Simpler Life
Exploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us lon...
How to Overcome Your Childhood
When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But o...
How to Travel
An original and comprehensive look at what it is we seek when we set off on an adventure abroad - and at how we can travel better, so that our experiences overseas become truly transformative and memorable. Going travelling is one of the few thing...
Big Ideas for Curious Minds
Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions ...
More Exciting Life
One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives cou...
What They Forgot to Teach You at School
We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of f...
Emotionally Intelligent Office
Stress and mental ill health currently costs the UK economy upwards of £30 billion a year. Modern businesses continue to place huge emphasis on technical training, yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to...
Self-Knowledge
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: 'Know yourself'. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who w...
On Confidence
The difference between success and failure often hangs on a fascinatingly small and elusive concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. This is a guidebook to what confidence consists of, why we lack it - and how we can a...
How to Think More Effectively
A guide to identifying, nurturing and growing our insight and creativity for more effective thinking. We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a very brilliant idea or two. However, our min...
Couple's Workbook
Therapeutic exercises to help couples nurture patience, forgiveness and humour. Here is a workbook containing the very best exercises that any couple can undertake to help their relationship function optimally; exercises to foster understanding, p...
Who Am I?
One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we're asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can't just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquirie...
Good Enough Parent
Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life's great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children's minds operate and what they need from those who...
Career Workbook
A thought-provoking and practical workbook with exercises to help you discover a career that is truly fulfilling. There are few questions harder or lonelier than, 'What should I do with the rest of my working life?' We are often simply meant to kn...
The School Of Life - Stay Or Leave
Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront. What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Is sex vital or could it be foregone? Does someone 'better' actually exist? How much should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one's partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be? This paperback edition walks the reader gently through their options and opens their mind to perspectives they might not have considered. It aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonising. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimise our regrets and find the way ahead.
Small Pleasures
So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But ...
Reasons to be Hopeful
An honest and accessible guide to finding light in the darkest of times. In a world that isn't short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life - despite all its challenges - still h...
On Self-hatred
A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life by learning to love oneself. Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don't like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the mea...
School of Life: A Job to Love
A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by understanding yourself. The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just necessary is a recent invention. These days, in prosperous areas of the world, we don't only expect to get paid, we als...
Art Against Despair
One of the most unexpectedly useful things we can do when we're feeling glum or out of sorts is to look at pictures. The best works of art can lift our spirits, remind us of what we love and return perspective to our situation. A few moments in fr...
Big Ideas from History: a history of the world for You
An engaging, alternative history of the world for children, which helps to make sense of today. The present can loom very large in a child's mind: all the crises and challenges of the modern world can feel overwhelming and at times dispiriting. Th...
School of Life: Relationships
A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships - yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to sup...
School of Life: Calm
A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations. Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age. Across history people have sought ad...
Therapeutic Atlas
The world is full of places that inspire and bring us joy: they might be exceptionally beautiful, resonant with history, untouched by civilisation or rich in memory. This is an atlas that gathers together some of the most enchanting and reinvigora...
Varieties of Melancholy
This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn't depression or anger or bitterness, it's a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional miser...
Screen-Free Fun
Whether we're big or small, it can be hard to get away from our screens. Most children spend between five and seven hours a day looking at some form of screen - and most grown-ups spend twice as much time. Screens promise endless entertainment, bu...
How to Find the Right Words
Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don't love them anymore; that we do love them (though we're not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they're fired; that we're furious with them (though we ad...
What Is Culture For?
Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes...
Heartbreak
Almost no one gets through life without, at some point, having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But there is also a vital role for understanding and perspective. We sometimes make our ...
Dating
Dating might seem a trivial and relatively inconsequential part of love, but it is in fact key to getting into the kind of relationship that can last and help us flourish. The process we call dating sits on top of some of the largest themes of lov...
Great Thinkers
The Great Thinkers is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture - drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to ...
Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
Being a parent can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is also - intermittently - the cause of some of our deepest sorrows. It is likely that we will spend at least some of the time in despair and confusion, wondering whether it really ...
How to Survive the Modern World
A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing. The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can ...
The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners
A guide to confronting modern social situations with confidence and grace.
Mind & Body
The modern world can present the body as a machine that just needs to be regularly exercised. However, it is a remarkably sensitive organ in which a lot of our pain and hope is stored and that we need to interpret and handle with subtlety. This im...
Replacement for Religion
Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion - but nevertheless being interested in it, moved by it and sympathetic to some of its aims. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some...
How to Get on With Your Colleagues
An essential guide to navigating the complexities of professional relationships. Our colleagues can be the sources of our greatest joys and triumphs: they compensate for our weaknesses, enlarge our strengths and aggregate our energies. However, wo...
Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
It's one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same. We marry the wrong person. Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We know that perfecti...
Anxiety
A guide to our anxious minds; offering a route to calm, self-compassion and mental well-being. Far more than we tend to realise, we're all - in private - deeply anxious. There is so much that worries us across our days and nights: whether our hope...