100 books like The Anxious Mind

This short book by the renowned author of The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic, and essential, book on grief.

Having found love late in life Lewis was devastated when his wife died a short time after their marriage. He rails at God and in a now-famous passage writes that no one ever told him that grief feels so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in my stomach, the same restlessness…

People who are mourning will recognize the rawness of grief and the need to find meaning in what feels meaningless. Lewis writes from inside the experience of grief and carves a path for the reader to understand his or her own experiences. 

Anger is a seemingly recalcitrant emotion – hard to avoid and difficult to manage. De Ira is the Stoic philosopher Seneca’s attempt to show us otherwise. To Seneca, anger is a wicked emotion. Yet a life free both of the turmoil of anger and of the desire for vengeance that Seneca thought defined anger is possible, he argued. Not only does anger lead us to lash out at others, it corrodes us from the inside – in Seneca’s image, like vinegar stored in a clay pot. While I find Seneca’s conclusion that we should eliminate all anger hard to swallow, his description of the dangers of anger, both to ourselves and to others, never fails to impress.

Like many emotions, shame seems like a double-edged sword. Shame seems to notify us that we haven’t lived up to our own ideals – that we’re not the people we thought or hoped we were. But shame has, as Thomason carefully delineates, a dark side: Shame can lead us to withdraw from the world in order not to be seen, and too often shame is a precursor to self-destructive behaviors. Naked ultimately argues that we need shame despite these drawbacks. Thomason’s book is also among the very best of recent books to use philosophical tools to investigate social media; her discussion of online shaming should not be missed.

We live in a very interconnected world, and yet loneliness is rampant. How can that be? Gaffney’s Political Loneliness helps us see that today’s loneliness is the byproduct of our specific political moment. Modern political life, she argues, alienates us from one other and fosters anonymity while also priming us to value belonging and inclusion. Gaffney’s purpose is less to offer us advice about how we can overcome this ‘political loneliness’ on an individual level. Rather, her uncomfortable message is that, with respect to loneliness at least, the personal is indeed the political, and she warns us that many will find totalitarianism an appealing antidote to the loneliness endemic to contemporary life.

As we learn in another classic, Primed to Perform by Doshi and McGregor, play is the most motivating activity there is.

I read this book for the first time during a dark period early in my career – where I did not feel inspired, engagement nor fulfilled. This book provided me with the framework to find meaningful activities – those where I was both skilled yet challenged to improve. Those activities where I would lose myself – where time would stand still.

Better yet, this book, framework, and philosophy have better helped me coach others to find play, engagement, and meaning in their activities at work and in life. 

In my own book, The Buddha in the Classroom, I tell the story of my fortuitous and life-changing first encounter with this book, while in my first year of college. Foreshadowing my career as a teacher of eastern philosophy, it lit the fire of my ongoing interest in Zen and had a profound impact on my personal journey into meditation. I sensed that the ironic title held some precious secret. I would discover, within its pages, the magic that happens when we learn to lean into the unknown, rather than fight against it. Indeed, the search for assuredness in life only seems to perpetuate the angst that is at the root of all the anxiety that characterizes the human condition... at least for many of us! Through letting go, we become more free.

I stumbled upon this one because Trump had it on his desk—go figure. Tillich, a Christian philosopher, explains how fear and anxiety drive people to irrationality. It’s wild because the very ideas he discusses were twisted for Trump’s campaign.

But Tillich’s insights on how fear pushes us to lose our mind—and how to stay courageous when the world seems to have lost its grip—are pure gold. This book is as relevant as ever.

If you’ve been avoiding having a difficult conversation, this book is for you.

It provides a step-by-step guide for preparing to have difficult conversations and navigating the waters once you’re in them, both personally and professionally. You’ll learn to see your own defensive barriers to communicating well (defensiveness to silence) and how to apply strategies for overcoming these obstacles and creating a safe and productive environment.

It’s a valuable resource you’ll come back to again and again, because people are complex, and communication is the bridge to building trust. 

This is a unique book in that it integrates the learnings from the great philosophies and religions with modern science to create a powerful story of how you and I can live a happy and a meaningful life.

The Author takes you on a great journey illuminating how our thinking and how our mind and body influence our beliefs and ways of being. He puts together a compelling new story that you can embrace to be on your Journey to Best Self. This book was so good that I have read it three times since I bought it.

I must have listened to this on audiobook a hundred times in 2000 when I had to drive hundreds of miles a week up and down the UK for my job until I felt as if the author’s words and message were seared into my brain!

It’s written in an easy conversational style, with practical examples from the author’s experience, and every idea in it is simple and easy to use in your own life. This book helped me through a difficult time and made me realise for the first time that I actually wasn’t alone or in any way weird, and that most people struggle with their fears.

To this day, I still tell myself, “I’ll handle it!” when I’m faced with a difficult or scary task!