Can Your Favourite Self-Help Book Really Solve Your Problems?

Here is some ugly truth for you, self-help books can not solve your problems. Can it help you to solve them? Not really. Can it help you to find a reason of your problem and motivate you to solve it? Yes, it does. Sometimes. Some people just forget about what self help books are actually doing.

Another truth is kind of obvious but not so obvious to those who are into these types of books. And that's what it is there is really nothing new has been said in any of the self-help books. All these things have been around for thousands of years, there's pretty much nothing you find on a self-help shelf is new. That's fine because what does change and what does matter is the packaging. That might sound a little bit disparaging but packaging is incredibly important, that's because humans are weird with advice. Just imagine how many times in your life have your parents told you to do something and you completely ignored them? Then three months later your friend tells you to do the exact same thing and you're like, "Oh my God, that's brilliant." That's because our receptivity to ideas and advice has to do with the context in which we receive it, who is giving the advice, how we're feeling when we receive the advice and how the advice is framed and explained. Self-help exists not because this information isn't already out there, it just hasn't been distributed. By repackaging timeless wisdom and basic human knowledge, these ideas can get distributed to more people than ever before. 

Here's the most important point, self-help ideas are simple but difficult, they are easy to understand but really difficult to actually go to do. Studying for biology exam is not simple, it's very complex but the physical act of sitting down and opening a book is quite easy.  Similarly, dealing with a panic attack is technically quite simple you just breathe. But for whatever reason in that moment it is unbelievably difficult to actually do it. Or let's take the mother of all self-improvement goals, losing weight, it's not rocket science, you eat some vegetables, you lift the weight, you go for a run. Yet, pretty much none of us do it regularly. This is because self-help problems are not intellectual problems like studying for an exam, or physical problems like figuring out how to cook food. They are emotional problems and emotional problems tend to appear extremely simple on the outside, like just eat a vegetable. This is where the packaging of self-help comes in, the way ideas are packaged can do a lot to alleviate the emotional difficulty of these problems in the short run.

You read a self-help book and you start thinking, "Oh my God, what excuse do I have?" And that's great, that's some really good stuff for a while because here's the thing, that ability to lean into emotionally difficult things, to push your comfort zone, it's a skill, we have to develop it over time. And while a book can give you a burst of motivation to lean into that difficulty in the short-term, it can't do it for you in the long-term. You can't magically get that skill from a book, or a seminar. You have to go and do it yourself.

So, the first great self-help book is amazing, it's wonderful, it's life-changing. Then life gets tough again and you need to learn something else that's simple but difficult. So you read another book and it helps a little or a bit. So you need to go back and read your favorite book again. And that helps just a little but not as much as you'd like it to, not as much as the first time. And this is where self-help books can actually start to suck. And the reason is "Learning can feel like progress even when it's not progress." So while self-help starts out as a solution, it can quickly become another part of the problem, another way to avoid our struggles instead of actually dealing with them.Styig for biology exam is not s

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