Prioritize Your Mental Health This School Year With These Books
The school year can bring all kinds of stress and distractions into your life. Be prepared on how to navigate the obstacles you could run into while maintain a healthy mindset with these books. Even if your school days are behind you, consider picking up some of these to guide your mental health journey in all stages of life.
INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
The award-winning author of Embrace the Suck and a Navy SEAL combat veteran reveals how to apply a deep focus in the pursuit of your goals—a book for anyone stuck in a personal or professional rut and seeking change.
Brent Gleeson, Navy SEAL combat veteran turned award-winning tech entrepreneur, 5X Inc. 500 CEO, and acclaimed speaker, has faced his fair share of hardship over the years, but nothing quite prepared him for the reckoning that would come when personal tragedy struck, forcing him to evaluate whether or not he was living up to his true potential.
In All In, Gleeson invites you on a journey of extraordinary growth, as he illuminates a new path for pursuing your passions with dedication, determination, and intentionality. No matter what you’ve dedicated yourself to—be it personal or professional—going all in requires unwavering commitment to our goals and values, leaving no room for doubt; it demands an alignment of heart, mind, and soul, anchored by a deep sense of self-awareness around what truly matters. Using the power of Relentless Routines, and featuring dozens of examples and lessons from influential historical and modern figures, Gleeson shows you how to:
- Break bad habits through purposeful routines – install small, non-negotiable daily actions that compound momentum.
- Narrow your focus—pursue goals that actually matter – say no with conviction and pursue the few goals that actually matter.
- Design better systems for optimal results – simple, repeatable processes, and feedback loops that make progress inevitable.
- Embrace discomfort as fuel for growth – use setbacks and obstacles as a training ground to build grit, skill, and confidence.
Our brains are wired for focus. We are designed for it, we crave it, and yet in our current age of overload, we often feel like our minds are bolting from one distraction to the next, with sustained focus always just out of reach. Finding Focus is an empowering guide to reclaiming your most precious resource: your attention. Leading behavioral scientist Dr. Zelana Montminy unveils the science behind focus and distraction, revealing how our hyperconnected reality and the endless flux between digital and physical life fragments our thoughts and diminishes our well-being. Finding Focus equips you with powerful strategies to:
· Silence the noise
· Rewire your brain
· Unleash your potential
· Rediscover yourself
If we can control our attention and be present, if we choose when and how we engage, we have a greater sense of wellbeing, deeper fulfillment, and a clear purpose. Finding Focus invites you to ask the question “Where do I want to direct my focus today?” It is a call to arms for anyone yearning to break free from the grip of distraction and live a life brimming with purpose and connection.
We’re experiencing a human revolution—not a tech revolution
Natalie Nixon, known as the creativity whisperer, helps corporate leaders catalyze creativity’s ROI for more inspired business results. In Move. Think. Rest. she reveals how the best organizations allow the personal and the professional to converge at strategic moments, which often come when we step away from our desks and phones. According to Nixon, it is this MTR framework (pronounced “motor”)—which allows us to make time for strategic thinking, prevent burnout, build leadership resilience and redefine performance for the Imagination Era.
Nixon’s MTR framework (Movement, Thought, and Rest) will change the way you work. And it will do so without demanding that you adhere to a rigid protocol or life-hack the liveliness out of your working hours. When you allow yourself to pause, unabashedly pay attention to your emotions, and allow your intuition to guide you, then you achieve fluency, ease, and even greater productivity. Move. Think. Rest. will help you shift the ways you work and live.
Cynicism is making us sick, but Stanford Psychologist Dr. Jamil Zaki has the cure—a “ray of light for dark days” (Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author).
In 1972, half of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted; by 2018, only a third did. Different generations, genders, religions, and political parties all think human virtue is evaporating. Cynicism is an understandable response to a world full of injustice and inequality. But in many cases, it is misplaced. Dozens of studies find that people fail to realize how kind, generous, and open-minded others really are. Cynical thinking deepens social problems: when we expect the worst in people, we often bring it out of them.
We don’t have to remain stuck in this cynicism trap. Through science and storytelling, Jamil Zaki imparts the secret for beating back cynicism: hopeful skepticism—thinking critically about people and our problems, while honoring and encouraging our strengths. Far from being naïve, hopeful skepticism is a precise way of understanding others that can rebalance our view of human nature and help us build the world we truly want.
Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
Discover the transformative New York Times bestseller—a step-by-step manual for mastering your inner mind for peak performance and living your life to the fullest.
As a professional baseball player, Jim Murphy’s sense of worth revolved around results. He was focused on achievement but also afraid of failure. When he started coaching professional and Olympic athletes, he often encountered the same mindset. He became obsessed with learning how the best in the world performed with poise under pressure.
After years of research, Murphy had a revelatory insight: the pursuit of extraordinary performance and the pursuit of an exceptional life are the same path.
Filled with exercises, techniques, and tools, Inner Excellence trains your heart and mind, showing you how to:
· Develop self-mastery—and let go of what you can’t control.
· Overcome anxiety—and build powerful mental habits.
· Remove mental blocks—and get out of your own way.
· Train your subconscious mind—and release limiting beliefs.
Merging two decades of research and interviews with top athletes and leaders with this training system, Inner Excellence will put you on a path towards a more satisfactory and joyful life.
Amanda Stuckey Dodson prided herself on her ability to maintain a peaceful, clean home: there wasn’t any mess that couldn’t be fixed by plastic organizing bins, spreadsheets, and a can-do attitude. When her life was upended by chronic illness, leaving her unable to maintain her elaborate cleaning systems, she learned that the hardest part wasn’t becoming organized, it was staying organized. Facing an unusually messy home, she knew she needed a different approach.
Tidying the Abyss is a gentle, step-by-step guide to keeping house when everything around you is falling apart. Dodson, a clinical social worker turned professional organizer, advocates for the abandoning of perfection to make room for creative, livable solutions. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of being chronically ill, neurodivergent, or hopeless at home maintenance, you need more than just organizational tips- you need a practice. Within these pages you’ll find guidance for:
- Managing motivation and overwhelm;
- Addressing your basic needs with systems for trash, kitchen & dishes, and laundry;
- Creating order in your most-used spaces (think bedroom and bathroom); and
- Common life complications like pet-related chaos or managing housework as a caregiver or as a parent
WALL STREET JOURNAL BUSINESS BESTSELLER
A BUSINESS BOOK OF THE WEEK AT 800-CEO-READ
Master one of our economy’s most rare skills and achieve groundbreaking results with this “exciting” book (Daniel H. Pink) from an “exceptional” author (New York Times Book Review).
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.
In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
1. Work Deeply
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Media
4. Drain the Shallows
A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Former Navy SEAL commander, White House Fellow, and nonprofit and business leader Mike Hayes offers an inspiring playbook for understanding and achieving your most rewarding and purposeful life.
Mission Driven offers a practical guide for transition points: young people, recent graduates, professionals shifting to new roles, or people shifting to find new balance in their lives. It is divided into two sections: The Long Game (figuring out who you want to be, how you define success, and what kind of impact you’re looking to have in your own life and the world) and The Short Game (moving readers from the who to the how, taking the learnings they’ve gathered in the first half of the book and applying them toward building their lives and finding their next great opportunities).
Its lessons include:
·Not What You Want To Be, But Who You Want to Be
·The Most Powerful Secret I Know: Helping Others Helps Us More
·Getting Comfortable Making Decisions
·Finding Enough In The Ways You Spend Your Time
Whether someone is at the beginning of their journey or, at any stage, looking for more, Mission Driven is a roadmap for discovering what drives you, and a playbook for translating those drives into opportunities. It is a book to help us satisfy our ambitions and our souls, filled with smart, empathetic guidance.