research that shows how exercise can lower anxiety in the long-term, virtually rid depression symptoms in mild and moderate patients with depression, improve memory and test scores for students, and even help people rid themselves of addiction. If you are a parent, this is a must read. Once you've read, Spark, you will want to stick to your workout plan!
From the author of the previously posted book, Spark, John Ratey takes on physical wellness once again, but with some different and stunning research. What afflicts us, he states, are "diseases of civilization"--cancer, heart disease, obesity, type II diabetes, and autoimmune disorders--that lowers our mental and emotional well being. These diseases of civilization are caused by how we live in this modern day world. Using great research and anecdotes, Ratey makes compelling arguments for some of the following--eat more meat and less processed sugar and wheat; exercise (not surprising); sleep better and sleep more; find social connections; be outside more. Through these, your physical wellness leads to better mental and emotional wellness. There will be 2-3 points in this book that will stick with you, guaranteed.
From Amazon: It Starts With Food outlines a clear, balanced, sustainable plan to change the way you eat forever—and transform your life in profound and unexpected ways. Your success story begins with the Whole30®, Dallas and Melissa Hartwig’s powerful 30-day nutritional reset.
Since 2009, their underground Whole30 program has quietly led tens of thousands of people to weight loss, enhanced quality of life, and a healthier relationship with food—accompanied by stunning improvements in sleep, energy levels, mood, and self-esteem. More significant, many people have reported the “magical” elimination of a variety of symptoms, diseases, and conditions in just 30 days.
Written by one of the researchers that conducted the famous Marshmallow Test at Stanford in the 1970s, Mischel documents the incredible findings over the last 40 years of the importance of willpower. There is a lot of research that shows willpower is the single most important trait to success. Mischel's book incredibly documents different experiments that relate to willpower and the outcomes for children sometimes decades later. If you are a parent, this is a must read.
From Publishers Weekly: Positive psychology pioneer Fredrickson introduces readers to the power of harnessing happiness to transform their lives, backed up by impressive lab research. The author lays out the core truths and 10 forms of positivity—joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love—in a book that promises to change the way people look at feeling good. Disdainful of Pollyannaism, Fredrickson remains realistic in her treatment and provides scientific evidence to illustrate her findings that maintaining a 3:1 positivity ratio of positive thoughts to negative emotions creates a tipping point between languishing and flourishing. The book includes compelling case studies, concrete tips, a Positivity Self Test and a tool kit for decreasing negativity and raising the positivity ratio. Although many of Fredrickson's methods and theories (notes on meditation and karma) will seem familiar to anyone versed in yoga or eastern religions, the scientific foundation of her arguments and additional online resources (www.positivityratio.com) offer readers a chance to experiment with positivity and very possibly lead richer lives.
Taken from the back cover: What if everything you thought you knew about stress was wrong? And what if changing your mind about stress could make you happier, healthier, and better able to reach your goals? Stanford psychologist and award-winning teacher Kelly McGonigal, PhD, combines exciting new research on resilience and mindset, proving that stress itself may not be bad for you.
In fact, embracing stress makes us stronger, smarter, and happier, and can even inspire compassion and enhance empathy. Distilling science, stories, and exercises into an engaging and practical book that is both entertaining and life changing. The Upside of Stress shows you: how to cultivate a mindset to embrace stress; how stress can provide focus and energy; how stress can help people connect and strengthen close relationships; why the brain is built to learn from stress.
The Upside of Stress is not a guide of getting rid of stress, but a toolkit for getting better at it--but understanding it, embracing it, and leveraging it to your advantage.
Taken from Publisher's Weekly:
Brown, author or I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't), again urges us to expose and expel our insecurities in order to have the most fulfilling life possible. Her latest is a guidebook for pilgrims on the journey to wholehearted living, which she defines as containing courage, compassion, deliberate boundaries, and connection. She has defined 10 guideposts for personal introspection, which involve cultivating some positive quality, whether it be authenticity, self-compassion, or a resilient spirit, intuition, meaningful work, or laughter. Each guidepost is the focus of a chapter that contains illustrative stories, primarily from her own life; definitions, including the difference between shame and guilt; quotes from such diverse sources as Diane Ackerman and E.E. Cummings; and brief suggestions of activities that she pursues with the assumption that they might help her audience. Although these activities are highlighted in her introduction to the book, they are in short supply and the book functions more as a chatty meditation on the guideposts. Despite occasional moments of insight, this book's primary value may be in spurring thought and providing references to other authors that will provide further inspiration for those seeking a more meaningful life.
Taken from Amazon:
Focusing on life’s biggest, messiest moments, Sonja Lyubomirsky provides readers with the clear-eyed vision they need to build the healthiest, most satisfying life. Lyubomirsky argues that we have been given false promises—myths that assure us that lifelong happiness will be attained once we hit the culturally confirmed markers of adult success. This black-and-white vision of happiness works to discourage us from recognizing the upside of any negative and limits our potential for personal growth. A corrective course on happiness and a call to regard life’s twists and turns with a more open mind, The Myths of Happiness shares practical lessons that prove we are more adaptable than we think we are. It empowers readers to look beyond their first response, sharing scientific evidence that often it is our mindset—not our circumstances—that matters most.
Taken from Amazon:
What kind of life do you want for yourself? What choices will create this kind of life?
In his New York Times bestseller Happier, positive psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar taught us how to become happier through simple exercises.
Now, in Choose the Life You Want, he has a new, life-changing lesson to share: Drawing on the latest psychological research, Ben-Shahar shows how making the right choices―not the big, once-in-a-lifetime choices, but the countless small choices we make every day almost without noticing―has a direct, long-lasting impact on our happiness.
Every single moment is an opportunity to make a conscious choice for a happy and fulfilled life. Choose the Life You Want covers 101 such choices, complete with real-life stories, to help you identify and act on opportunities large and small.
Taken from Amazon:
How do you get to “happily ever after”?
In fairy tales, lasting love just happens. But in real life, healthy habits are what build happiness over the long haul. Happy Together, written by positive psychology experts and husband-and-wife team Suzann Pileggi Pawelski and James O. Pawelski, is the first book on using the principles of positive psychology to create thriving romantic relationships. Combining extensive scientific research and real-life examples, this book will help you find and feed the good in yourself and your partner. You will learn to develop key habits for building and sustaining long-term love by:
• Promoting a healthy passion
• Prioritizing positive emotions
• Mindfully savoring experiences together
• Seeking out strengths in each other
Through easy-to-follow methods and fun exercises, you’ll learn to strengthen your partnership, whether you’re looking to start a relationship off on the right foot, weather difficult times, reignite passion, or transform a good marriage into a great one.
Taken from Amazon
Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.
Everyone wants to be happy and successful. And yet the pursuit of both has never been more elusive. As work and personal demands rise, we try to keep up by juggling everything better, moving faster, and doing more. While we might succeed in the short term, it comes at a cost to our well-being, our relationships, and, paradoxically, our productivity.
In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppala, the science director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, explains that our inability to achieve sustainable fulfillment is tied to common but outdated notions about success. We are taught that getting ahead means doing everything that's thrown at us (and then some) with razor-sharp focus and iron discipline; that success depends on our drive and talents; and that achievement cannot happen without stress.
The Happiness Track demolishes these counterproductive theories. Drawing on the latest findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience - research on happiness, resilience, willpower, compassion, positive stress, creativity, and mindfulness - Seppala shows that finding happiness and fulfillment may, in fact, be the most productive thing we can do to thrive professionally. Filled with practical advice on how to apply these scientific findings to our daily lives, The Happiness Track is a life-changing guide to fast tracking our success and creating the anxiety-free lives we want.
Taken from MIT Press
Most of us will freely admit that we are obsessed with our devices. We pride ourselves on our ability to multitask—read work email, reply to a text, check Facebook, watch a video clip. Talk on the phone, send a text, drive a car. Enjoy family dinner with a glowing smartphone next to our plates. We can do it all, 24/7! Never mind the errors in the email, the near-miss on the road, and the unheard conversation at the table. In The Distracted Mind, Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen—a neuroscientist and a psychologist—explain why our brains aren't built for multitasking, and suggest better ways to live in a high-tech world without giving up our modern technology.
The authors explain that our brains are limited in their ability to pay attention. We don't really multitask but rather switch rapidly between tasks. Distractions and interruptions, often technology-related—referred to by the authors as “interference”—collide with our goal-setting abilities. We want to finish this paper/spreadsheet/sentence, but our phone signals an incoming message and we drop everything. Even without an alert, we decide that we “must” check in on social media immediately.
Gazzaley and Rosen offer practical strategies, backed by science, to fight distraction. We can change our brains with meditation, video games, and physical exercise; we can change our behavior by planning our accessibility and recognizing our anxiety about being out of touch even briefly. They don't suggest that we give up our devices, but that we use them in a more balanced way.
A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the best-selling author of Think Again and Originals.
For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: Passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.
Kristin Neff, Ph.D., says that it’s time to “stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind.” Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind offers expert advice on how to limit self-criticism and offset its negative effects, enabling you to achieve your highest potential and a more contented, fulfilled life.
More and more, psychologists are turning away from an emphasis on self-esteem and moving toward self-compassion in the treatment of their patients—and Dr. Neff’s extraordinary book offers exercises and action plans for dealing with every emotionally debilitating struggle, be it parenting, weight loss, or any of the numerous trials of everyday living.
Taken from Amazon
Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.
When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work.
But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start.
Taken from Amazon
Resilience is a crucial ingredient–perhaps the crucial ingredient–to a happy, healthy life. More than anything else, it's what determines how high we rise above what threatens to wear us down, from battling an illness, to bolstering a marriage, to carrying on after a national crisis. Everyone needs resilience, and now two expert psychologists share seven proven techniques for enhancing our capacity to weather even the cruelest setbacks.
The science in The Resilience Factor takes an extraordinary leap from the research introduced in the bestselling Learned Optimism a decade ago. Just as hundreds of thousands of people were transformed by "flexible optimism," readers of this book will flourish, thanks to their enhanced ability to overcome obstacles of any kind. Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté are seasoned resilience coaches and, through practical methods and vivid anecdotes, they prove that resilience is not just an ability that we're born with and need to survive, but a skill that anyone can learn and improve in order to thrive.
Excerpt taken from Amazon's page:
Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable or to dare greatly. Based on twelve years of pioneering research, Dr. Brené Brown dispels the cultural myth that vulnerability is weakness and argues that it is, in truth, our most accurate measure of courage.
Brown explains how vulnerability is both the core of difficult emotions like fear, grief, and disappointment, and the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, empathy, innovation, and creativity. She writes: “When we shut ourselves off from vulnerability, we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.”