Best thing I ever learned is to question everything around me for real. I was literally raised on clean girl, romanticize your life, hyper individualism, therapy speak type rhetoric. Like that’s my generation. And while I don’t think it’s bad—I’m very much into aesthetic moodboards, quotes, whatever—it’s also important to ask “am I taking the best out of this? Am I going too far?” I don’t want to sit down and play piano and think to myself “wow this is healing me right now” every single time. I just want to think “wow I’m having so much fun playing the thing I’ve been daydreaming of since childhood.” Like there’s nothing wrong with “being healed” but when you’re doing everything out of romanticization, aesthetics, healing core whatever whatever, I feel like it all gets lost in translation. But that’s just me and how I’m interacting with these trends at this point in my life
Same thing with hyper individualism honestly. Do people who thrive on being alone exist? Absolutely. More power to them. But also does everyone have to be that way?? Totally not. Are there periods of our lives where we have to be strong and content only w our own company? Yes, and I don’t think advice along those lines is misleading. But it’s also okay to want community and to work for community. You don’t need to pathologize that as anxious attachment core, needy, desperate whatever. I think that’s what I mean. Like there is truth in a lot of modern day advice, and I do think we’re a more emotionally aware generation if that makes sense??, but I want to extract the best out of these things and discard the rest. I definitely don’t wanna be sucked in. And honestly if your only reading diet is self help books you will be sucked in
I’m very critical of self help books, with the exception of books written by actual PsyDs or those with degrees or equivalent expertise in a subject. Everything else feels predatory and a sham and you can get good enough advice akin to those books from advice blogs or something, not an entire self help book written by someone who used to run a blog and repurposed their posts into a half assed book. (Check out the If Books Could Kill podcast on Spotify btw, they delve into the con artist / shoddy background behind very popular books like Atomic Habits and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck) Anyway I’m all for self improvement, but (and this is as much a reminder to myself) it’s important to strike the balance of being diligent while not also going overboard and being sucked into those trends. 🩷 And that’s hard to distinguish for us because we’re literally fish swimming through the water of it all, but it’s at least important to keep in mind!!!
Jumping on this because I feel the discussion around this (self help) tends to fall into either extremes (bad or good).
I'll start with a broad statement: the big problem with self-help and the way it is generally approached in our day and age is that it individualizes problems. Can you get better by working on yourself? Oh, absolutely. But...
— 1. The way we frame things in our minds translates into how we approach them in our lives. It's good to acknowledge desires for self-improvement, but we need to be careful of how we go about it.
—1. a If you're serious about it, you will need to ask yourself: is it because I'm following whatever trend is popular these days? And while that trend might be new, is it generally reinforcing what is considered good on a broader societal scale? You can't dodge these questions. Because peer pressure/FOMO/societal norms affect you. We humans are social creatures, no one is immune to this. Recognize it can affect your judgment/desires. And don't forget it can go the other way too. Are you reluctant to adress something a trend is based on *because* it is popular?
—1. b You following a trend (for the purpose of this addition, let's say, self help) is not inherently bad. But it may not translate well into commitment or the best approach for you. Trends will be co-opted by people looking to sell you stuff (capitalism baby!). And in the self-help department, that translate into 2 big dynamics that play off each other. Some people will make the problem bigger than it is in order to convince you need help (and the extreme of this being that some people will downright lie and make things up). The other dynamic is to never adress the a broader societal playing field in which you actually live. If people can convince you it is *exclusively an individual problem* in order to sell you stuff, they will.
—1. c. The lens of aesthetics will end up flattening your experiences, because the aesthetic/look will be the overarching goal. Not the approach you chose, not the journey to get there. And we also may like the idea more than the lived reality of said idea put into practice. It is pleasant to think ''this is what a healthy or put together person looks like/acts like''. It might be infinitely more unpleasant to learn what actual work you need to put in to see results yourself + unless you know a person intimately, you will likely never know if they are ''put together'' or ''healthy''. Change is rarely a pleasant process, people put up fronts, and ''healthy'' hasn't got just the one definitive look you can rely on (like, oh I don't know, being thin being considered a sign of good health).
—1. d. Outside of an aesthetic lens, you will be tempted to look through your journey with self help through an ''optimization lens''. That's a pitfall eveyone falls into to some extent (and outside of self help too). We are incintivized to look at very moment of our lives like it needs to be allocated to something and to pay off. This is pervasive, and it's not just ''I need to have results'' way of thinking. It's more insidious and less pragmatic than that. It's more like ''I need to optimize every moment of my life to get the best out of it''. Some of that underlying reasoning for it can be logical (good rest leads to better work after all), but it can be taken to an extreme (if I don't rest well I'm basically wasting my time). Or said differently, it's a performance lens applied even outside of work, with a deep emphasis on ''positivity'' and avoiding ''unproductivity'' at all costs (capitalism baby!).
— 2. As any endeavor where you end up working on yourself: you will need time and probably lots of it too. Some of our behaviors and beliefs can take years to properly recognize and adress, especially so if you do it ''on your own'' or with limited support.
— 3. If you seek mental health professionals at some point, remember mental health professionals are people too. They grew up in the same societal playing field as you. They're not all knowning. They have their own blindspots and short comings, and they might not question norms as much as you think they do (regarding health in general, not just mental health). Some may be active enforcers of said societal norms. These professionals also will have received training/education on specific subjects that, by the time you may seek them out, might be outdated or proved to be rather ineffiecient because the underlying issue proved to be more complex than it was previously thought to be (examples: weight gain and weight loss, the whole perspective on what is or what isn't considered a mental disorder, etc...). Lastly, these professionals also might not be critical of their own fields or its various methods of therapy/processes... And oh, some of those can't be bad if they're widely adopted inside the professional field, right? (*this is me squinting at the BMI index, not designed for medical use in mind and in fact was conceived to be a purely statistical tool applied to a very limited population, as well as being developed in a very specific era and setting that ran directly off an eugenist worldview*).
— 4. At some point there's a threshold you won't be able to cross, no matter how much time or effort you would be able to dedicate to it. We can't rewrite our entire history nor can we can't erase formative experiences from ourselves, and our bodies and our minds are not separate. Brendan Lee Mulligan has a very evocative way of talking about this, referring to the formative childhood years and like it's comparable to ''the 1st passing through the washing machine and that it sets a temperature''.
— 5. Some of your problems can be lessened by seeking self-help and adopting a new perspective and changing your behaviors, yes, a hundred times yes. But a decent portion of problems we face consistently throughout our lives likely won't be solved by self-help, or at the very least, not entirely. You can try to be mindful and practice self care as much as you want, but if your situation is the result of imposed norms or exterior constraints, say, like working long hours or in conditions that are putting your mental or/and physical health to the test and you can't effectively rest? You need material change, and you can't therapy talk yourself out of your material conditions.
— 6. Last point, but if you need to take something away from this let it be this thing. Self-help as it operates today (trend, market) puts the responsability for change entirely on you + frames it essentially as a ''perspective'' you need to shift and ''adjustments'' you need to make (back to the optimization lens).
The most illustrious exemple of this is the famous ''you got the same 24 hours a day as Beyoncé'' kind of talk.
Okay, first of all: bullshit. You don't got the same social or financial capital nor the network Beyoncé has. Second of all: this talking point is a rationalization and also just there to stroke your ego (otherwise, why bring Beyoncé or any other celebrities into this?).
''If this person can make it, so can you'' coupled with ''look this person is successful because they have the right mindset/habits''. It frames success (and everything we come to associate with it) as a consequence of ''healthy'' or ''productive'' habits/mindset. It denies the role of luck and opportunities as well as limitations, and infers the thing that's holding everyone back is willpower and effort. It may come from people who genuinely mean well. But don't be fooled. Scrape off the paint and this is a ''the meritocracy exists'' argument disguised as motivation.
End notes
A very good point is the diversity of our sources, whether for self-help or anything else you might want to pursue: you need to have a variety of different sources.
One last thing though: being critical is good, but we can also fall into the over extreme. Questioning everyting will take a toll on you. Some of us can't help it, but regardless, at some point it becomes counterproductive. This is where I probably should say ''touch grass'' or something. .
