Books to Help You Stick to Your New Year’s Resolution

We’re a couple weeks into the new year, which means we’re just about at the point where most folks abandon their New Year’s resolutions. Whatever you call your goals for the new year—resolutions, intentions, vibes—and however you get there—step-by-step plans, a word for the year, navigating based on how you want to feel—you’re more likely to make progress if you’ve got good resources.

Today, we’re exploring books to support some of the most common New Year’s resolutions: getting clear on priorities, developing good habits, establishing a meditation/mind-body practice, and getting organized. Thinking about money, relationships, and etc? Those recs are coming in the next installment, hitting your inbox January 28.**

For something more on the practical side, try Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu. While the book is positioned as a resource to help women learn to let go of responsibilities and assumed expectations that hold them back, it’s an excellent resource for people of all genders and in all kinds of family and work relationships. We found it so useful here at Book Riot that we assigned it to the whole company for discussion at a retreat a few years ago!

Already clear on your priorities, but feeling like everyone else is the problem? Run, do not walk, to Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace, which contains framework and scripts for creating, communicating, and enforcing boundaries in every kind of relationship.

Extra credit: Inciting Joy by Ross Gay is a gorgeous and, at times, challenging collection of essays that invite us to consider what real joy and connection look like.

Dan Harris and Jeff Warren’s Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics is one of the great ones. Harris shares his own journey into meditation (a former network news anchor, he turned to meditation after having a panic attack on air, an experience he documents in the memoir 10% Happier), and longtime meditation teacher Jeff Warren provides short meditations from a variety of practices and schools of thought to help you discover what works for you. They start from the approach that “one minute counts”—you won’t catch them declaring that if you don’t meditate for twenty minutes twice a day, you’re doing it wrong—and in lieu of promising that meditation will change your whole life, they suggest that it might make you a very reasonable 10% happier. (10% Happier is also the name of their meditation app, which features a diverse array of experienced teachers and practices for modern life, including recent additions focusing on neurodivergence and ADHD.)

Pro-tip: listen to this one on audio (it’s included in Spotify Premium!) so you can experience Warren’s terrific guided meditations.

Yoga and meditation go hand-in-hand, and it can help to get the wiggles out before you sit. In Every Body Yoga, Jessamyn Stanley cuts through the bullshit of contemporary yoga culture to offer an inclusive, accessible, and often funny entry point to the practice. The book contains full-color photos and clear directions for 50 yoga poses, along with simple sequences to practice at home. Want to release fear, feel energized, and love your body? Stanley has you covered. And if you’re worried that you won’t be “good” at yoga or able to get into some of the postures, she also provides modifications to make the practice comfortable and tailored to your needs. This is yoga the way it’s meant to be.

If your work is dominated by screens and digital material, I can’t recommend Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brainenough. This is a flexible, customizable approach to organizing all of the components of your life and work that exist online. It’s a bigger lift upfront for a great payoff down the road.

In How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis’s thesis is simple: “You don’t work for your home; your home works for you.” Also, this: “messiness is not a moral failing.” Amen, and hallelujah. Life can be A LOT, and Davis’s compassionate approach offers ideas for reframing your relationship to your to-do list alongside practical tips for keeping everything together enough without losing your mind in the process. We can probably all benefit from this book, but Davis recognizes that things like anxiety, depression, and ADHD can make cleaning and organizing especially difficult, and her methods take this into consideration.

**This piece originally appeared in our brand new newsletter, Better Living Through Books, written by Rebecca Schinsky! If you’re into self-improvement, cooking, personal finance, and the bouquet of genres we think of as “lifestyle nonfiction,” we think you’ll dig it. Subscribe to Better Living Through Books here!