At the turn of the year, many of us take the opportunity to think about our lives—how they are going, and how we hope to live them in future. We asked Avram Alpert, author of The Good-Enough Life, to recommend five of the best self-help books of 2022 that might help our bids for self-improvement; his choices remind us that self-help is not only about life-hacks and diets, but about bringing the world more in line with our ideals.

Lockdowns have forced many of us to pause and consider the way we are living our lives, says the podcaster and bestselling author Emma Gannon. Here she highlights five of the best self help books published in 2021, with a special focus on creativity and setting better boundaries to safeguard our time and energy.

Feeling stressed and overwhelmed? You are not alone. Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, selects some of the best books on time management—including two classic how-to guides, plus several texts focused on helping you decide how you really want to spend your finite time on this planet.

Feeling anxiety is a natural part of being a human being, but for some people it can cause terrible mental and physical anguish and prevents them from leading happy and fulfilling lives. Lucy Foulkes, a psychologist at University College London, talks us through books that can help with anxiety.

We asked Oliver Burkeman, the Guardian writer and author of The Antidote, to select the best self help books published in 2020. His recommended titles include spiritual guidance for the age of doomscrolling, a philosophy of failure, and practical advice for those working from home for the first time.

If you feel like you lose whole days to procrastination or indecision—or simply have too much to do!—you probably want advice on how improve your productivity. We spoke to David Allen, creator of the perennial bestseller Getting Things Done, about the best books on the subject: why we waste time, and what we can change to be more productive.

Two decades ago Andy Puddicombe was ordained as a Buddhist monk. Now back in lay life, he tries to teach the benefits of meditation to the rest of us—most notably through the Headspace app, but also by writing books. Here he chooses some of the books that inspired him, from Japanese poetry to Tibetan philosophy. Not all are meditation books but they are his “old favorites.”

Elizabeth Day, author of How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learnt from Things Going Wrong, explains how the road to success truly is paved with failure—and why we must learn to deal with it better.

Can we cultivate qualities like grit, tenacity and kindness? How about habits of the successful—hard work, perseverance and productivity? Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit and founder of the Character Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, recommends five books, including a title that graces every CEO’s shelf.

The self-help genre is sometimes dismissed as simplistic or over-earnest. But, at their best, self-help books offer powerful insights into how to live. Oliver Burkeman, the Guardian columnist and author of The Antidote, recommends five of the best self-help books published in 2019.

To reach your full potential you must put as much effort into building mental resilience as you do into work or training, advises high-performance psychologist Dr Michael Gervais. Here, he selects five titles to help you find the right mindset—whether you dream of sporting stardom, artistic achievement or business success.

Most of us want to be happy, and yet it’s hard to achieve. Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of  the classic The Happiness Hypothesis, talks us through five books, old and new, to better understand happiness.

The contemporary historian and educationalist Antony Seldon discusses his selection of books on how to be happy.

In a world where many people feel frazzled by the pace of life, can mindfulness help? What’s the best way of practising it? Or is it just a fad? Philosopher Nigel Warburton talks to mindfulness expert, Tessa Watt, about the best books on mindfulness.

If you’ve stepped inside a school recently, you’ve probably heard teachers talking about the importance of  a ‘growth mindset.’ Here psychologist Carol Dweck, who pioneered research into this key concept, explains what it’s all about and recommends books—other than her own—that shed light on it.

Most self-help books promise to take you from 0 to 100, but many people reading them are starting at minus 100. The author of What’s Stopping You? picks books that helped him come to grips with his own insecurities.

The author who gave us The Happiness Project passes on tips for happier living, with a little help from Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin and a nun with humour on her mind.

In times of political or personal turmoil, there’s a tendency to seek solace in stripping back life to its bare essentials. Minimalist thought is threaded through Stoicism and Zen Buddhism; absence and space became major preoccupations of 1960s US art. Kyle Chayka, the art critic and author of The Longing for Less, recommends five books on the philosophy that underpins the present fad for minimalist self-help.

The CEO of iOpener, a human asset management consultancy, explains how you can increase happiness and thus productivity in the workplace. She picks five essential reads for bosses and employees.

Since the publication of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) in Victorian Britain, self-help has become a billion dollar industry—and its influence is even felt in the contemporary novel, says Harvard literary scholar Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion, a new history of the rise of self-help narratives in modern literature.