Self-help books and gurus tell us to optimize every microsecond, enforce unwavering self-discipline, and curate a life like an all-smiles highlight reel.
While wanting to improve isn’t a bad thing, the need to always be productive and happy can turn into a highway to more discontentment. We’re Pavloved into obeying fleeting trends in health, fashion, and productivity. We’re constantly on-call to do more, better, and faster. Only to be told that the side effects of modernity – the anxiety, depression, the ADHD, are signs of some shameful psychological impurity.
Yes, humans are innately designed to learn, grow, and seek success. But if you feel like you’re falling behind despite chugging down one self-help book after the other, it’s time to slow down and observe where the bottleneck lies.
Self-optimization fatigue: when self-help becomes exhausting
According to Danish psychologist, Dr. Svend Brinkmann, we’ve become obsessed with achieving ideals curated by society. So much that we’ve become less equipped to live a meaningful life. To live a life with genuine connections and contributions.
Why? Because chasing these ideals is downright exhausting. This is known as self-optimization fatigue.
We’re also expected to be happy all the time. Which, turns out, is tough when you’re constantly being told you can do better, be more positive, and be more productive.
I know, alleviating self-optimization fatigue sounds like its own version of self-help. And it probably is. But on a deeper level, it’s about slowing down and nurturing the right intentions so that we see the growth in our gruel.
Problems with the self-help industry
Blind generalization
Most self-help advice can be extremely my-way-or-the-highway. Do X, get Y. But life presents us we too many variabilities to reduce everything down to one simple equation. And God only knows where half of these self-help gurus came from. You’ve likely been through the pain of sifting through content after content – deciding what’s credible and what’s pure BS.
Supply needs demand
The self-help industry is largely market-driven rather than peer-reviewed. Frontlined by persuasive speeches backed by rhetoric to sell. We’re sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading (cue Goop’s stone vaginal inserts that allegedly strengthen women’s pelvic-floor muscles while eliminating “negative energy.”)
After all, we aren’t meant to buy one iPhone and be satisfied. The same is true of self-improvement.
Low adherence to change
What determines the success of a self-help piece is the reader’s adherence to positive behaviors. Not the number of books the reader reads. Just like seeing a doctor: A successful prognosis largely depends on adherence to treatment. Not how often they Google their symptoms.
You may read a lot about how to be a better conversationalist. But you won’t see change without that actually networking with others. Behavioral change is not easy. That’s why people rarely adhere to the behaviors prescribed by books and gurus. It requires persistence, accountability, and action – not pure studying.
So, how do we make sure that self-help, helps?
1. Be interested in something beyond yourself
If you’re waiting to achieve an ideal self before you can be happy, you’re in for a life of misery. Especially when society is curated to exacerbate our sense of inferiority.
To truly be happy is to be interested in causes beyond the self. And let happiness be a by-product instead of a goal. You don’t need to be a productivity master to help out someone in need, you just need to be a human with a heart. True personal growth happens when we get in touch with humanity.
2. Limits can be liberating
Many self-help aficionados want you to live a “life without limits”. That freedom is about creating unlimited time, money, energy, so that you can do more, buy more and be more. The truth is, without limits, we cannot be free.
As American technologist John Maeda highlights in his book The Laws of Simplicity, “In the field of design there is the belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.” Limitations are liberating frameworks that force you to streamline your work, to teach us that we are capable of doing more with less.
3. Acceptance before greatness
There are two types of people that seek self-help content
- Group 1: Those hoping to get themselves from a state of discontentment to acceptance
- Group 2: Those hoping to get themselves from a state of acceptance to greatness
Those in the first group believe they’re a fundamentally flawed person. They will assume every choice they make is bad and hence they always feel dejected. They think success happens when they finally pull off someone else’s lifestyle verbatim.
Ironically, for self-help to be effective is to have the one precondition that self-help gurus can’t give you: self-acceptance. And that’s why the second group is more likely to benefit from their books, podcasts, and gurus.
4. Slowing down with lectio divina
You probably find yourself buying more books and feeling good about how many books you’ve read over the year. Each year, you consume more content, more quickly. Yet, you still find yourself far from your goals, but closer to information overload and a frazzled mind.
This is when you can embrace the technique of lectio divina, which means ‘divine reading’. This concept originally referred to reading the bible, but it should be applied to other texts as well. Reading self-help content this way allows you to internalize what you’ve read. And this significantly increases the depth of understanding.
5. Guides, not rules
No self-help advice is one-size-fits-all. That’s why all advice should be taken with a grain of salt. To acknowledge that it might not always work for us. To use them as guiding principles rather than hard rules.
Taking advice with a grain of salt means all we’re really doing is receiving guiding points. How we apply those guides, how we adapt them to suit ourselves, how we determine if they work – should be the key outcomes of any advice we read.
Concluding thoughts
We all deserve to reach self-actualization. But to do so isn’t by blindly imitating the Tim Ferris’ and Charles Duhiggs of the world. Sometimes, it’s about accepting that things don’t need to be hyper-optimized to have value.
For self-help to actually help, we have to pace ourselves and observe the systems we’re being raised in. To understand that not everything is in our control, and accept that it’s okay. Because eventually, there are still things that are within our control, and that’s where we nurture our true potential.
