From the best books based on the science of happiness to top happiness books with the most inspirational and powerful personal journeys, here are the top 11 must-read books on happiness.
Searching for the Perfect Book on Happiness?
Are you looking for must-read books about happiness? Or maybe you’re searching for something different to dive into in 2021. If ever there was a time to find happiness, this would be it. Financial stress, loneliness and depression are all on the rise. Add to that the ever-increasing pressures of our modern world, social media, and general information overload it’s no wonder that burnout is also increasing.
So, where can you turn to find your happiness? In this article, we explore the 11 all-time, must-read, best-selling books on happiness. These books not only look at different aspects of human happiness but will explain and teach you the skills needed to find your happiness. So, with a little bit of knowledge and some small changes, we can all achieve a happier, healthier life.
Books Based on the Science of Happiness
1. The Art of Happiness – the Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler
“The very motion of our life is towards happiness.” – Dalai Lama
A beloved classic – the original book on happiness, with new material from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Nearly every time you see him, he’s laughing, or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling. He’s the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, a Nobel Prize winner, and a hugely sought-after speaker and statesman. Why is he so popular? Even after spending only a few minutes in his presence, you can’t help feeling happier.
The Art of Happiness is the ultimate happiness book. Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. He explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life’s obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace.
Based on 2,500 years of Buddhist meditations, mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, The Art of Happiness is a book that crosses the boundaries of traditions to help readers with difficulties common to all human beings. This book has touched countless lives and uplifted spirits around the world.
2. Authentic Happiness – Martin Seligman
An international bestseller, Authentic Happiness launched the revolutionary new science of Positive Psychology—and sparked a debate on the nature of real happiness. According to esteemed psychologist and bestselling author Martin Seligman, happiness is not the result of good genes or luck. Real, lasting happiness comes from focusing on one’s personal strengths rather than weaknesses—and working with them to improve all aspects of one’s life.
Using practical exercises, brief tests, and a dynamic website program, Seligman shows readers how to identify their highest virtues and use them in ways they haven’t yet considered. Accessible and proven, Authentic Happiness is the most powerful work of popular psychology in years.
3. The Happiness Advantage – 7 Principles that Fuel Success and Performance at Work. – Shawn Achor
“Happiness is a Choice, happiness spreads, and happiness is an advantage.” – Shawn Achor
We’ve been taught that if we work hard, we will be successful, and then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, get a raise, 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. This discovery has been repeatedly supported by research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the world.
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 at large companies like UBS and KPMG—to share strategies for how to fix this broken formula in The Happiness Advantage.
Using 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, and ultimately more successful at work. A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage at its core is about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.
4. Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert
“What makes humans different from every other animal is that they think about the future.” – Daniel Gilbert
Bringing to life scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioural economics, this bestselling book reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there.
In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. With great insight and accessible writing, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.
5. The How of Happiness – Sonja Lyubomirsky
“You can change your personal capacity for happiness.” – Sonja Lyubomirsky
Drawing on her own ground-breaking research with thousands of men and women, research psychologist and University of California professor of psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky has pioneered a detailed yet easy-to-follow plan to increase happiness in our day-to-day lives — in the short term and over the long term.
The How of Happiness is a different kind of happiness book, one that offers a comprehensive guide to understanding what happiness is, and isn’t, and what can be done to bring us all closer to the happy life we envision for ourselves. Using more than a dozen uniquely formulated happiness-increasing strategies, The How of Happiness offers a new and potentially life-changing way to understand our innate potential for joy and happiness as well as our ability to sustain it in our lives.
6. Happier – Tal Ben-Shahar
“This fine book shimmers with a rare brand of good sense that is imbedded in scientific knowledge about how to increase happiness. It is easy to see how this is the backbone of the most popular course at Harvard today.” – Martin E. P. Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness
Can you learn to be happy? YES . . . according to the teacher of Harvard University’s most popular and life-changing course. One out of every five Harvard students has lined up to hear Tal Ben-Shahar’s insightful and inspiring lectures on that ever-elusive state: Happiness.
Grounded in the revolutionary “positive psychology” movement, Ben-Shahar ingeniously combines scientific studies, scholarly research, self-help advice, and spiritual enlightenment. He weaves them together into a set of principles that you can apply to your daily life. Once you open your heart and mind to Happier ’s thoughts, you will feel more fulfilled, more connected . . . and, yes, happier.
7. The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
This book has been translated into 30 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. Eckhart says he receives millions of letters from people who say the book has transformed their lives – including Oprah Winfrey, Meg Ryan and Cher. Yet, in true cynic style, Eckhart admits that many people still simply don’t get it, in fact, Time Magazine wrote: “But the book, awash in spiritual mumbo jumbo (“The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind”), will be unhelpful for those looking for practical advice.”
Cynics aside, this book has become a classic for all those looking to find joy in life. To make the journey into the Now, Tolle says we need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Through Tolle’s book, we learn to move rapidly into a significantly higher altitude where we breathe a lighter air. We become connected to the indestructible essence of our Being, “The eternal, ever present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.”
Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle uses simple language and an easy question and answer format to guide us. A word-of-mouth phenomenon since its first publication, The Power of Now is one of those rare books with the power to create an experience in readers, one that can radically change their lives for the better.
Happiness Books with Powerful Personal Journeys
8. The Happiness Project – Gretchen Rubin
One rainy afternoon, while riding a city bus, Gretchen Rubin asked herself, “What do I want from life, anyway?” She answered, “I want to be happy”—yet she spent no time thinking about her happiness.
In a flash, she decided to dedicate a year to a happiness project. The result? One of the most thoughtful and engaging works on happiness to have emerged from the recent explosion of interest in the subject.
The Happiness Project synthesizes the wisdom of the ages with current scientific research, as Rubin brings readers along on her year to greater happiness. In fact, Rubin’s “happiness project” no longer describes just a book or a blog; it’s a movement. Happiness Project groups, where people meet to discuss their happiness projects, have sprung up across America—and across the world. Rights have been sold in more than 35 countries. Hundreds of book groups have discussed the book; professors, teachers, psychiatrists, and clergy assign it. The book has spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller lists, and The Happiness Project was even an answer on the game-show Jeopardy!
9. 10% Happier – Dan Harris
“I wrote a memoir about a fidgety, sceptical newsman who reluctantly becomes a meditator to deal with his issues – and in the process of publishing it, I occasionally, to my embarrassment, found myself failing to practice what I preach. I was kind of like a dog that soils the rug, and the universe kept shoving my face into it.”
In 2014, Dan Harris published his memoir 10% Happier. The book—which describes his reluctant embrace of meditation after a drug problem, an on-air freak-out, and an unplanned “spiritual” journey—became an instant bestseller and Dan, to his own surprise, became a public evangelist for mindfulness.
10% Happier is a spiritual book written for – and by – someone who would otherwise never read a spiritual book. It is both a deadly serious and seriously funny look at mindfulness and meditation as the next big public health revolution.
10. Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert
Eat, Pray, Love is a journey around the world, a quest for spiritual enlightenment, and a story for anyone who has battled with divorce, depression, and heartbreak.
It’s 3 a.m., and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her 30s, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered, and realises it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion, and balance.
So, she travels to Rome, where she learns Italian from handsome, brown-eyed identical twins and gains 25 pounds; to an ashram in India, where she finds that enlightenment entails getting up in the middle of the night to scrub the temple floor; and to Bali, where a toothless medicine man of indeterminate age offers her a new path to peace: simply sit still and smile. And slowly, happiness begins to creep up on her…
11. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World – the Dalai Lama & Archbishop Desmond Tutu
An instant New York Times bestseller. Two spiritual giants. Five days. One timeless question. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet.
In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu travelled to the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness’s eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life’s inevitable suffering?
They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy.
This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecedented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.
