Books like Authentic Happiness

01

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

Martin E. P. Seligman · Psychology

Martin Seligman founded the positive psychology movement and published Authentic Happiness in 2002.

02

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · Psychology

Flow is Csikszentmihalyi's landmark study of optimal experience — those moments when people are so deeply absorbed in an activity that time warps, self-consciousness disappears, and effort feels effortless.

03

The Happiness Hypothesis

Jonathan Haidt · Psychology

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU who spent the early part of his career studying morality and happiness, and this book — published in 2006, before his work on political psychology brought him wider attention — synthesizes ancient philosophical wisdom with modern psychological research.

04

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin E. P. Seligman · Psychology

Martin Seligman's research career began with learned helplessness — the discovery that animals and humans who experience uncontrollable events generalize the uncontrollability to subsequent situations where control is actually possible, becoming passive even when action would help.

05

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert · Psychology

Daniel Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist whose central finding, after decades of studying affective forecasting, is that humans are systematically wrong about what will make them happy.

06

A General Theory of Love

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon · Psychology

A General Theory of Love is a 2000 book by three psychiatrists at the University of California, San Francisco — Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon — who set out to explain love scientifically without stripping it of its significance.