L et’s face it, most of us want to be healthier, slimmer and more successful in achieving our goals. We want to earn more, save more, while all the while prioritising relationships with our family and friends. Fortunately, our knowledge of how to achieve those goals is improving, as science increases our knowledge on everything from how the gut works to how to make good decisions.
Here’s a selection of books about self-improvement that have appeared on Five Books , recommended by our expert interviewees. Some are classics that have stood the test of time, others are based on very recent scientific research:
“In a way, looking at diet is a bit like looking at smoking and cancer; it’s one of the risk factors for disease that hasn’t had that much attention paid to it, other than knowing that it was quite important, but also difficult to measure properly” Read more...
Diet Books
Tim Spector ,
Scientist
“The seven habits are so great, that you shouldn’t ignore them. He talks about the ‘circle of concern’ and the ‘circle of influence.’ The circle of concern is anything that impacts your life, which could be things like the weather. You obviously can’t influence the weather, but there are other things you can influence. Effective people focus on the circle of influence. Another thing he says is that you’ve got to ‘act or be acted upon.’ This was a classic for me. If you don’t become proactive in moving towards what you want, what will happen is that other people who have goals will simply recruit you. You’ll end up working for someone else’s plan.” Read more...
The best books on Overcoming Insecurities
Robert Kelsey ,
Entrepreneurs & Business People
Why We Sleep is a bestselling book about the vital importance of sleep to human functioning. It's by sleep scientist Matthew Walker , Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of its Center for Human Sleep Science. We neglect the importance of sleep at our peril, he warns: "relative to the recommended seven to nine hours, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span."
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Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia has been a huge bestseller. The book makes a strong case for the importance of preventative care—or rather what he calls 'proactive' medicine—as opposed to just dealing with health problems as they arise. He emphasizes the idea of lifespan versus 'healthspan'—living not only longer but in good shape. If you don't have the time to read the whole book, a key piece of advice: "Exercise is by far the most potent longevity 'drug'."
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“John Yudkin was British academic who made up his mind that the reason people were getting fatter in the 1960s and 1970s was due to our increased use of sugar in foods, and the increased processing of foods. If Yudkin had won the global argument, we’d be eating different food today. He was ahead of his time.” Read more...
Diet Books
Tim Spector ,
Scientist
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken is an enlightening book about the dangers of eating food that has had too much done to it—a.k.a. ultra-processed food or UPF. As he explains: "If it's wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn't usually find in a standard home kitchen, it's UPF." While we all know that it's healthier to eat an apple than a Pringle, van Tulleken makes a good case as to why we're so attracted to ultra-processed foods and why they are potentially so damaging to our health.
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“It’s a book that crystallised a handful of really deep and true and powerful insights about how to organise your work within time—the kind of insights that are so fundamental now that Allen probably doesn’t get all the credit he should get, because they just seem like givens…Probably the most penetrating one is that a lot of the stress that we associate with feeling overwhelmed with work is actually the stress of using our brains to keep track of and remember everything that’s on our plate. It’s not necessarily that there’s too much to do, but that our brains are badly designed for storing lists of what to do” Read more...
The best books on Time Management
Oliver Burkeman ,
Journalist
“The title of the book takes me back to high school. Who was popular? Where are those people now? In this book, Prinstein discusses and presents research on our innate and universal need for status and likability. When people say they don’t care about status or when they claim indifference to what other people think of them, it sounds cool; however, we sense that it isn’t true. It is part of human nature to care about how others regard us. Prinstein writes that popularity is based on likability as well as status, but that it’s difficult to simultaneously convey both these characteristics. Research on social perception shows that we evaluate other people according to these two fundamental dimensions of social perception.” Read more...
The best books on Making A Good Impression
Övül Sezer ,
“I think reflecting on things, just being able to think about things in an open-ended way, is increasingly essential for many of us in the jobs that we do. And Deep Work is partly about how to safeguard that kind of time in your schedule.” Read more...
The best books on Time Management
Oliver Burkeman ,
Journalist
“We tend to see ourselves as not unlike rats, creatures driven by the short-term reward centres in our brains. But what Gilbert does fantastically well is to argue that, actually, humans are better at long-term thinking than almost any other animal. A chimpanzee may strip off the leaves from a branch to make a tool to poke into a termite hole, but that chimp will never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. Yet this is exactly what humans do.” Read more...
The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking
Roman Krznaric ,
Philosopher
“Sonja Lyubomirsky has done the best studies on how simple interventions, simple things you can do, on a daily or weekly basis, have measurable effects on your happiness. So if your goal is to actually raise your happiness level, then this is the best book to read – it has very concrete suggestions of what you can do…The How of Happiness I would describe as the state of the art in evidence-based positive psychology.” Read more...
The best books on Happiness
Jonathan Haidt ,
Psychologist
“I chose this as the first one because it doesn’t really take a clinical approach to anxiety. It very much positions anxiety as something common that lots and lots of people experience. I think that’s an extremely helpful way of thinking about it. Jeffers also makes the point that, whatever it is that you’re worrying about, ultimately all fears or worries are about the fear that you won’t be able to cope if something bad happens. After all, if you believe that you can handle whatever might go wrong, you’d have nothing to worry about. I found that a really interesting concept.” Read more...
The best books on Anxiety
Lucy Foulkes ,
Psychologist
“If you feel insecure, you feel insecure about certain things, and those insecurities will be triggered by certain incidents that act as reminders. That triggering is going to happen, it’s set in your brain. He calls them ‘neural hijackings’—that’s the key phrase. The amygdala has jumped in and said. ‘there’s an emergency here,’ and that overrides what Goleman calls the thinking brain. That’s what’s absolutely crucial to insecure people. It’s what they can’t lose, no matter what the claims of all those self-help books.” Read more...
The best books on Overcoming Insecurities
Robert Kelsey ,
Entrepreneurs & Business People
“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff is almost a self-help book for people who are put off by self-help books. Out of these five, it’s the one you’d probably find in the downstairs loo. It’s very readable, all these nice 300-word bits. It’s brilliant for people with low self-esteem because he really does throw it at you, how you should just reconsider the world.” Read more...
The best books on Overcoming Insecurities
Robert Kelsey ,
Entrepreneurs & Business People
Saul Perlmutter, Robert MacCoun and John Campbell
🎯 A bestselling book on Five Books in 2024
In Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense a Nobel-prize winning physicist, a philosopher and a social scientist together give a clear, accessible and enlightening guide to the tools of thinking that make science work. This is a brilliant book by eminent thinkers in their fields who are also superb communicators. It's a really enjoyable read and a great book for anyone who wants to think more clearly about evidence, argument, reason and the need for a degree of intellectual humility.
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“Quitting should be viewed as a skill. This book showed me that it is a superpower to know when to walk away. I believe I have learned to recognize when it is time to quit. I think we get better at this as the years go by. As a society, we celebrate not giving up. We revere perseverance and determination. While these are important values, I believe that we should also celebrate quitting. Even though quitting may not make the most favorable impression and it’s difficult to admit that we were wrong, doing so may set us on the path to happiness.” Read more...
The best books on Making A Good Impression
Övül Sezer ,
“It’s a wonderful read because it doesn’t presuppose any background knowledge of economics or finance…It’s had so much staying power. It was written in the 1970s, a bestseller when it came out, and it’s still a bestseller now. I recommend it to my MBA students today because it’s just a wonderful introduction to the field of finance. At the same time, it provides some very sensible advice for investors about how to manage their own money.” Read more...
The Best Finance Books
Andrew W Lo ,
Economist
“The very first self-help book for married couples from a systems perspective. It really is a nice self-help book for regular people. But the question is: if you really want to change things do you want to be told what you already know, which clearly hasn’t been working, or do you want to see things with fresh eyes, even though none of us is comfortable with what’s unfamiliar? The Don Jackson book will help you see that there are things going on with communication in your relationship that you never realised.” Read more...
The best books on Relationship Therapy
Mira Kirshenbaum ,
Psychologist
“He talks about greatness, and how to learn it from other people: to look around your sport world, the coaches and athletes at every level, Olympic, pro, national, local, and notice what you like or admire in those people. He says, if you can notice some of these elements, that must mean you have some of those elements in yourself, that you could develop. That’s a big message he sends.” Read more...
The best books on Sports Psychology
Bill Cole ,
Sportspersons & Sportswriter
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