Notable Psychology & Self-Help Books of 2025

What are the newly published books on psychology and self-help that I should be aware of in 2025?

While 2025 is yet to have a break-out commercial hit on the scale of Mel Robbin’s 2024 mega-selling, somewhat self-explanatory The Let Them Theory, or James Clear’s paean to small but sustainable changes, Atomic Habits—which continues to haunt bestseller lists seven(!) years after publication—it has nevertheless seen several new and noteworthy books about the human mind.

Daniel Levitin’s Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power—a follow-up to his 2006 hit, This is Your Brain on Music—offers an overview of the potential healing properties of music, and its apparent ability to soothe the symptoms of conditions as diverse as Alzheimers’ Disease and chronic pain. Music As Medicine was featured on our site earlier this year when it was shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Book Prize, which celebrates the best popular science books of the year. As the botanist Sandra Knapp, chair of the judges, explained: “One of the real messages that comes from this is that there is no one-size-fits-all. Music as medicine is highly personal. Something that works for you might not work for your wife, your brother, your sister, your child. There are certain things about every person’s brain that work in particular logical and electrical shapes. So how this work depends on the individual.”

Talk: The Science of Communication and the Art of Being Ourselves, by the Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks, is a warm and suitably conversational self-help book that delves into the underlying structures of dialogue in search of small improvements that might nevertheless make profound impacts on our attempts to connect, bond and collaborate with others. Talk summarises studies of parole hearings, speed dates, and dozens of other human encounters, drawing from Wood Brooks’ oversubscribed course ‘How to talk gooder in business and in life’, sharing her insights with those who can’t—or don’t want to—undertake a MBA.

Those sound interesting. What other psychology and self-help books have caught your eye in 2025?

Here at Five Books, we have a soft spot for the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series from Princeton University Press, in which timeless advice from the Classical greats is collected by theme and offered in new translation. In August, they released How to Have Willpower: An Ancient Guide to Not Giving In, which brings together Plutarch’s essay ‘On Dysōpia’ (for which translator Michael Fontaine offers the alternate title ‘How to Resist Pressure’) and Prudentius’s poetic allegory ‘Psychomachia’ (or, ‘How to Slay Your Demons’), in which temptation is represented as a war within in the human soul. A radically different approach to that of popular psychology, but you may find counsel in these ancient meditations on enduring human difficulties.

There is also a cluster of new books about creativity by contemporary writers that you may find will help you in your own creative practice. Suleika Jaouad, author of the deeply moving memoir Between Two Kingdoms, returns with The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life,  a tribute and guide to the art of journaling, both as therapy and art form. The book draws from her popular Substack, The Isolation Journals, which started in lockdown and in which she “reached out to the most remarkable people I knew, asking them to contribute an essay and an accompanying prompt.” Contributors include celebrity authors like Salman Rushdie, George Saunders and Elizabeth Gilbert, as well as cancer survivors and convicts.

The poet Maggie Smith published Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, a book of practical, craft-focused advice generated over a twenty-year teaching career. And, in the UK, the popular newspaper columnist and novelist India Knight offers her take on how to apply one’s style and taste to interiors with Home: How To Love It, Live In It, And Find Joy In It.

And perhaps one more? A wild card?

Sure! In Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away, Coltan Scrivner—described as “a behavioural scientist and horror entertainment producer,” an unholy combination if ever I’ve heard one—explores the very human fascination with serial killers, slasher flicks, and everything that goes bump in the night in this lively work of popular science. Spooky stories and horror movies are a manifestation, he argues, of an evolutionarily-driven psychological function that prepares us for real danger. Steven Pinker praised it as “A fascinating examination of a feature of human nature that all of us have, most of us deplore (at least in others), and few of us understand.” A fun and surprisingly illuminating read for those who love to be scared witless—and would like to know why.