Reader Samantha got in touch with me a while ago to ask for more information about living a more purposeful life. Specifically, she asked about the books that I would recommend about purposeful living and what it means. I confess it’s taken me rather a long time to reply (apologies, Samantha), because, somewhat surprisingly, I found it a difficult question to answer.
The main reason is that there isn’t a specific book or site or resource that I could put my finger on as emblematic of my conception of purposeful living. Like many introverts I read a lot; basically all the time. And it struck me that the nebulous ideas I’ve tried to capture under the term “purposeful living” are kind of distributed across a rather eclectic reading list. I also have a bit of a contrary nature and read things that I disagree with, to better understand other people, and so hesitate to recommend books that irritated or angered me but nevertheless had some nuggets of wisdom within them.
After this typical period of centrist dithering, I decided to stop being so precious and just throw out a list of the most memorable and thought-provoking books that have helped shaped my notion of what a purposeful life means. In no particular order:
The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
A great summary of the psychology behind much of our behaviour. A real eye-opener on how cautious one needs to be to avoid coasting along familiar tracks through habit, and how important it is to be much more active in decision-making. Also, some good practical advice on how to break bad habits and establish good ones.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Another classic for understanding how your mind works. A great primer for how our various cognitive biases, mental short-cuts, and quick-and-dirty intuitions can lead us to make flawed decisions. A good lesson in why it often pays to think slowly and carefully before taking action.
Women who run with the wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
A really poetic and thought-provoking journey into the Jungian conception of the subconscious. Weird and wonderful in places, and uses a very powerful device of telling archetypal stories as a way of illuminating fundamental aspects of human nature. Focused on the female experience, but not limited to that.
The seven habits of highly effective people, Stephen Covey
A milestone of self-development. A perennial bestseller. Basically, a manifesto on how to live an effective life and be a positive influence on the world. (A bit dull in places, though).
The consolations of philosophy, Alain de Botton
I’m not a big fan of the School of Life, but this was the first Alain de Botton book that I read, and I still love it. A humane, comforting, and concise summary of what the major schools of philosophy can offer to improve modern life. This was the first place that I came across the teachings of Seneca and is a great gateway drug to the hard stuff.
Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Douglas Kent Hall
A case study in the power of single mindedness. Whatever you think of the Austrian Oak, he is a force of nature and has a phenomenal work ethic. As he put it in a commencement speech once “Nobody ever climbed the ladder of success with their hands in their pockets.”
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
Fascinating, surprising, depressing, inspiring. A deep dive into why some people achieve extraordinary things, and how small advantages coupled to positive feedback loops can play a decisive role. Another great example about how hard work and marginal gains can lead to compounding successes.
Memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev
A man I have always admired. A fascinating life and the key player in the thawing of the cold war.
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
A bit of an annoying read, but interesting nonetheless. Don’t bother trying to fathom “the secret”, but do take away the core point: you have to decide that you want to succeed and work for it. That emphasis on active choice retains its power, despite the dated case studies.
Quiet, Susan Cain
Viva the Introvert revolution!
Eat that Frog!, Brian Tracy
A lean but idea-rich book on how to achieve the important things in your life, without neglecting other responsibilities. A productivity and prioritisation guide from a businessman who also seems like a genuinely nice guy. The weird title comes from a paraphrased Mark Twain quip: “If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing it’s probably the worst thing you’ll have to do all day.”
And, of course, it goes without saying, Love and Limerence, Dorothy Tennov.
Since starting the site, I’ve had several readers recommend books for me, and some of them have been gems. So please, wise LwL-ers, fill up the comments with your own recommendations…
Thanks for the list – some of those sound very interesting.
One book I have found has helped me tremendously, not specifically about Limerence, but for generally changing my outlook on life was “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay.
Also for those limerents trying to repair wider problems with their marriage/relationship, “Hold Me Tight” by Dr Sue Johnson was recommended to me by my individual therapist before we started marriage counseling. Would highly recommend, providing you’re both committed to it.
Hold Me Tight was good, but I found Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment to be even better. I’m convinced now that EVERYONE should understand her/his own attachment style and how to identify this trait in potential mates. And if you’re already married, this can be an invaluable resource in learning how to de-escalate from the fighting that stems from disconnection with your partner.
I read it. Overall, I liked it but I thought it had a few shortcomings.
The part on “protest behavior” was excellent. I think every therapist doing couples or relationship counseling should start with attachment styles.
Where I thought it came up short was in what was causing your SO’s insecure attachment. If the source of your SO’s insecure attachment is a personality disorder, nothing they recommend in the book will ever really fix that. You may be able to manage the insecure attachment, you may not. The book glosses over that. It could lead someone to believe that if they do enough of the right things, good results will eventually materialize. It could lead someone to stay in an abusive relationship while trying things out.
I have two professional opinions that LO #2 had a personality disorder. I was never able to get her in front of a therapist and I tried. I told her that if getting back together was even a glimmer in her mind, we’d see a marriage counselor. I’d pay for it. She had a different idea of “professional help.” Both therapists said I was lucky to have gotten away from her and both said that if I ever go back on the market, don’t re-engage her.
I should have mentioned the book was “Attached….” by Heller and Levine
Thank you for the recommendations, some interesting finds I’ll look into.
This morning I bit the bullet and disclosed my LO to my SO, boy that was tough, I think I’ve never been so petrified in my life. SO took it well, he’s promised not to buy a shot gun and listened to everything I’ve had to say, we spoke for nearly 4 hours. I feel like I’ve been in the washing machine that was left on spin cycle, it’s the 1st big step for us to mending our marriage and I feel relieved, guilty, but still relieved.
Tomorrow NC starts, I have mixed feelings about this.
Well-done! That’s a massive step.
Good luck for NC – will be worth it in the long run.
For a purposeful life, “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin.
Really enjoying this Happiness Project. Thanks for recommending it!
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I feel like this one might be a bit divisive on this site, but love or hate the guy, his observations on conscious loving are very true to the notion of purposeful living. My SO and I read a bit each morning to set our tone for the day, and after the shock of my confession about the LE, it became an anchor-point for us in processing the experience together. Like much other eastern / Buddhist perspectives, Tolle points out the contradictory nature of obsessive, self-grasping “love”, and his simple solution – to be present – helped me through the worst of the chemical comedown.
“The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt
“Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive.”
This was big in business schools about 20 years ago but it has a much wider context. In “The Goal,” the context was a business and the goal was to make money for the company.
What are your goals in life? Take happiness…if what you’re doing contributes to it, that thing is productive. If it detracts from your happiness, it’s not. However, defining your goals isn’t always easy and something always seems to come up that throws a wrench in the plan. Sometimes, we appear to have competing goals. You have to decide which goals to pursue and which goals you have to subordinate to achieve the primary goal.
If you can stomach it, Goldratt also wrote, “Theory of Constraints.” The oversimplification is that your productivity can never be better than your most significant constraint.
My last LE was not productive in the context of a happy, stable marriage.
I just read Marie Kondo’s “Life-changing magic of tidying up” and found its idea of “putting your house in order” physically and metaphorically to be very much in line with purposeful living. On p. 184, though she is talking about possessions and choosing what to keep and what to discard, it could also have to do with the fantasies of limerence: “There are three approaches we can take toward our possessions: face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die”
Just found a lovely little book which is kind of graphic tale of what may be a limerents journey back to happiness with interactive sections for the reader to do some self work! It’s called “Hidden Heartbreak” by Emma Lee. It’s charming and ever so helpful.
Dr L – join Amazon Associates and add affiliate links for all these books. This is a great site and it wouldn’t cost readers any more and would bring in some more income for all the work that goes into the site.
DrL,
Have you read “Behave – The Biology of Human’s at Our Best and Worst” by Robert Sapolsky? If you have, I’d be interested in what you think of it.
I’m only about 60 pages and one appendix into it. It’s pretty dense. A lot of the technical part is beyond me but a lot of what he says seems to make sense.
No. That’s a new one on me. Sounds good.
I’m slowly getting through it. It’s interesting.
Here’s one for DrL:
The book tries to explain how the brain works and what affects it. I just finished the section on Oxytocin and Vasopressin. The book demonstrates we’re beginning to understand how things affect certain parts of the brain. Technology is allowing us to map brain function better and better. The book cites relevant studies giving conclusions to things. Something is considered valid because enough subjects exhibit similar behavior under similar conditions.
So,
If that’s true, could you take data, i.e., a sufficiently accurate map, and back fit it to a known population? For example, all Virgos are supposed to have some common characteristics as modified by aspects affected by time and place of birth (yeah, I know way too much about this thanks to LO #2). ENTJs share common characteristics. Dissmissive-Avoidants meet the same diagnostic criteria. This implies the brains in those people should be more or less firing in the same way. What if you could map the brain patterns of these groups? Would Virgos have the same neural patterns? Could somebody look at a neural map and conclude, “You’re an Aquarian INFP, with an anxious attachment style?”
I asked that question of the EAP counselor. She made some comment about the validity of psuedo-science. I asked her but what if the data actually supported it? She didn’t respond.
“Distancing: Avoidant Personality Disorder, Revised and Expanded” – Martin Kantor
http://admin.umt.edu.pk/Media/Site/SSH/SubSites/cp/FileManager/Ebooks/DCPe-26.pdf
Martin Kantor takes a different approach to Avoidant Personality Disorder (AvPD). He breaks down avoidants into 4 Types (LO #2 seemed to be a Type III). It’s not the most rigorous text but the first 11 chapters are very interesting. After that, it’s directed at clinicians. The book received a fair amount of criticism. In a later work, he revised some things.
Kantor’s discussion of Passive-Aggressive behavior Pages 130-137 is outstanding. Even if you don’t read anything else, I recommend you read those pages.
Hi there, I’m new to the site but WOW does a lot of this resonate with me! I’m realizing I’ve been dealing with serial limerence for decades, and until recently also had unacknowledged alcohol addiction. I’ve kicked the booze and am now in process of getting the limerent tendencies….under active management, shall we say. 🙂 But along the way I’ve picked up a number of excellent books that have each been as valuable if not more than any therapist. In addition to The Power of Habit & 7 Principles of Highly Effective People, I’d also recommend (in no particular order):
Feeling Good by David Burns
7 Secrets of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman
Feeling Good Together by David Burns
The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz
Creating Your Best Life by Miller and Frisch
The Resilience Factor by Reivich and Shatte
The How of Happiness by Lyubomirsky
Positivity by Barbara Frederickson
Do One Thing Different by O’Hanlon
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John Ratey
Toxic Parents and CoDependent No More were also eye openers. I wouldn’t be surprised if limerent tendencies were associated with traumatic childhoods, anxious attachment styles, and learned codependent behaviors, especially for those of us who fall hardest for the lost, broken, and hurting.
I found a book recently- it was recommended to me- that has totally changed the game for me. It’s exactly what DrL. has been saying the whole time, but I felt overwhelmed and powerless to put it into action. It has taken my intrusive thoughts, already, down many notches, and I told my SO that I actually have a calm(ish) brain for the first time in the longest time. It gives me so much hope that I can kick the limerence habit actually.
The name of the book is You Are Not Your Brain- the 4-step solution to changing bad habits, ending unhealthy thinking, and taking control of your life. Jeffery M. Schultz and Rebecca Gladding. It is written from a neuroscience perspective, and explains why our thoughts and actions are so powerful and why the habitual responses and bad habits are so hard to break. And the 4-steps are very simple and, for me, immediately helpful.
The fruits, so far, have been a calmer mind, a marked decrease in my feelings of shame and guilt for what goes on in my brain, increased hope and confidence that I’m not a victim of the limerence, and increased intimacy with my SO. I can also see how so many of the attempts I made at trying to handle and manage this on my own actually ended up strengthening the things I was trying to get rid of.
SO GOOD!
Thank you for this. I am going to purchase. Im super pleased this has helped you. Wow.
Thank you for this. I will have to check that one out too. I need to stop spending so much time thinking about my LO. I have had a couple of good experiences lately that have helped, but my obsessive thoughts still aren’t entirely gone.
Update- this book has been like a miracle for me! Everyday is getting a bit better, and it feels like LO is naturally fading into the backround of my mind. I think I used to believe that I’d miss it- that I’d somehow be less without the LE (which is truly demented, as it has caused so much pain and discomfort and strife). But I don’t miss it. I feel a growing freedom and lightness. I STRONGLY recommend this book and the tools it gives- amazing the effect it’s had!!!!
I’ve ordered it and eagerly waiting it’s arrive. Super pleased it’s helped you so much!
“Why am I missing my LO and wanting to reach out … I’m worried he’s slipping back into a fantasy version of himself. I feel so sad! I just want to slap myself right now as I really need to let this go. I’m so low cuz I feel like this is never gonna end and I’m going to be stuck in this forever. I’m battling with myself so much as I just don’t know why I can’t move on from this. I just keep coming back to this same place. It’s exhausting!”
I just read your comment, Rachel, and I wanted to comment here. I think what I’m learning is that the whole reason we keep falling back into the same emotional holes over and over and over and over is because of the way our brain has been trained. For me, thanks to this lovely book, this is what I do now: I observe the thought and feeling- so “I’m craving LO” and “I’m having uncomfortable physical sensations of a nervous stomach, sweaty hands, fast heart” I just label it without judgement, and then I say “that’s a deceptive message from my brain. It’s just my brain, it’s not me. There’s nothing I need to do right now.” And then I turn my attention to something that’s good and real- not trying to get rid of the uncomfortable feelings, but doing something else even while the feelings and thoughts continue to bother me. Literally ALL the trouble I’ve found is in trying to get rid of the feelings and thoughts all by myself. They refer to that as “feeding the monster” and it just ends up making everything worse. By the way, they say that when you turn your attention, it doesn’t mean talking about it…. just being INTENTIONAL about the next thing that needs to be/can be attended to. And then the 4th things to do is to say to yourself “that thought is a deceptive brain message and can be disscarded”
What I’m finding is that it really helps to observe how the thoughts and feelings fade EVERY SINGLE TIME on their own if I don’t panic and try to take care of them by myself. DrL. is right when he says that my actions are the things that matter- in that they can make everything either worse or better. They can feed the monster or starve the monster.
I’ve noticed that the thoughts and sensations went absolutely crazy when I started doing this, but that they quickly and permanently lost a bit of their power over me. I’m still in the process, but I know that this will lose it’s power completely over time. My brain isn’t in charge anymore.
Keep your chin up- there’s SO much hope!!!!
Yey Jayne I am thrilled your feeling so good and I’m really sinking in your positivity.
I think I need to remember that I don’t miss LO I miss my dopamine hit but I forget that sometimes and get sucked into the fantasy. I do like seeing limerence as an addiction and these lows are all part of the withdrawal. It’s not about LO, if it wasn’t him then I would have been someone else who glimmered.
I’ve got this book and am on chapter 4. It’s so educational! Have you found putting it into practice easy enough.. the cognitive stuff I find so so hard. But I am going to give this ago now my emotions have settled a little. Thanks for your message I always appreciate any support from here
I find it simple- but it’s also really difficult in that I need to stay mindful. I think it’s difficult to do anything new until it becomes the new normal. But I’ll take this difficulty over creating the habits that attack my integrity, honesty and peace. There’s really no payoff to this LE anymore at all- so I’m willing to do what it takes to put it behind me. I also think that plan of action will positively affect many other areas of my life as well.
I’m now not just wanting- I’m willing to do what it takes- that’s the difference for me at this point. I have an actual life- outside of my pretend one- that I want to live😊
Update- this book has been like a miracle for me! Everyday is getting a bit better, and it feels like LO is naturally fading into the backround of my mind. I think I used to believe that I’d miss it- that I’d somehow be less without the LE (which is truly demented, as it has caused so much pain and discomfort and strife). But I don’t miss it. I feel a growing freedom and lightness. I STRONGLY recommend this book and the tools it gives- amazing the effect it’s had!!!!
Sorry for the double reply!!
Rachel- I’m excited for you! Can’t wait to hear what you think
Thanks for these books DrL!
I read “Quiet” a few months ago and what an eye opener! Helps make more sense of my experience of being an introvert in the commercial workplace. I have lost count of the number of times my annual appraisals say something like “needs to network more”.
Have just finished “Consolations in Philosophy” and absolutely loved it! Have never read any western philosophy before, only eastern & Buddhist philosophy. I was surprised at how the same themes and ideas come up in both. Am hooked and want to read more! -any more recommendations?
I read another book by Alain de Botton “The course of love” – a great read for limerents as is a story about a very realistic marriage from the perspective of a limerent husband.
Steven Reiss, Who am I?
A model of human needs and motivation that both makes sense and has some data behind it.