100 books like The Self-Love Experiment

I owe my life and sanity to Louise Hay. Her teachings, particularly in You Can Heal Your Life, taught me that everything in my mind “is only a thought and a thought can be changed”.

This book is a powerful tool for healing our mind and life. It teaches us that our thoughts and beliefs directly influence our physical health and well-being. In it, Louise Hay emphasizes positive thinking, self-love, forgiveness, and affirmation techniques as tools to heal our mind, body, and life.

This book has been a significant milestone in my life. I truly believe it can heal our lives.

The key to loving yourself is knowing yourself and accepting that person entirely. That is, not just the polished, perfect parts of you but the inner layers. The insecurities. The vulnerabilities. The pain. The mistakes. Written as a bite-sized self-help book of prose that can be easily digested in one or two sittings, Mind Platter is brimming with pieces that changed my perspective of my healing journey for the better. 

If you’re learning to love yourself better, Mind Platter is a great book to dive into for many reasons. It’s a book that unveiled many truths for me, such as the cause of my discomfort and pain (often hidden in my unrealistic expectations of myself and me ‘making a home’ in other people), how to be more forgiving, and the importance of growth and moving on. This book taught me how to be kinder to myself through its discussion of… show more.

This is one of the first self-help books I read that didn’t feel like too much ‘hard work’ and was still incredibly helpful. What I mean by that is that often self-help books can get a little too theoretical, or hard to digest, and this makes it difficult to uncover the tools that we need without getting lost in all the words. Vex’s book wasn’t like that at all. Vex King breaks down self-love into positive vibes, emphasising that the way to become your greatest self is to welcome and experience these good vibes in various areas of your life. Vex’s approach to self-love is to unpack concepts such as lifestyle, mindset, acceptance, manifestation, and good habits and what they can do to promote your best life. 

To love yourself, then, would be to ensure that you’ve adopted a healthy way of practising all, or most of the above. The… show more.

This book was such a great read. One of the main goals of this book is for readers to understand what, and how much, they deserve and how this contributes to an increase in self-love. Just like Vex, Dani emphasises the importance of the Law of Attraction and manifestation. She uses examples from her experiences to shed light on the various tools she adopted over the years to build her confidence and create the life she deserves. I love a good self-help book filled with personal examples and what worked/didn’t work in the author’s life, and Watson does that really well. Maybe, I’m nosey, or maybe it's because that’s the way I write my own books and I enjoy diving into other people’s experiences to see how similar we can all be in our healing. 

This book is for anyone spiritual, or readers who believe in the law of attraction,… show more.

I’m a people-pleaser. I can’t say ‘No’ to anyone and in the past it has destroyed me.

This book reminds us all that we only have a limited amount of time, energy, and money and we should only spend them on things that make us happy and don’t annoy us. We need to stop caring what other people think. We can’t make everyone like us but we can make them respect us, and there is a way to get off going to your great uncle’s 90th birthday without being rude.

Trust me – this book will change your life.   

To my mind, Dr. Emmons is the leading scientist in this field. His lab at the University of California has conducted much of the gratitude research that ends up reported in the mass media.

He’s written denser books and major academic papers for psychology journals on the topic. But what I like about this book is that he’s writing for ordinary people, without using medical/scientific jargon that gets in the way of comprehension. What you get is plain talk. Why is gratitude important? What does a gratitude practice mean—and how does it enrich your life?

Yes, you can find more complex books on the topic, but this one is only 96 pages and it’s coming from the pen of an expert. Start here to understand the concept.

You’re probably familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an undergraduate psychology staple that explains how a person’s basic needs (such as security) are foundational to higher needs (such as self-actualization). But did you know Abraham Maslow never actually drew that pyramid? Popular psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman follows in Maslow’s footsteps, tracking down his later research and personal writings to uncover what the famous humanist really thought about personal development. It turns out that the image of the pyramid is both misleading and incomplete: it is missing its top level, self-transcendence.

Kaufman walks us through an updated vision of Maslow’s work, culminating in our ability to rise above everyday affairs and connect with our higher aspirations and ideals. In the process, we learn how to cultivate the proper mindset for growth and turn our aspirations into reality. Transcend is not about parenting per se, but it is chock full of insights… show more.

If you’ve ever felt the pull of resistance, and the frustration of knowing that there’s something that you really want to do, but then that little voice in your head steps up and stops you, then this book will 100% help you. It explains a very easy way of short-circuiting that discussion.

It’s another simple idea, which is what makes it so powerful and helpful. And if you enjoy listening to podcasts, Mel now has an excellent one, "The Mel Robbins Podcast," which you can find on all platforms.

I loved this book as a child and shared it with my own kids when they were little. It really hit home when my youngest daughter was a pre-schooler. Dandelion’s friends do not recognize him when he dresses up and has his hair done. When my daughter was in pre-school, I went to the hairdresser and she dried my curly hair, straight. When I went to pick up my daughter, she started crying and was quite distressed about my new look. I had to put on a hat in order to get her to stop. Reading Dandelion helped her get over that! I also, of course, love the message about not needing to change anything about yourself for your friends because they love you just as you are.

This book is such a powerful book for all young boys and girls to read. It's about how to truly love yourself because if you don't love yourself no one else will. It shows that you can be your true self and that self-love is the best love. It's about the author's personal experience as to what she endured growing up as a kid, but this book can also relate to what most teens or young kids go through with bullying, abuse, and more.