Positive Psychology Books

Authentic Happiness
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph. D.

AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS is the first book to examine the mechanisms by which mentally healthy people become happy, and how happy people become very happy. Martin E. Seligman is the international leader of the Positive Psychology Movement. His first trade book, the international bestseller More... LEARNED OPTIMISM, greatly influenced the way people thought about mental health by bringing the concepts of cognitive psychology to a mass audience. AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS is an even bigger ground-breaker. It represents the first time any scientist has placed value in the study not only of mental illness, but of 'mental wellness'. It's not about curing one's ills, but about exercising one's strengths and virtues in order to achieve what Seligman terms 'authentic happiness'. The life-changing lesson of AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS is that, by assessing the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us and achieve new and lasting levels of genuine contentment and joy.

Happier: learn the secrets to daily joy and lasting fulfilment
by Tal Ben-Shahar

Can You Learn to Be Happy?
YES . . . according to the teacher of Harvard University's most popular and life-changing course. One out of every five Harvard students has lined up to hear Tal Ben-Shahar's insightful and inspiring lectures on that ever-elusive state: HAPPINESS.
HOW?Grounded in the revolutionary "positive psychology" movement, Ben-Shahar ingeniously combines scientific studies, scholarly research, self-help advice, and spiritual enlightenment. He weaves them together into a set of principles that you can apply to your daily life. Once you open your heart and mind to ...

Happiness
by Richard Layard

In this landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe, and Japan. What is going on?

The How of Happiness
By Sonja Lyubomirksy

Drawing on her own groundbreaking research with thousands of men and women, research psychologist and University of California professor of psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky has pioneered a detailed yet easy-to-follow plan to increase happiness in our day-to-day lives — in the short term and over the long term.

The How of Happiness is a different kind of happiness book, one that offers a comprehensive guide to understanding what happiness is, and isn't, and what can be done to bring us all closer to the happy life we envision for ourselves. Using more than a dozen uniquely formulated happiness-increasing strategies, The How of Happiness offers a new and potentially life-changing way to understand our innate potential for joy and happiness as well as our ability to sustain it in our lives.

The Pursuit of Perfect
by Tal Ben-Shahar

Do you wrestle with maintaining happiness in your daily life? Does the success rat race keep you stressed? Or maybe you just think that perfectionism is attainable when you work at the right things hard enough for long enough. If this touches a chord for you and you are ready to consider the possibility of adopting a new way of thinking about your life, read The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D.

Covering topics like failure, success, reality, love, and work, the author makes a compelling case for seeking to become a recovered perfectionist — as he has. Through a combination of personal anecdotes, extensive research, and numerous soul-searching exercises, Ben-Shahar leads readers to their own personal discovery of subtle perfectionist traits or to tackle the stronghold of the perfectionism trap.