As I’ve mentioned before, one way The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up changed my life was that by having my home in order I could concentrate on other things in life that interest me.
My eyes were also opened to the fact that I held the keys to changing my life.
Below are three books that I’ve read since then that are not just good but great and have changed how I see things:
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke
I first stumbled on Dr. Lembke’s work on dopamine and how it affects us during an online talk she gave about the subject. Eye-opening.
In the book, she explains how pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions. Our brain likes balance so if there is too much pleasure, it will start balancing it.
“The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain.”
The book explains what addiction is. We can be addicted to many different things: shopping, social media, chocolate, or even romance novels. What is addictive to one person may not be addictive to another person. The book also acknowledges how in the modern world it has become more and more difficult for us to avoid temptations and gives suggestions on how to keep things balanced.
Dr. Lembke has given multiple talks about the subject.
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
This book is old and for years I assumed it must be irrelevant by now. So even though many people recommended it I didn’t read it until last year. I wish I had read it years ago!
This book is timeless:
“Winning friends begins with friendliness.”
“You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
The concepts of this book are simple, yet they still need to be told.
The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World by David Robson
This is a mindblowing, fascinating book.
It is a well-written, scientifically-backed book about how much our expectations impact every part of our lives. How our own beliefs shape our reality.
For example, when we perceive a meal to be “a diet meal” we will feel less satisfied afterward than when we eat a meal that we perceive to be indulgent, even if both meals have the same amount of calories.
Every chapter of the book covers a different aspect of life and how our expectations affect it: from how we view our health and stress levels, to how we view our age and willpower; negative expectations bring negative outcomes and positive expectations bring positive outcomes.
Read this book!