5 Books That’ll Help You Get Unstuck When You’re in a Funk

You wake up one morning, and your brain is in a fog of meh.

You have things to do, but dragging your dead ass out of bed to do any of them sounds worse than sandpapering a bobcat’s backside inside a telephone booth.

I work for myself, from a motorhome in Tucson, on my own schedule. Which sounds like the conditions under which a person should never be in a funk. 

And yet, sometimes I wake up, and my iPad is sitting right there, and I still can’t make myself open it. I stare at it, and it stares back. My favorite podcast hosts sound like the teacher from the Charlie Brown specials.

The saguaros outside the window are doing their thing, and I’m doing…nothing.

I call this The Funk. The big, sluggish thing that catches a free ride on your shoulders and has no idea when it’s overstayed its welcome.

One of the few things that reliably helps me tell The Funk to go play hide-and-go stuff itself is the right book. Not the kind that wants you waking up at 5 AM and doing cold plunges, or the ones that ask you to “journal your way to a breakthrough.”

The books that meet you where you are and don’t make you feel worse about being there.

Here are five that have done that for me.

1 | Make It Mighty Ugly — Kim Piper Werker

If you identify as creative, one of your biggest fears is probably that everything you make will be terrible. This book says great, make something terrible on purpose, and see what happens.

Werker walks you through intentionally creating ugly things, then takes you into why you avoid creating at all. The demons she names, perfectionism, the fear of wasting supplies, the need for the first draft to be the last draft, are specific enough to feel like she’s been watching you through a window.

This book is the reason I stopped waiting until I felt “ready” and started treating first attempts like placeholders rather than evidence of my abilities.

In any medium, I now start out assuming the first thing I do is going in the trash. It makes every first step about 40% less terrifying.

2 | The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck — Sarah Knight

The title is a riff on Marie Kondo’s book, which should tell you where this is headed.

If you have a solid sense of humor and a healthy relationship with four-letter words, this is a practical book about spending less time and energy on things you don’t care about and giving yourself permission to stop doing them without becoming the person everyone hates.

The Joy vs. Annoy framework alone is worth it. You make two lists: things that bring you joy, things that annoy you. Then you figure out where your time is going. It’s not complicated, but for some of us, it is extremely confronting.

Knight is funny. She’s also clear that not giving a certain number of f*cks doesn’t mean being careless with people’s feelings. The book threads that needle better than the title suggests.

3 | Fire the Haters — Jillian Johnsrud

This one is for anyone who’s sat on something they made for six months because they were terrified of what someone on the internet might say about it.

Johnsrud covers three things: dealing with actual online critics (the trolls, the bad-faith commenters, the people whose whole deal is to make you feel small), dealing with the inner critic that shows up before you even publish anything, and figuring out how to keep going after you’ve had a real failure.

What makes it useful is that it’s not theoretical. She’s been a content creator long enough to have steered through all three of these in real life, and the advice reads like what a more experienced friend would tell you over coffee, not what a business coach would tell you in a webinar.

The section on imposter syndrome is the best part. If “procrastination masquerading as preparation” describes your creative life, you’ll recognize yourself in this book.

4 | We Need Your Art — Amie McNee

Aime’s book was published in 2025, and I’ve already recommended it to anyone who will listen.

McNee’s whole argument is that what stops most of us from making art isn’t a lack of time or skill, it’s the mental blocks we’ve built up around whether we’re allowed to call ourselves artists, whether anyone needs what we make, and whether we’re taking up too much space by wanting this.

She covers perfectionism, the inner critic, procrastination, and imposter syndrome, but she does so as a creative coach who’s lived them, not as a productivity expert who’s solved them.

The sustainable small-steps framework is practical without being prescriptive: a sketch every evening, 500 words a day, and one thing that moves the work forward.

The journal prompts throughout are useful if you’re the kind of person who processes by writing. And if you’re not, you can skip them and still get a ton of value out of this book.

5 | Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself — Dr. Kristin Neff

I’m putting this one last because it’s the most different from the others, and also the most necessary.

Neff is a researcher, not a self-help writer, and it shows. The case she makes for self-compassion is grounded in empirical studies, and the distinction she draws between self-compassion and self-pity is worth the price of the book alone.

The core argument is that being hard on yourself doesn’t make you work harder or do better. It makes you scared, stuck, and more likely to avoid the things you’re already struggling with. 

Self-compassion, treating yourself with the same basic decency you’d extend to a friend going through the same thing, is what creates the psychological safety to try.

For neurodivergent people, late bloomers, people who grew up being told they weren’t living up to their potential, this one hits differently than it might for someone who didn’t carry that for decades.

The Funk is not a you problem. It visits everyone, including people with dream jobs, flexible schedules, and saguaros outside their window. 

What these five authors understand, and what most productivity advice gets completely wrong, is that there’s no single way through it. 

Werker says make something ugly. Knight says stop doing the things that drain you. Johnsrud says stop letting the fear of other people’s opinions run your creative life.

McNee says your art is needed, whether you believe it or not right now. Neff says you deserve the same basic decency you’d extend to anyone else who was struggling.

You don’t have to make ugly things and practice self-compassion or fire your haters all at once. Start with whichever author sounds most like someone you’d want to sit next to at a coffee shop.

If you’ve read any of these, or if you have a book in mind that didn’t make my list and probably should have, drop it in the comments. I’m always adding to my pile of e-books (because The Funk will always return).