Why Self-Help Books Don't Work

Guest Opinion

By Greg Holmes | Aug. 10, 2024

How many self-help books have you read? How many do you have on your bookshelves? Have you been on a retreat to help with some form of self-improvement, whether it be psychological, physical, or spiritual?

If you’ve done any or all of the above, you’re not alone. The business of self-help has continued to grow rapidly into a $13.2 billion industry, and there appears to be no end in sight.

Perhaps the best example of this growing interest can be seen in the proliferation of self-help books. Sales of self-help books increased 30 percent from 2020 to 2021, and the number of books in that genre has tripled each year since 2013. A Barnes and Noble bookstore in New
York City has over a quarter mile of shelf space dedicated to self-improvement books alone.

Why do we buy so many of these books? Basically, we’re looking for advice and inspiration from some self-proclaimed expert or guru that will motivate us to change our lives. We’re eager to learn the “seven steps” or the “four secrets,” about this or that, such as how to declutter our homes, lose weight, stop smoking, etc. Just name your problem and there’s plenty of advice on how to solve it!

Our hope is that once we find the right book with the right advice, our lives will finally change for the better. The problem, however, is that self-help books, no matter how well written, no matter how well researched, simply don’t work.

Why don’t they work? Take decluttering as an example. Be honest now. Do you really not know how to take things out of your house and throw them in the trash or recycle them? Or how to tidy up? Of course you do, but you just don’t want to do it. You could buy a book about how to declutter, but I bet at the end of the day that book will simply be one more thing that adds to your clutter.

It’s the same deal with so many other problems such as weight loss, smoking cessation, and procrastination, just to name a few. Again, there are plenty of self-help books on those topics, but they won’t work if you don’t want to do the hard work that they recommend.

Admit it: decluttering is boring, you want to eat what you want to eat, and there’s a part of you that actually likes to smoke—the part of you that doesn’t want to stop.

Consider the case of “Nancy” (not her real name), a psychotherapy client who struggled with depression. She became excited after finding the book The Road Less Traveled, one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. She thought she had finally found the answer to her problems.

Nancy enthusiastically highlighted passages of the book with a bright pink fluorescent marker. She brought the book to her session so I could see what was important to her. The book was divided into four sections: discipline, love, religion, and grace. When I examined the book, I found the only section absent of highlighted sentences was the section on discipline. When I asked Nancy about this, she replied she didn’t read that section as she thought it would be “boring.”

There’s the age-old proverb that where there’s a will, there’s a way. That saying is the underpinning of the philosophy of motivational cheerleaders. However, the concept of will is complicated because it is frequently ambivalent. In other words, one part of us wants to improve and change our behavior while the other part willfully avoids doing so.

Not acknowledging and addressing this ambivalence is one of the biggest problems in healthcare. Assuming patients are honest about their behaviors, want to change them, and will follow your advice is simply a recipe for frustration and provider burnout. People who refuse to follow the advice in self-help books or from their physician often feel like there is something “wrong” with them and that they are incapable of change.

“Tom” was one of my favorite clients. Each week he would share a tale of woe: deferred maintenance on his house that he wouldn’t fix, several years of overdue tax returns, sleep cycle problems because he would stay up all night playing computer games. The list never changed because his behaviors didn’t.

Tom never asked for advice, and I never gave him any. I knew advice wouldn’t work, just like a self-help book wouldn’t help. I never judged or psychoanalytically stigmatized him. Although he complained a lot about the same old things, in the end, Tom just wanted to continue being Tom.

One day toward the end of his treatment Tom asked, “Do you think all of this could be some kind of a quiet rebellion?” We both knew the answer.

Sometimes rebellions are quiet ones indeed, not just hidden from others, but also from ourselves. There was nothing “wrong” with Tom; he simply did what he wanted to do and avoided the rest.

Greg Holmes lives and writes in Traverse City.