What is Self-Help?
Self-Help is defined as “the acts of helping or bettering oneself without the aid of others”. Self-help books began printing around 200 years ago. There are thousands of self-help books and videos out in the world today, but how effective are they.
Types of Self-Help
Self Improvement focuses on self-management, effectiveness, and reaching your goals. These books make up a large portion of the top self-help books and focus on living a better life. While all of the categories focus on this to a degree this category focuses directly on this theme.
Identity is ****focused on answering the question “Who am I?”. This category focuses on knowing who you are, gaining insight, and making the right choices for yourself. This category focuses on self improvement as secondary goal in most books that focus on self improvement.
Relationship focuses on personal relations like friendships and romantic relationships. This category is more goal-oriented that the other categories as it has the specific goal of creating and maintaining satisfying relationships. These books often provide tools that focus on enhancing communications abilities.
Coping focuses on stress management and provides various tools to relax and rest. This category focuses on increasing resilience as well as changing the readers mindset. The author aims to leave the readers with a mindset that minimizes stress.
Each category of self-help has two approaches to solving these issues: growth-focused and problem-focused. Problem-focused books aim to solve a specific problem and use specific techniques to address these problems. While Growth-focused books lean more towards to theory guided activities and learning about theory.
Does self-help media work?
Long answer: People search for answers using psychology and while this may be helpful. Media tends to oversimplify, and overextend the uses of the advice.
Some of the advice is for specific scenarios and people. An example of this would be to have a more positive outlook while this make work for some it’s been shown to actually create more stress for people with anxiety. In addition. it might prevent people from getting proper care for themselves or following outdated advice. For example, venting your aggressions prolongs anger. Another example of outdated advice would be self affirmation while it make work in the short run for it to be effective in the long term you need to have affirmation from those you value. There has been no direct proof on the effectiveness of self-help books as they tend to be a one size fits all version of the psychological advice, but some problem-focused books have shown promise in their effectiveness.
Short: answer: Kind of, some of the advice is oversimplified and may have negative effects on the readers. However, problem focused books have evidence to being effective.
How to find a the right book?
When looking for a good self book there are a series of criteria too look at before purchasing it and those criteria are:
- Authors credentials
- Check to see if they have accreditations in the topics they are speaking about. Make sure that they are up to date on the latest research and are still actively working the psychology or related field.
- Treat your book like your therapist
- A good author should build a relationship with you throughout the book and allow you to feel confident in their techniques. You should adapt these techniques to your specific circumstances.
- Look at the quality of writing.
- It should be well written. This shows how much effort is put into the book itself and make sure that it’s actually providing more than just common sense.
- Decide whether the book will motivate you
- Check the books formatting and writing and make sure that it makes sense to you and that it can help you reach your goals.
- Here is a book That I’ve read and enjoyed