Top 10 Practical Self improvement books to make you happier and healthier
I’ve read over 600 self improvement books over the last 6 years.
I’ve learned most self improvement books are full of good ideas with no practical application. They sell hope without actually improving your life.
So how do you know which books are full of ideas, and which will actually change your life? Here are the top 10 self improvement books that are practical and will teach you to be healthier and happier.
10. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One — Dr. Joe Dispenza
Key Insights:
Personality and Reality Control:
Your personality dictates your reality — and it is within your control. Who you are, what you do, how you act and react — these make up your personality, and they are all habits. They are the habits of being our present self.
Addiction to Feelings:
With these habits, there are a list of associated feelings, and we become addicted to those feelings. E.g. We’ve become addicted to the feeling when we lash out, when we procrastinate, and when we complain.
These habits of being ourself become our state of being, and these states of being dictate what we see as well as how we interact with the world. But it’s all within our control. Our brain creates chemicals to match our feelings with our thoughts (and vice versa).
So first we feel the way we think. Then we think the way we feel. Controlling how we think is one of the ways we can escape our current habits and create our new reality.
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Building a business and being a great writer are two different skills.
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9. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — Dr. Jordan Peterson
Key Insights:
Your are Responsible for Yourself:
Have you ever noticed it’s easier to have compassion for someone else than it is for yourself? This unlocks a secret (and effective) path to self-care: Treat yourself as if you’re someone you’re responsible for helping.
When we start treating ourselves as if we’re someone that we’re responsible for helping, we start doing the little things that are crucial. Such as exercising, eating well, and consistently taking our medication.
Leading Yourself First:
Want to lead others? Lead yourself first.You must first lead yourself before you can lead others. If you aren’t able to control your impulses, motivate yourself, or give yourself a plan and execute on it, you have no right leading others.
Humility and Action:
Leading ourselves requires change. And that first step is a lot smaller than you think. It’s smaller then we think it is, because it we’re further back then we think we are.
We think we’re at ground zero when we’re actually below zero. It’s this disconnect that keeps us from taking the smallest action. Yet that smallest action is required for us to move in the right direction. So we’re at a standstill until we’re willing to humble ourselves and take that first step.
“Modern man doesn’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.” — Carl Yung
8. Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy — Mo Gawdat
Key Insights:
Measurement and “Fun Quota”:
You will only see results in what you measure, so set yourself a “fun quota” each day or week. Put it on your calendar, and measure it.This will ensure that you see progress in your happiness.
Happiness Equation:
“Happiness is equal to or greater than the events of your life, minus your expectation of how life should be.”
Happiness = Events of your life — your Expectations.
So to become happier, our circumstances don’t need to change. We can simply change our expectations.
Perception of Reality and Stories We Tell Ourselves:
This is because our brains don’t react to reality. We react to the stories in our head that we tell ourselves about reality. We give every situation around us meaning, through the stories we tell about it in our head.
We react to those stories and the meaning we created within those stories. We don’t react to the events that happen. This means happiness is primarily found within our head.
7. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art — James Nestor
Key Insight:
The Power of Slow Breathing:
Slow, deliberate breathing can give you access a state of calm and clarity, similar to the spiritual lift found in prayer.
Choosing Discomfort for Growth:
Tomo breathing, is a technique where you intentionally induce stress into your body, to show your body that you are in control. This method of breathing demonstrates how not all stress is bad.
By intentionally creating stress, we can train our bodies to differentiate between negative stressors and positive stressors. Positive stressors designed for improving physical and mental strength and resilience.
Breathing and Mental States: Breathing through different nostrils alters your mental state. This is weird, but stay with me here.
Alternating the nostril through which you breathe can shift the mind between creative and analytical states.
For the full study and in-depth info here, you’ll have to pick up the book.
6. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering — Joseph Nguyen
Key Insights:
The Distinction Between Thoughts and Thinking:
There is a crucial difference between passive thoughts and active thinking.
Passive thoughts are what the brain generates constantly without effort. Active thinking are our conscious engagement and interaction with those thoughts.
This is helpful in understanding that while we may not have direct control over the spontaneous generation of thoughts, we do have control over our level of engagement with them (out thinking).
The Impact of Excessive Thinking:
Stress is less about the content of our thoughts and more about the volume and intensity of our thinking.
It’s the total quantity of thoughts and our relentless engagement with them that lead to feelings of stress and overwhelm.
This shifts the focus from trying to control the content of thoughts to managing our thinking (our engagement with them).
Cumulative Effect of Feelings:
This quantity-over-content doesn’t just stop at stress. Feelings (particularly negative ones like anger, stress, and resentment) accumulate and intensify as we continue to engage with our thoughts.
There is a direct correlation between the intensity of negative emotions and the quantity of associated thoughts.
This means we can lower the intensity of an emotion by reducing our engagement with the thoughts surrounding it.
5. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams — Matthew Walker
At 11 years old, I forced myself to get less-then 6 hours of sleep each night because, “I don’t want to waste my life away” I would tell myself.
Yup, there’s lot of emotional baggage to unpack there. But the point is, I hated the idea of sleep. It was a necessary evil.
So I avoided reading this book. But now that I have, it’s RADICALLY changed my life.
Here are the Key Insights:
The Importance of Sleep Phases:
There are many phases of sleep, though 2 are what we understand the most.
These are REM and DEEP. REM Sleep (No Rapid Eye Movement) is the process where the brain creates connections between new ideas. In short, creativity.
Deep Sleep helps cut through our emotion-reaction instinct, allowing us to respond rather than emotionally lash out.
Sleep 1 extra hour and increase your income by 16% (this is wild!):
All else considered equal, sleeping one extra hour per night accounts for a 16% increase in income (pick up the book to hear this study. Very fascinating).
This is primarily due to your ability to solve problems faster, make more abstract connections, and manage your emotions better after sleeping 1 extra hour.
Problem-Solving Advantages of Napping:
When you have a problem in front of you, the best thing you can do is take a nap. The regions of your brain associated with solving this problem activate — but at a significantly higher speed.
Translation: while you’re awake, you consciously try to solve your problem. But your conscious brain also has other things to worry about (hunger, safety, task prioritization, etc). While you’re asleep, that extra mental bandwidth seems to be cleared up, so your brain works to solve the problem even faster.
4. The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself — Michael singer
Key Insights:
Your Thoughts Influence Your Perceived Reality:
We can’t control the external world, but we have the potential to control our minds.
This concept is why we run the process of recreating the external world within our minds and then interacting with this inner world. This interaction is where the conscious and subconscious mind meet.
Discovering the Root Cause of Actions by Abstaining:
If you’re not sure why you do something, stop doing it and observing what happens. Initially, you’ll experience a series of urges or discomforts. Sit through them.
These sensations (and the layers of justifications that follow), will start to point out the root cause of the behavior.
Resistance to Events:
What we often resist is not the events that have occurred, but the passage of these events through our internal landscape.
Our resistance stems from a misalignment between external events and our inner expectations or beliefs. This resistance keeps the event actively present in our minds, creating suffering and preventing us from moving forward.
By acknowledging and allowing these events to pass through us without resistance, we can achieve a state of acceptance and inner peace. This process involves letting go of the need to control how we feel about certain experiences and instead embracing them as part of our journey.
3. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender — Peter Lownds, PHD
Key Insights:
Emotional Memory Storage:
Our memories are intricately linked to the emotions we experience.
This explains how our emotional state at the time of an event significantly influences how that memory is stored as well as how (and when) we remember it.
The Mechanism of Resistance:
Resistance allows negative emotions to continue. Resisting an emotion maintains its presence and influence over us. It’s the pressure we apply in resisting an emotion that keeps it active and ongoing.
When we stop resisting and allow ourselves to feel the emotion (painful as it may be), the pressure is relieved and the emotion released.
This process of letting go is not about suppression or denial, but about acknowledging the emotions presence and allowing it to pass through us.
Relief Through Release:
The act of letting go is not a passive act, but as an active process.
By consciously choosing to release our emotional responses, we open the pathway to healing and inner peace.
True emotional relief come from an understanding and acceptance of our emotions, rather than our attempts to control or avoid them.
2. Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges — Amy Cuddy
Key Insights:
Power and Perception of Opportunities:
There is a direct relationship between feeling powerful and the ability to perceive more opportunities in your life.
This sense of empowerment doesn’t just pertain to physical or social power, but to the inner feeling of being capable and competent.
Influence of Self-Perception:
How we think of ourselves (even in trivial contexts) affect our real-life behavior and decision-making.
This means the roles we assume (even in virtual environments) bleed into our real-world persona. This then influences our actions, confidence levels, and how we interact with others.
The Role of Physical Posture in Influencing Behavior:
The concept of “posture pre-suading” behaviors, thoughts, and emotions point to the relationship between our physical states and our mental/emotional states.
Adopting certain postures can predispose us to feel and behave in ways consistent with the posture’s associated state.
For example, adopting a power pose can make us feel more confident and assertive.
1. NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Programming — Tom Dotz
Key Insights:
Stimulus → Meaning -> Emotion -> Action
Our perceptions (stimuli) are interpreted (meaning), which in turn elicits emotions, leading to actions. This shows the importances of the meaning we assign to our experiences and how they shape our behavior.
Understanding this sequence empowers you to reinterpret or reframe your perceptions, leading to different emotional outcomes and the actions you want.
Internal Negotiation with Self-Parts:
The concept of viewing yourself as composed of many ‘parts’ (with different desires, fears, and functions) offers a framework self sabotage.
This means personal conflicts and challenges can taken care of by identifying these internal parts and negotiating with them.
If you’re a non-fiction writer struggling to make money, you’re in the right place.
Building a business and being a great writer are two different skills.
Over the last 7 years, I’ve dedicated myself to learning business.
And now, I’m here to help other non-fiction writers make a living doing what they love.
I send out a daily 500 character, 3 bullet point email with business tips for non-fiction writers.
I purchased every book listed above and out of the over 300 books I have in my audible, these are the most powerful for making you happier and healthier. That being said, I am using affiliate links so I get a small % if you buy a book, at no extra cost to you.
