5 Books That Helped Me Become a Better Person, Actually
Help For My self
Whenever I think about the self-help genre, my gut sinks a bit.
It’s when I see the hundredth book about getting more out of the same 24 hours Bill Gates and Elon Musk have that I start to wonder: What does it mean to help yourself these days?
Does it mean to get more stuff done? Does it mean to girl-boss your way through the corporate ladder? Does it mean to live your life brazenly, take every chance you get, but take no prisoners?
I just… I don’t know. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel a little sad that so many of today’s self-helps books seemed to be focused on the following things:
Achieving status and/or success (usually in one’s career, finances, and other external conditions of being).
Increasing productivity.
Establishing steadfast routines and optimizing some aspect of your life.
“Cracking the code” to all things from weight loss to being socially accepted to corporate America.
These books usually have some tongue-in-cheek title, example task lists, sample charts to track habits, and are usually recommended by productivity gurus on YouTube.
Of course, not all books in the self-help genre are like this, but enough are to a point that it’s noticeable, and it just makes me kinda sad. It tells me that so much of our culture prioritizes external values and socially-constructed prestige. It tells me that we’re quicker to want to help others make more money, earn status, or get more done than we are to help people actually love and have compassion for themselves.
While I wish the self-help genre as a whole wasn’t as focused on these things, I still want to make clear that I’m not doubting the very real knowledge, experience, and wisdom these writers have to share. I know these books have a legitimate educational and even artistic merit. These books are written and thoroughly researched by people with the qualifications, accolades, and first-hand experience to write on such things. I’m also not judging anyone’s unique quest and right to help themselves. And lastly, I don’t doubt that these books do their jobs; they help millions of people all over the world.
It’s just that so many these books never seem to offer me what I want.
Help.
I want help for my self—not for myself, or my Self.
Does that make sense?
My self needs needs mental, spiritual, and emotional help. My self needs help achieving quiet, peace, resolve, happiness. My self needs help understanding that there really is not a Self, or things that I need to get or achieve for myself to be happy.
I need help doing the deep work it takes to understand that true happiness and peace comes from within. Not from more money, achieving more, or climbing higher.
I hope this doesn’t come off as sounding “un-ambitious.”
On the contrary, all this deep work to achieve true inner peace is one of the most ambitious things I’ve ever done. I’ve had to undo years of trauma-responses, sit with my pain, test myself at every corner, and think deeply about why I’d react to things the way I did.
That’s not exactly easy for anybody who thinks the world of their problems.
But I knew I had to do those things.
I knew that getting my mental, spiritual, and emotional houses in order would be what would actually help me achieve all those other things (success in my career, increased productivity, etc.). My focus had to be on becoming a better person first, not the other way around.
Becoming skinnier, becoming wealthier, becoming more productive—these weren’t the things that were going to make me happy. Being genuinely and truly happy first, though, would help me live this life a little bit better and, as an added benefit, help me achieve all those other external things.
One thing’s still certain: this journey toward inner peace and happiness will never end. There’s no chart or check list that I can use to track my progress. I’ll never master peace and happiness, but I have to try everything I can to at least recognize those states of being and always strive for that.
Reading the books in this list have helped me do that. These books have helped shaped my understanding of peace and have given me sound advice and doctrines I try to live by. Since reading them, I feel like I’ve become a happier, calmer, more peaceful, and overall better human.
Hopefully, they can do the same for you.
The 5 Books That Helped My self
*This list is not presented in any particular order/ranking. All works in this list are non-fiction.
1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Description: Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. Meditations is a series of his notes, writings, and meditations on life as his own source of self-improvement and reflection. In it, he examines compassion, Nature, justice, internal peace, dealing with strife, and the transience of life. It’s organized into 12 books, each containing a few short passages and personal recordings on these subjects.
What it helped me with: This book came at a pretty emotionally catastrophic time in my life. I was constantly high-strung, being pulled in a million different directions by a million different people, and it rendered me detached from my own life and angrier than I’d ever like to admit. Meditations helped me overcome much of my emotional unrest and imparted wisdom that would help me avoid that kind of turmoil in the future. It helped me to simply accept and have compassion for my life, all its transgressions, and all those in it. It laid out so simply how to deal with sorrow, anger, fear, people who wrong me. This is, of course, a work in progress, but Meditations truly helped me understand that an eased state of mind and inner peace is obtainable—even in the throes of suffering and hardship.
You can read my full post on Meditations here.
2. 10% Happier by Dan Harris
Description: Dan Harris, an ABC news anchor (and self-help skeptic), ignores all signs of his stress until one day, he has a panic attack on national TV. Cue his deeply personal, at-times hilarious, and sincere journey into understanding what might have led to this. 10% Happier is an account of this odyssey, his experience with various self-help methods, and how he ultimately discovers meditation and mindfulness to be the most effective ingredients to a truer, albeit small, sense of happiness.
What it helped me with: This book helped me become a more open and willing participant to my own happiness. How funny is it that we so often hold our own happiness at gunpoint? That we believe trying different things to become happy is somehow embarrassing or goes against “logic”? 10% Happier helped me realize how silly I’ve been to ever hold my happiness hostage to my own skepticism and distrust of others who’ve claimed they found a way to be a happier and better person. It helped get over myself and be more open to getting that 10% of happiness.
Harris writes from a perspective we all know too well: the overworked, overzealous, panicked, anxious, restless, and fearful individual. Because of that, this book also helped me contextualize a lot of my own mindfulness journey and realize that I’m not the only one who suffers from an overactive mind and anxiety. It helped me understand that these anxious voices in our minds can be helped, and that we aren’t at the mercy of our fears so long as we try—in spite of our own skepticism—to remedy them.
3. Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Description: Man’s Search For Meaning is Frankl’s account of his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, and how—despite some of man’s worst atrocities and cruelties of mankind—someone can find hope and a meaning to life.
What it helped me with: This book humbled me. It grabbed me by the shoulders and shook some sense into me in a way that I and so many others like me sometimes need. When you are reading about the tragic and vile and insurmountable suffering someone feels as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, it makes your bad day at work feel like a fucking cakewalk.
What a privilege it is to feel pain in our homes. To cry inside of a bathtub we fill with bubbles. To eat our favorite foods to bring us comfort. To fall asleep in our beds with slight headaches, only thinking of worst-case scenarios.
Whenever I’m having a particularly “rough” day, I think back to what I learned from this book and feel grateful to be exactly who I am, where I am, with the problem that I have. Whenever I get in those moods where I just don’t see the point anymore or feel completely hopeless about a situation, I remember this man and his heart.
This is a book that truly means the phrase, “It could be so much worse.”
And yes, I know everyone’s suffering is valid, but what this book specifically helps with is putting our suffering into perspective. It reminds me of how small and inconsequential my problems are, and because of this reminder, I’m able to be a happier, better person.
It also doesn’t come as a surprise that this book helped me become a more compassionate person in general, too—specifically when it comes to people’s backgrounds. Not that I wasn’t before, but it reminds me of the real hate and prejudice and ugliness that’s so pervasive in our history and present. This book helped me fortify my compassion for others, for all.
4. No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by Thich Nhat Hhan
Description: Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, explores the nature of human suffering and our all-too-ready impulse to suppress or run away from it. In No Mud, No Lotus, Hanh shares wisdom, mantras, practical advice, and practices to help us embrace and transform our suffering.
What it helped me with: This book helped me become a more compassionate person towards myself. For so long, I didn’t want to accept that suffering was a natural part of my life, and so any time I felt pain or anguish, I convinced myself I was weak. I let my suffering make me feel smaller. I also let it completely dominate and control my life. These emotions influenced how I’d talk to my family, interact with strangers, and react in situations. It was like I was trapped in my own suffering and self-rebuke until this book (and just time and more life experiences in general) offered me a lifeline. Hanh’s teachings helped me… caress my problems. They helped me be kind to my pain. To welcome it with open arms, show it through the door, and spend time with it in a safe room until it was ready to leave. This book provided me guidance on how I can simply allow my pain to be painful, and nothing else.
5. The Daily Stoic
Description: The Daily Stoic offers 366 ancient meditations/quotes from different Stoic philosophers and their modern-day translations. Meant to be read on a daily basis, The Daily Stoic aims to help its readers live a better, wiser, and more joyful life one quote at a time.
What it helped me with: The Daily Stoic helped me show up for my better self on a regular basis. It kept me accountable, and helped me grow my Stoic muscles so I could get progressively calmer, easier to relate to, more compassionate, and less reactive.
The act of showing up and reading a passage on a daily basis was such a huge help in starting off the day right and setting the tone for the rest of it. It’s a daily anchor you cast; and I found myself having more good days than bad ones whenever I’d read a passage. On the whole, this book helped me feel more focused on my emotional wellbeing and approach situations in a way I’d be proud of later.
Self-Help Isn’t Just For Yourself
While I might not be some sort of perfect angel that never reacts or feels pain anymore, I do genuinely feel like a better, more enlightened person.
This person is a much better friend. A much better daughter and sister. A much better employee. A much better wife. A much better civilian. A much better human.
So much of that is due to my dedication to helping my self become happier, more knowledgeable, and compassionate in all things I do and say.
Because of my learnings, I’ve gotten closer to life. I feel closer to enjoying it. I’m closer to the present moment. I’m closer to the role I play in my own life. I’m closer to the person I want to be. That better friend, daughter, sister, employee, wife, civilian, human.
I help my self so I can help others. I help my self so I can make their lives easier, spare them pain and confrontation and reactions, and impart some of my wisdom unto them in my own ways.
I can sometimes see my thoughts, my emotions, and I can release them in a way I wasn’t able to before. I can honestly say that reading these books have brought me a sense of peace I thought was previously unattainable. Like it was some trite state of being wellness hacks lied about obtaining.
But that’s not true. I know peace and happiness so much better now. And I know that those things are real.
I can often see it on the other side of split-second moments, and I know ways to get to that side now.
I just needed some help along the way.
I’m so glad I dedicated time and energy to helping my self.
Hopefully, it’s made me a better me, for you. <3
