The best books to help you develop emotional badassery

We all do emotional labor, but most of us don’t get paid for it. Hell, most of us don’t even get noticed for it! The Managed Heart brings this labor out of the shadows, and it’s a life-changing book. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild developed the concept of emotional labor, which is the labor we do to manage our own emotions and the emotions of others in the context of our work. 

Emotional labor is crucial, but it’s nearly always unacknowledged, unsupported, and treated as something you should already know how to do – for free! This book helps you observe the hidden world of emotional labor and develop your own approach to this vital form of work.

We live with so many toxic myths about happiness, and many of these myths come from books about happiness! The Happiness Myth steps up to defend happiness from all the nonsense. It’s a rollicking and often-hilarious tour through the history of human happiness, full of surprises and strange-but-true ideas to ponder. 

Historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht challenges our current certainties in this irreverent and well-researched exploration of what our ancestors (and we!) need to live happy lives. She’s a wonderful and witty person to spend time with, and she’ll help you become more intelligent about the true and everlasting nature of human happiness. Happy now?

Fear is not the problem! Fear arises to help you deal with the problem! Gavin de Becker is a security expert who declares that fear doesn’t get in our way at all. In fact, fear contains the instincts and intuition that help us stay safe in the world.

Using stories from real cases and his own life, de Becker shows us how fear works to keep us safe – and how avoiding or ignoring fear is always a very bad idea. The Gift of Fear will help you connect to the essential intelligence in your fear, and it will help you become safer, more intuitive, and more aware of the world around you. Essential reading.

This is a serious WTF book! Lisa Feldman Barrett is upending the entire study of emotions, hooray! Left and right brain? Nope, we don’t have two brains, and the hemispheres aren’t all that different. Lizard brain and the 3-part or triune brain? Nope! Lizard brains are just as “evolved” as ours, and our emotions don’t live in just one area of the brain.

Reading facial expressions of emotions? Nope! Humans are actually terrible at reading emotions from the face. Are there universal emotions? Nope! Is the amygdala the seat of fear or emotions in general? Nope! How Emotions Work will prompt you to say WTF? a bunch of times, but it will also teach you more about yourself and how to work with your emotions and your “body budget,” yes!

Hatred is one of the most destructive emotions there is – if you have no skills for hatred, that is. If you can do your shadow work (which psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed to help you work with the lost, forbidden, and projected parts of yourself) you can perform astounding feats of self-awareness, integration, healing, and evolution.

This essential book contains 65 essays on the shadow – where to find it, how to understand it in yourself and others, and how to do the shadow work that can help you find the gold in even the most troubling, dislocated, and incomplete areas of your psyche. Bonus: when you know how to do your shadow work, you’ll become more whole, and you’ll be a much easier person to live with!