Jonathan Haidt's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Nir Eyal

4.1

You sit down at your desk to work on an important project, but a notification on your phone interrupts your morning. Later, as you're about to get back to work, a colleague taps you on the shoulder to chat. At home, screens get in the way of quality time with your family. Another day goes by, and once again, your most important personal and professional goals are put on hold.

What would be possibl

Recommended by Arianna Huffington, Cal Newport, Mark Manson, and 18 others.

Jonathan Haidt

I highly recommend @nireyal's new book, Indistractable. Nir and I disagree on whether phones are a cause of rising in teen depression, but his book is full of great ideas for improving your relationship with your phone, and "hacking back" your time. https://t.co/l2kPIAe1gs [source]

Arianna Huffington

Founder/The Huffington Post

This is such an important book. Indistractable is the best guide I’ve read for reclaiming our attention, our focus, and our lives. [source]

Cal Newport

Author

Indistractable is a master class in understanding the root cause of distraction. Recommended for anyone looking to do more deep work. [source]

Cover unavailable

2

The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

John Tierney, Roy F. Baumeister

4.2

"The most important book at the borderland of psychology and politics that I have ever read."--Martin E. P. Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at that University of Pennsylvania and author of Learned Optimism

Why are we devastated by a word of criticism even when it's mixed with lavish praise? Because our brains are wired to focus on the bad. This negativity effect explains things

Recommended by Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt

@thomaschattwill I'm drawing here on an amazing book I read a draft of: The Power of Bad, by @JohnTierneyNYC and Roy Baumeister. Lots of advice for taking advantage of the bad things in your life. By amazing coincidence, this book comes out TODAY: https://t.co/vLMWrIRiVX [source]

3

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert

4.0

Preview Summary

• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? • Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song

Recommended by Ev Williams, Jonathan Haidt, Chelsea Frank, and 6 others.

Jonathan Haidt

He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. [source]

Chelsea Frank

I read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. [source]

Derek Sivers

My recommendation is to do little tests. Try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself an exit plan, being open to the big chance that you might not like it after actually trying it... The best book about this subject is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. His recommendation is to talk to a few people wo are currently where you think you want to be and ask them for the pros and cons. Then trust their opinion since they're right in it, not just remembering or imagining. [source]

4

The Dhammapada

Gil Fronsdal and Jack Kornfield

4.5

The Dhammapada (Pāli; Prakrit: धम्मपद Dhammapada; Sanskrit: धर्मपद Dharmapada) is a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures. The original version of the Dhammapada is in the Khuddaka Nikaya, a division of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.
The Buddhist scholar and commentator Buddhaghosa explains that each saying record

Recommended by Jonathan Haidt and Dr. Gabor Maté.

Jonathan Haidt

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear. [source]

Dr. Gabor Maté

The Buddhist collection of sayings. And it begins with, basically, the idea that we create the world with our minds. [source]

Cover unavailable

5

Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives

Gilbert Brim

3.3

Recommended by Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt

Gilbert Brim is possibly the wisest person I’ve ever met face to face. I interviewed him for a report I did for the MacArthur Foundation in 1994. He was running a research network on midlife, on the psychology of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and he had written this wonderful book called Ambition – How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout our Lives. In it, he brought together research as well as his own insights that he had collected in his own 75 or so years. It fits very well with Buddha because Brim recognises that our basic psychology is one of striving. When we get what we hoped for, we don’t celebrate for more than a minute – or a day at most. Right away we ratchet up our expectations, and move on to the next goal. Which is why we’re never really satisfied. The book is about how to be a Westerner who is going to strive, who is going to get great pleasure from work. It’s about how to violate the advice of the Buddha, while still respecting the psychology that the Buddha told us about. Brim has this phrase that I’ve never forgotten: he advises us to live life ‘at the level of just manageable difficulty’. So, if you live life at 50 per cent of your capacity, you’ll be bored and disengaged; if you live it at 100 per cent of your capacity, you’re going to be burned out, but if you live at about 85 per cent on average, with some fluctuations, that’s about the best you can do. [source]

6

The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want

Sonja Lyubomirsky

4.3

Preview Summary

Learn how to achieve the happiness you deserve

"A guide to sustaining your newfound contentment."--Psychology Today

You see here a different kind of happiness book. The How of Happiness is a comprehensive guide to understanding the elemetns of happiness based on years of groundbreaking scientific research. It is also a practical, empowering, and easy-to-follow workbook, incorporating happiness stra

Recommended by Jonathan Haidt and Paul Thagard.

Jonathan Haidt

Sonja Lyubomirsky has done the best studies on how simple interventions, simple things you can do, on a daily or weekly basis, have measurable effects on your happiness. [source]

Paul Thagard

What makes Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book different is that it’s actually based on scientific research on what makes people happy. [source]

7

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

Barbara Ehrenreich

4.2

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy

In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a te

Recommended by Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt

This is one of the most original and interesting books I’ve read in the last five years. Barbara Ehrenreich had written a book on war and got intrigued by the rituals and the group cohesion that results from war. So she wrote her next book on this human capacity and even need for group cohesion. What she found is that just about every society, at the time of Western contact, had some way of altering their bodies, and dancing around a fire or totemic object to some sort of rhythmic beat, music or a drum. Almost every traditional society had ways of using motion and music to bind themselves together and to achieve states of collective ecstasy. Europeans were generally disgusted by this, and tried to stamp it out as best they could. She shows how Christianity used to be a danced religion, but in the middle ages that got stamped out too. And what we’re left with is this rather dry and puritanical fear of ecstasy and loss of control. [source]