How To Make Your Life Exciting Again

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg draws on extensive research to explore how habits develop into automatic behaviors that influence personal lives, businesses, and communities. He explains why unhealthy habits are notoriously difficult to break and provides a practical framework to help you understand and change any habit.

In this guide, we’ve restructured Duhigg’s key ideas to focus on how your habits form and what you can do to change them. We’ve also compared and contrasted each key concept with updated research on habit formation and expanded on Duhigg’s advice with actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and psychologists.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz contends that the vast array of choices presented to us leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action, recommends we learn how to better navigate our choices, from groceries to health insurance.

Schwartz’s work combines psychology, economics, and his personal experiences. In this guide, we’ll examine the types of choices we face, the challenges of making choices, how excessive choices make these challenges more difficult, and how to live with expanded choice. Our guide adds scientific and cultural context to Schwartz’s ideas, plus updates on how choice has grown since the book’s publication.

If you often find yourself needing to duck out of parties early, covering your ears at loud concerts, or crying at sentimental commercials on television, you might be a highly sensitive person. In The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron explains the trait of high sensitivity through case studies, personal experiences, and years of research. Aron is a psychotherapist, an author of multiple books on high sensitivity, and a highly sensitive person herself.

In our guide, we’ll explore what high sensitivity is and where it comes from, as well as the strengths and challenges associated with it. We’ll also discuss how you can manage your sensitivity in your personal, social, and professional life and how to cope with any negative symptoms you may experience from it. We’ll also add advice from other experts on how to tap into your abilities as an HSP and manage its challenges, and we’ll contextualize Aron’s advice in the broader field of psychology and social science.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz contends that the vast array of choices presented to us leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action, recommends we learn how to better navigate our choices, from groceries to health insurance.

Schwartz’s work combines psychology, economics, and his personal experiences. In this guide, we’ll examine the types of choices we face, the challenges of making choices, how excessive choices make these challenges more difficult, and how to live with expanded choice. Our guide adds scientific and cultural context to Schwartz’s ideas, plus updates on how choice has grown since the book’s publication.

In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown—a popular public speaker, bestselling author, and professional social worker—provides a guide to the many emotions and mental states that people feel. Brown says many people can only recognize and name three emotions: happiness, sadness, and anger. This lack of vocabulary blocks us from being able to fully experience and share our feelings with others.

Atlas of the Heart provides descriptions and explanations of 87 emotions, along with the situations where you’re likely to encounter them. With a deeper understanding of emotions, you’ll be able to talk about them more openly and accurately, and thus form deeper connections with the people around you.

This guide provides actionable advice for handling negative emotions and embracing positive ones. It will also provide some biological and psychological background for why we have certain feelings and why those feelings are so powerful.

We take it as a given that we want to be happy, but how do we achieve happiness, or even define it? Derren Brown suggests that the answers can be found in the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers for whom the quest for a happy, well-lived life was a practical problem to be solved. Brown says that by adopting a philosophy based on those of the Stoics and Epicureans, we can lead thoughtful, balanced, and more well-rounded lives.

As a magician, Brown isn’t a stereotypical self-help guru. However, his understanding of how stories misdirect us led to his belief that we can reshape our own narratives to be happy in the here and now while maintaining a positive outlook toward our own mortality. This guide will examine Brown’s definition of happiness and the philosophical building blocks he claims can achieve it. We’ll compare Brown’s ideas to those of modern psychology and contrast his views with those of other happiness experts, some of whom he argues directly against.

In Who Will Cry When You Die?, self-help guru Robin Sharma wants to know if you’ll feel happy with the life you’ve led when you’re on your deathbed. Sharma thinks that most people lead lives they’ll regret because they focus on the wrong things—success, money, fame—and none of the right things—family, community, love. If you think you might have end-of-life regrets, Sharma provides a collection of pithy life lessons and advice to help you seize control of your life and turn it into one you’ll look back on fondly.

We’ve grouped those lessons into eight broader tactics that will help you cope with adversity, build self-discipline, spread kindness, and more. You’ll come away with actionables you can implement daily to make your life better and background on the philosophies, ideologies, and science on which Sharma draws.

Defining moments are the small, meaningful moments that make our lives richer and give us fond memories to look back on. In The Power of Moments, brothers Chip and Dan Heath break down the elements of defining moments and teach you how to use them to make everyday experiences meaningful and memorable. You’ll learn how to elevate moments with delightful and deliberately random surprise, guide others to transformative truths, multiply your moments of celebration on your journey to a goal, and deepen your connections with the people around you.

In this guide, we’ll explore the psychological phenomena and developments of human nature that shape the Heaths’ ideas. We’ll also discuss ways you can meaningfully use the elements of defining moments in a range of settings and with an eye toward our rapidly changing and ever more tech-dependent world.

Happiness is more than just a positive state of mind—it’s a state of being that enhances your health, strengthens your relationships, and fuels both your creativity and productivity. However, though many people are aware of these benefits and try to feel happier, their efforts often fail to create consistent, long-term happiness.

In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky—psychology professor and recipient of the Templeton Positive Psychology Prize—addresses this challenge. Drawing from her extensive research as well as insights from leading scientists in the positive psychology field, she unpacks the factors that fuel happiness and provides practical strategies to nurture and sustain it.

In this guide, we’ll explore Lyubomirsky's thoughts on what contributes to long-term happiness and how you can amplify it in your life. Additionally, we’ll supplement her ideas with psychological research and actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and practitioners.