Okay, real talk. Every December I see the same books and energy online: “New Year, New Me!” mood boards, 5 a.m. club challenges, 75 Hard, twelve new habits stacked before breakfast. And every year I think… babe, I love you, but I am tired.

I don’t want to attack the new year like it’s a project to be conquered. I want to walk into it softly, curiously, like I’m meeting someone I’m excited to fall in love with. I want to feel spacious, creative, quietly confident, and deeply connected, not because I hustled harder, but because I finally remembered who I am when I’m not performing.

So this year I’m skipping the usual suspects (you know the ones, the orange habit book, the purple power of now book, the one with the monk who sold his Ferrari). We’ve read them, we’ve highlighted them, we’ve felt guilty for not implementing them perfectly.

Instead, I’m curling up with five books that feel like upgrading your soul’s operating system. They’re gentle and profound. They don’t scream. They whisper, “He, you’re allowed to feel good without earning it first.”

Here are the five books I’m taking into the new year like love letters to my future self. If even one of them calls to you, grab it. Your January self will thank you. Find more books to read or add to your to read list here.

5 Books Every Exhausted Sensitive Person Needs on Their Nightstand in 2026.

1. The Creative Act: A Way of Being – Rick Rubin

This book feels like sitting in a dark studio with Rick Rubin while he tells you the secrets of the universe in a voice barely above a whisper.

He doesn’t teach you “how to be more creative.” He shows you that you already are creativity itself, that it’s not something you do, it’s something you allow. Every page feels sacred. There’s zero fluff, just distilled wisdom from someone who’s midwifed some of the greatest art of our time.

There’s a part where he says the artist’s job is to collect dots and connect them later, to live in a state of open receptivity. I read that and suddenly stopped judging myself for daydreaming in the shower or staring out train windows. That’s data collection, baby.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, dry, or like your spark went out sometime in 2020, this book will quietly hand it back to you. Not by making you “produce more content,” but by helping you fall back in love with being alive. It’s the most spiritually nourishing book on creativity I’ve ever read.

Perfect for anyone who wants 2026 to feel magical again.

2. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – Dacher Keltner

Listen. If you want to feel more alive in your actual daily life, not in some distant future when you’ve “made it”, this is the one.

Dacher Keltner is one of the world’s leading emotion scientists, and he spent years studying awe, that goosebumps feeling when you see a sunset that stops you in your tracks or hear music that makes you cry in the grocery store.

Turns out awe is literally medicine. It reduces inflammation, decreases anxiety, makes you more generous, and rewires your sense of time so life feels expansive instead of rushed. They measured this. With science.

But the best part? You don’t need to climb Machu Picchu. The eight most common sources of awe are all free and available right now: other people’s courage, nature, music, visual art, moral beauty, collective movement (think dancing or sports crowds), spiritual experiences, and big ideas about life and death.

I started intentionally hunting for “micro-doses of awe” every day, watching clouds from my fire escape, listening to choral music on the subway, noticing how my friend’s eyes light up when she talks about her dog. Within two weeks I felt, different. Lighter. Like the world was winking at me again.

If your goal for the new year is simply to feel more alive in your body and wonder-struck by existence, this book is pure magic.

3. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole – Susan Cain

From the queen who gave us Quiet comes the book I didn’t know I needed until it wrecked me in the best way.

Susan makes the case that our culture is obsessed with relentless positivity, but some of us are wired for the bittersweet, we feel the ache of impermanence, we cry at beautiful things, we hear minor keys in music and feel seen.

And that’s not depression. That’s depth.

She weaves science, stories (Leonard Cohen! Miles Davis! the Pixar movie Inside Out!), and her own life into this love letter to the melancholic soul. There’s an entire chapter on how every great creative breakthrough comes from transforming pain into beauty.

I finished this book and finally stopped pathologizing my tendency to tear up at everything. Instead I started seeing it as my superpower, my ability to feel the full spectrum is what lets me love hard, create deeply, and connect authentically.

If you’ve ever felt “too sensitive” or guilty for not being happier, this book will hand you your sensitivity back as a gift. You’ll start the year understanding that your longing is pointing you toward what matters most.

4. Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things – Adam Grant

Okay, hear me out, this is the only “growth” book on the list, but it’s the anti-perfectionist version.

Adam Grant studied people who achieved extraordinary things despite not being “natural talents”, the late bloomers, the awkward kids, the ones who got Cs in the subject they later revolutionized.

His finding? Talent is overrated. What actually predicts who rises is a specific combination of character skills: being a sponge (obsessed with learning), being imperfect (comfortable with looking stupid while improving), and being determined without being rigid.

There’s a story about a Finnish educator who transformed their school system by making it okay to be bad at things initially, and now Finland has one of the best education systems in the world. Another about a NASA engineer who succeeded because he asked for help constantly.

This book made me stop waiting to feel “ready” or “gifted enough” to start things. Instead I started asking: “Who do I want to become?” and then practicing becoming her, messily and publicly.

If you want to grow in the new year without the toxic perfectionism that usually comes with self-improvement, this is your book. It’s deeply encouraging without ever feeling like hustle porn.

5. The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness – Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

Spoiler alert from the 85-year Harvard Study of Adult Development:
It’s not money.
It’s not fame.
It’s not even health (though that helps).

The single biggest predictor of happiness, health, and longevity is warm relationships.

This book is the data plus the stories. They followed people from age 18 to 103, through marriages, divorces, wars, careers, tragedies, triumphs. and the ones who stayed connected to other humans (family, friends, community) were the happiest and lived the longest. Period.

But here’s what wrecked me: it’s never too late to start. One man in the study was a miserable loner until age 78, then joined a bowling league and completely turned his life around. Another repaired a decades-long rift with his brother at 82 and said it was the best thing he ever did.

The book gives practical, non-cheesy ways to invest in relationships, how to have better conversations, how to reach out when it feels awkward, how to tend to the garden of your connections.

I closed this book and immediately texted three friends I’d been meaning to reconnect with. One of them called me crying because she’d been going through something and didn’t want to burden me. We talked for three hours. That conversation alone made my entire year.

If you want to start the new year with what actually matters, feeling loved and known, read this. It’s science-backed permission to prioritize people over productivity.

So Here’s My Hope for Us This Year

I hope we stop treating January like a performance review of our worthiness.
I hope we choose feeling alive over looking productive.
I hope we let ourselves be beginners, feel everything, chase wonder, create terribly, and love imperfectly.

These five books aren’t about fixing you. They’re about remembering you were never broken, just a little sleepy, maybe. A little disconnected from your own magic.

Pick one. Or pick all five. Read them in the bath, on the subway, at 2 a.m. when you can’t sleep. Let them seep into your bones.

And if the new year feels big and scary, I’m right here with you. We don’t have to have it all figured out. We just have to keep choosing the things that make us feel most ourselves.

Which one is calling you? Tell me, I’m nosy and I care.

You’re going to have such a beautiful year.
Not because you’ll achieve everything.
But because you’ll finally let yourself feel everything.

All my love, Your friend who believes in you more than you know ♡