Two weeks ago I released my first self-help book: No More Bananas: How to Stay Calm in the Crowd Insanity. is a book that offers practical advice on staying calm and confident in today’s stressful world of social media and information overload. although very well intentioned, I realize that its effect may be quite limited. because it turns out that the effectiveness of self-help books is debatable, to say the least. why is this and what can we do to make them more effective?
There is certainly no shortage of self-help books. thousands of them are available and new ones appear every day. and they are also popular. Millions of copies have been sold of 2018’s Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck” and Steven R. Covey’s 1989 “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”—to highlight a recent example and a classic.
You are reading: Are self help books bad
Despite their popularity, there are many critics of self-help books. these can be grouped into three categories:
- Negative Effect: Self-help books give wrong and sometimes harmful advice, give false hope, make insecure people feel worse about themselves, or make people refrain from seeking professional help. support.
- placebo effect: if they already work, it is not because of the advice they give in self-help books, but because people pay attention to something that they do not they had paid attention to before.
- no effect: although people may find self-help books interesting to read (or just have), they don’t work because the advice is common sense or too simplistic and people don’t do anything with them.
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Such reviews appear in the news (like here and here), in publications that people write (like here and here), and also in various books (like here and here). the sheer volume of reviews and the tone of many of them make it seem that criticizing self-help books is just as popular as self-help books themselves.
I want to focus on the third point above: the observation that self-help books often have no effect. the other two points are also interesting, but they depend very much on the type of self-help book and the specific advice that is offered. the last point, however, is more general. So why don’t self-help books have the effect authors hoped for?
The main reason, as this article from the journal of happiness studies suggests, is usually the reader. reading a self-help book, we are the ones who decide to do something with it or not. And we usually don’t. we glance at the book, read the blurbs, or even read the book, but then go about our usual business. and we can do it freely. there is no therapist, coach, or teacher to tell us what to do or keep us on track.
While hiring a self-help book coach might be a solution, I’ve wondered numerous times while writing no more bananas how I can help the reader apply the tips on their own, without the need for someone to play games. self help police Of course, that started with making the advice very practical. But that’s not enough, because many of the self-help books contain quite practical advice that can be easily applied.
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Oddly enough, I found an answer when I was a couple of times in a Benedictine monastery. what I learned there is how you have to read the texts to really learn something from them. the “technique” they use is called lectio divina, which means “divine reading.” Originally, this referred to reading God’s word, but can also be applied to other texts, including self-help books.
The central idea of lectio divina is that you read a text very slowly and let the sentences sink in one by one. you start reading slowly until there is a paragraph or a sentence that draws you in. then you stop and reread that paragraph or sentence. and again, and again, and so on. thus, as a cow does with grass, you chew over the words until you have digested them. as she does, her mind goes to work and connects what she reads with things she already knows.
by reading in this way, you allow yourself to internalize the text you read and this significantly increases the chance that you will change your behavior and thus actually benefit from the text you read. And, as research has shown, a nice side effect is that this entire reading experience already makes you feel better. this makes applying the lectio divina technique a double-edged sword.
then, your favorite self-help book and start reading this way. I bet you can tell the difference.
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