Books like Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte

Atomic Habits by James Clear presents a practical framework for building good habits, breaking bad ones, and mastering tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

Freakonomics reveals how hidden incentives shape everyday life, from crime to education, using data-driven insights that challenge conventional wisdom.

Deep Work shows how focused, distraction-free effort is a rare yet essential skill for achieving superior results and genuine fulfillment in today’s fast‑paced economy.

Leaders Eat Last explains how leaders who prioritize the safety and well‑being of their teams build trust, loyalty and high performance in modern organizations.

Kelly McGonigal, Stanford psychologist, reveals that stress can make us stronger, smarter, and happier if we learn to embrace it.

Finding Time argues that the long hours most Americans work actually harm both business productivity and personal well‑being, using real data from a Fortune 500 software team to show how reward systems encourage burnout.

"In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. In this brilliant dissection of our times, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism"-- "When Jeremy Bentham proposed that government should run 'for the greatest benefit of the greatest number,' he posed two problems: what is happiness and how can we measure it? With the rise of positive psychology, freakonomics, behavioural economics, endless TED talks, the happiness manifesto, the Happiness Index, the tyranny of customer service, the emergence of the quantified self movement, we have become a culture obsessed with measuring our supposed satisfaction. In anecdotes that include the Buddhist monk who lectured the business leaders of the world at Davos, why the Nike Fuel band makes us more worried about our fitness, how parts of our city are being rebuilt in response to scientific studies of oxytocin levels in our brain, and what a survey from Radisson hotels--that proves that 62% of us believe that well-being is a luxury worth more than work or a good relationship--really tells us about the way we measure ourselves, and continually find ourselves wanting"--

"When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family. The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine's history. Since that time, Anne-Marie Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life, and family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the "motherhood penalty," women at the top and the bottom of the income scale are further and further apart. Now, in her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means, and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive. With moving personal stories, individual action plans, and a broad outline for change, Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals a future in which all of us can finally finish the business of equality for women and men, work and family"--

Mira Ptacin confronts the devastating loss of an unborn child while reflecting on her mother’s own tragedy of a deceased adopted son, a memoir that explores grief, free will, and the enduring bonds between mothers and daughters.

In her remarkable new book, The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild brings us startling news of the ways in which home is being invaded by the time pressures and efficiencies of work, while the workplace is, for many parents, being transformed into a strange kind of surrogate home. For three years at a Fortune 500 company, she interviewed everyone from top executives to factory hands, sat in on business meetings, followed sales teams onto golf courses, and trailed working parents and their children through their days. In a series of vivid portraits, Hochschild paints a surprising picture of couples as time thieves, children as emotional bill-collectors, spouses as efficiency experts, parents who feel like helpful mothers and fathers mainly to their workmates, and women who - like generations of men before them - flee the pressures of home for the relief of work. Hochschild's groundbreaking study exposes our crunch-time world and reveals how, after the first shift at work and the second at home, comes the third, and hardest, shift of repairing the damage created by the first two.