When Does Self-Help Harm rather than Help?

It depends on what kind of story it generates

Although self-help is one of the most popular and, arguably, impactful genres out there, many people are highly critical of it. A common charge against self-help is that self-help doesn’t actually help those who consume it, but instead keeps them trapped in a cycle of feeling broken and not good enough, ensuring that they keep looking for the next miracle cure.

Others worry that self-help makes us self-centred and feeds our narcissistic tendencies. However, the aim of all good self-help is never just to become an ever more highly optimized and productive entity that gets better and better at securing personal advantages in a largely hostile world. For we are above all relational and meaning-making animals, in need of connection and deeper purpose. We tend to lose rather than find ourselves when we go in pursuit of purely self-centered goals such as more money, influence, status, and power. The top of Maslow’s pyramid of needs was never actually self-actualization, but self-transcendence. Most philosophers of old knew that - the Stoics, too, subscribed to a profoundly relational conception of the self, which sometimes gets lost in modern Stoic frameworks.

The hero’s journey blueprint confirms the ultimate purpose of all self-development. But, just as in the case of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, most people talking about the hero’s journey leave out the final, most important part of that ancient story script. After heeding the call to adventure and defeating the monster/their shadow-self in a foreign land/the realm of the subconscious, the hero returns to their kingdom transformed – in the sense of ‘less self-obsessed’ and ‘better able to serve others.’ In addition, the hero tends to come back with a boon or wisdom in tow which they then generously share with their people.

Self-Optimization vs Self-Improvement

I have always distinguished between self-optimization and self-improvement in my writing and in my own coaching practice. The former centres on the mind-as-computer metaphor and understands the self as a machine-like entity that can be enhanced, rewired, debugged and reprogrammed, and the output of which can be speeded up and maximized. The aim of the optimized self is to function seamlessly and be as productive as possible. The non-optimized self is in danger of becoming obsolete or dysfunctional, unable to compete in the fast-changing marketplace.

In the self-optimization framework, productivity and efficiency are end values. Longevity, looksmaxxing and health-span enhancement hacks are more recent additions to the list of common optimization-aims (Ketogenic diets and the benefits of various supplements and exercise routines are prominent topics in many self-help podcasts right now).

But the problem with the self-optimization approach is that aims such as productivity, efficiency and longevity are simply not satisfying end-goals in their own right. They are only ever means to an end. And this end tends to remain ill-defined. But we have to ask: productivity and efficiency for what purpose – to achieve what exactly? What will we seek to do with our enhanced health- and life-spans? Why do we want to live longer in the first place? Of course it is preferable to be productive, efficient and healthy, but we still need to put that productivity, efficiency and health to work - to use it for something, to harness it for a purpose. In other words, being a highly productive person obsessed with health-span maximization cannot and should not be the sole meaning of our life. It can only be a good basis for achieving that meaning, whatever that may be.

Self-improvement is a much more useful concept. I understand self-improvement as a life-long process of self-understanding and self-acceptance that enables us to direct our energy outwards – towards the people and projects we care about. It allows us to make sense of ourselves, to live better with ourselves and not waste our energies in inner-psychological warfare. It frees up the energy we would otherwise lose in subconscious pattern repetition and acts of self-sabotage so that it can flow outwards – to what lies beyond the self. Self-improvement understood this way is a pre-condition for self-transcendence.

Self-improvement also entails seeing ourselves as life-long learners, as people driven by curiosity, openness and the desire to grow and become better members of our communities, large and small. Life-long learning includes learning about ourselves – our patterns, their origins, and their current functions. When we understand ourselves better we can accept ourselves better and manage our tricky and irrational parts with more self-compassion.

Self-Help Isn’t the Problem - Bad Stories Are

I profoundly disagree with the sadly all too common notion that self-help is a money-making industry run by ruthless charlatans homing in on our psychological weaknesses, and that there is something inherently embarrassing about the consumption of self-help. I am proud to be both a writer and reader of self-help. It’s an important genre and it is also a deeply impactful genre - millions of people read it, and they also seek directly to apply learnings from self-help in their daily lives to change their core beliefs and behaviours. It is ridiculous to think of self-help as a monolithic entity and to condemn all of it outright. That is like saying, ‘the novel is bad,’ when it is clearly a vast and complex genre in which bad, mediocre and absolutely brilliant works co-exist. The same is true of self-help.

Of course, there bad actors and questionable trends, and there is outright deranged self-help out there, such as manifesting, in which, to quote Jefferson Airplane, ‘logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead’. And bad self-help triggers bad stories: it makes us feel not good enough, it casts us as broken, and, on top of that, it makes us feel ashamed because the cure hasn’t worked. Often, we blame ourselves for that rather than the questionable cures. When we have failed to manifest vast riches or a dream partner, we feel even worse than before.

But there are also many excellent writers and podcasters out there who have genuinely interesting and helpful insights to share. The appetite for that is enormous, because so many of us long for more wisdom and better frameworks for understanding ourselves. And they help us tell ourselves better stories about ourselves and others – more understanding, more compassionate, less self-centred, more other- and world-oriented ones.

Ultimately, the desire to improve ourselves, to be more at ease and at peace with ourselves and the world, and to become more able to direct our attention and energy to what truly matters, is ancient. Philosophers and spiritual teachers have talked about how to achieve the good life and become better people for millennia. It is clearly a timeless longing, and a large part of what makes us human in the first place. It’s a shame, then, that most modern philosophers have largely abandoned this task, and it is partly for that reason that modern self-help has exploded as a genre.

Self-help deserves a better, more nuanced story, too. Nothing is bad about our desire to tell ourselves better stories about ourselves and others. If the advice we consume makes us feel more broken and more deficient, however, and results in shame and guilt, it is obviously not helpful. But if it succeeds in giving us even just small impulses that can help us make better sense of ourselves and others, it is surely a good thing.

Images: Shiromani Kant @Unsplash