15 Jan Beat The January Blues With Four Inspirational New Books
The second Monday in January has been tagged “The most depressing day of the year” by the media. The cold weather and long nights, struggling to stick to New Year’s goals especially Dry January or the diet and exercise plan, the post festive slump, and back-to-work routine can make anyone feel low. We have four new books to boost your mood and motivation, and remind you that you don’t need to be “perfect” to improve your happiness, success, and general wellbeing.
The following four writers believe everyone is on their journey to accepting themselves and we each have the mindset to develop ourselves with knowledge, support, and achievable goals.
Happy Ever After: Escaping The Myth of The Perfect Life by Paul Dolan
Paul Dolan, the bestselling author of Happiness by Design, shows us how to escape the myth of perfection and find our own route to happiness. There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us.
In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a variety of studies ranging over wellbeing, inequality and discrimination to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness. He shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting fulfilment. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever.
By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.
Mentors: How to Help and be Helped by Russell Brand
Could happiness lie in helping others and being open to accepting help yourself?
“I have mentors in every area of my life, as a comic, a dad, a recovering drug addict, a spiritual being and as a man who believes that we, as individuals and the great globe itself, are works in progress and that through a chain of mentorship we can improve individually and globally, together… One of the unexpected advantages my drug addiction granted is that the process of recovery that I practise includes a mentorship tradition.”
Mentors – the follow up to Sunday Times number one bestseller, Recovery, describes the benefits of seeking and offering help. Brand describes the impact that a series of significant people have had on the author – from the wayward youths he tried to emulate growing up in Essex, through the first ex-junkie sage, to the people he turns to today to help him be a better father. It explores how we all – consciously and unconsciously – choose guides, mentors and heroes throughout our lives and examines the new perspectives they can bring.
An Edited Life: Simple Steps to Streamlining your Life, at Work and at Home by Anna Newton
Declutter every aspect of your life with this realistic guide to getting neat and keeping things that way.
Anna Newton is just trying to balance work, her friends, her family, her husband Mark, a growing handbag habit and a love for takeaway pizza. Anna is a typical Virgo – she loves being organised. She’s Marie Kondo’d her house, nearly throwing away her TV remote in the process. She’s waved goodbye to her things with Fumio Sasaki. She’s minimized and bullet-journalled her schedules down to the finest detail. Along the way, she’s realised something key: there’s no one prescription for an organized life, a tidy home and calm mind. Instead, it’s all about editing.
Learn how to edit your home, calendar, exercise regime, social life, me-time, wardrobe, household budget, digital detox, beauty routine and office space. It’s about how to utilise your time and spend more of it doing what makes you happy.
We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World by Malala Yousafzai
In We Are Displaced, which is part memoir, part communal storytelling, Nobel Peace Prize winner and bestselling author Malala Yousafzai experiences visiting refugee camps caused her to reconsider her own displacement – first as an Internally Displaced Person when she was a young child in Pakistan, and then as an international activist who could travel anywhere in the world, except to the home she loved. Malala not only explores her own story of adjusting to a new life while longing for home, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her various journeys – girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they’ve ever known.
In a time of immigration crises, war and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world’s most prominent young activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person – often a young person – with hopes and dreams, and that everyone deserves universal human rights and a safe home.