Self-help
Self-help or self-improvement is a self-directed improvement of oneself[1]—economically, physically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
When engaged in self-help, people often use publicly available information, or
Many different self-help group programs exist, each with its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents, and in some cases
Self-help groups associated with health conditions may consist of patients and caregivers. As well as featuring long-time members sharing experiences, these health groups can become support groups and clearinghouses for educational material. Those who help themselves by learning and identifying health problems can be said to exemplify self-help, while self-help groups can be seen more as peer-to-peer or mutual-support groups.
History
In classical antiquity, Hesiod's Works and Days "opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of."[4]: 94
The
The genre of
The hyphenated compound word "self-help" often appeared in the 1800s in a legal context, referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use lawful means on their initiative to remedy a wrong.[5]
Some consider the self-help movement to have been inaugurated by
Early 20th century
In 1902, James Allen published As a Man Thinketh, which proceeds from the conviction that "a man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." Noble thoughts, the book maintains, make for a noble person, while lowly thoughts make for a miserable person. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the use of repeated positive thoughts to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an "Infinite Intelligence".[8]: 62
In 1936,
The market
Group and corporate attempts to help people help themselves have created a self-help marketplace, with
A subgenre of self-help book series exists, such as the
Statistics
At the start of the 21st century, "the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal coaching, [was] said to constitute a 2.48-billion dollars-a-year industry"
Self-help and professional service delivery
Self-help and mutual-help are very different from—though they may complement—aid by professionals.[15]
Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some professionals considering that, for example, "the twelve-step approach encourages a kind of contemporary version of 19th-century amateurism or enthusiasm in which self-examination and very general social observations are enough to draw rather large conclusions."[16]
Research
The rise of self-help culture led to boundary disputes with other approaches and disciplines. Some would object to their classification as "self-help" literature, as with "Deborah Tannen's denial of the self-help role of her books" to maintain her academic credibility, aware of the danger that "writing a book that becomes a popular success...all but ensures that one's work will lose its long-term legitimacy."[3]: 195 & 245
Placebo effects can never be wholly discounted. Careful studies of "the power of subliminal self-help tapes... showed that their content had no real effect... But that's not what the participants thought."[17]: 264 "If they thought they'd listened to a self-esteem tape (even though half the labels were wrong), they felt that their self-esteem had gone up. No wonder people keep buying subliminal tapes: even though the tapes don't work, people think they do."[17]: 265
Much of the self-help industry may be thought of as part of the "skin trades. People need haircuts, massage, dentistry, wigs and glasses, sociology and surgery, love and advice."[18]: 6 —a skin trade, "not a profession and a science".[18]: 7 Its practitioners thus function as "part of the personal service industry rather than as mental health professionals."[3]: 229 While "there is no proof that twelve-step programs 'are superior to any other intervention in reducing alcohol dependence or alcohol-related problems',"[16]: 178–79 at the same time it is clear that "there is something about 'groupishness' itself which is curative."[19] Thus for example "smoking increases mortality risk by a factor of just 1.6, while social isolation does so by a factor of 2.0... suggest[ing] an added value to self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous as surrogate communities."[20]
Some psychologists advocate for positive psychology, and explicitly embrace an empirical self-help philosophy. "[T]he role of positive psychology is to become a bridge between the ivory tower and the main street—between the rigor of academe and the fun of the self-help movement."[21] They aim to refine the self-improvement field by intentionally increasing scientifically sound research and well-engineered models. The division of focus and methodologies has produced several sub-fields, in particular: general positive psychology, focusing primarily on studying psychological phenomenon and effects; and personal effectiveness, focusing primarily on analysis, design, and implementation of qualitative personal growth. The latter of these includes intentionally training new patterns of thought and feeling. As business strategy communicator Don Tapscott puts it, "Why not courses that emphasize designing a great brain?... The design industry is something done to us. I'm proposing we each become designers. But I suppose 'I love the way she thinks' could take on new meaning."[22]
Both self-talk—the propensity to engage in verbal or mental self-directed conversation and thought—and social support can be used as instruments of self-improvement, often via empowering action-promoting messages. Psychologists designed experiments to shed light on how self-talk can result in self-improvement. Research has shown that people prefer second-person pronouns over first-person pronouns when engaging in self-talk to achieve goals, regulate their behavior, thoughts, or emotions, and facilitate performance.[23]
Self-talk also plays an important role in regulating emotions under social stress. People who use non-first-person language tend to exhibit a higher level of visual distance during the process of introspection, indicating that using non-first-person pronouns and one's own name may result in enhanced self-distancing.[24][25] This form of self-help can enhance people's ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under social stress, which would lead them to appraise social-anxiety-provoking events in more challenging and less threatening terms.[25]
Criticism
Scholars have targeted many self-help claims as misleading and incorrect.
Self-help writers have been described as working "in the area of the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized… although a veneer of scientism permeates the[ir] work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing."[16]: 173
Christopher Buckley in his book God Is My Broker asserts: "The only way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one".[28]
Gerald Rosen raised concerns that psychologists were promoting untested self-help books with exaggerated claims rather than conducting studies that could advance the effectiveness of these programs to help the public.[29] Rosen noted the potential benefits of self-help but cautioned that good intentions were not sufficient to assure the efficacy and safety of self-administered instructional programs. Rosen and colleagues observed that many psychologists promote untested self-help programs rather than contributing to the meaningful advancement of self-help.[30]
In the media
Kathryn Schulz suggests that "the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry’s existence".[31]
Parodies and fictional analogies
The self-help world has become the target of parodies. Walker Percy's odd genre-busting Lost in the Cosmos[32] has been described as "a parody of self-help books, a philosophy textbook, and a collection of short stories, quizzes, diagrams, thought experiments, mathematical formulas, made-up dialogue".[33]
Al Franken's self-help guru persona Stuart Smalley was a ridiculous recurring feature on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s.
In their 2006 book Secrets of The SuperOptimist, authors W.R. Morton and Nathaniel Whitten revealed the concept of "super optimism" as a humorous antidote to the overblown self-help book category.
In his comedy special Complaints and Grievances (2001), George Carlin observes that there is "no such thing" as self-help: anyone looking for help from someone else does not technically get "self" help; and one who accomplishes something without help did not need help to begin with.[34]
In Margaret Atwood's semi-satiric dystopia Oryx and Crake, university literary studies have declined to the point that the protagonist, Snowman, is instructed to write his thesis on self-help books as literature; more revealing of the authors and of the society that produced them than genuinely helpful.
See also
- Arete
- Conduct book
- Dale Carnegie
- Individualism
- Internal locus of control
- Law of attraction (New Thought)
- Life hack
- List of twelve-step groups
- Live in the Moment
- Lucinda Redick Bassett
- Manifestation
- Mirror-of-princes writing
- Mutual aid society
- Mutual self-help housing
- Napoleon Hill
- Neurohacking
- New Thought Movement
- Outline of self
- Personal development
- Popular psychology
- Positive psychology
- Preschool education
- Self Awareness
- Self-experimentation
- Self-healing
- Self-help groups for mental health
- Self (psychology)
- Self-sustainability
- Self-taught
- Sophism
- The Secret (2006 film)
- Think and Grow Rich
- Twelve-step program
References
- ^ a b c VandenBos, Gary R., ed. (2007). APA Dictionary of Physicology (1st ed.). Washington: American Psychological Association.
- ^ ISBN 1-4000-5409-5.
- ^ a b c d e McGee, Micki (2005). Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ a b Boardman, John (1991). The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) traces legal usage back to at least 1875; whereas it detects "self-help" as a moral virtue as early as 1831 in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus.
- ^ Van Wyhe, John (2004). Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. p. 189.
- ^ Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1841). "Compensation". Essays. p. 22.
- ^ ISBN 0-7658-0964-8.
- ISBN 0-07-142680-9.
- ISBN 978-0-534-63264-9.
...programs that claim to increase self-awareness and facilitate constructive personal change.
- ISBN 978-0-7879-6741-3.
- ^ Denison, Charles Wayne. The children ofest: A study of the experience and perceived effects of a large group awareness training (The Forum). University of Denver, 1994. p. 48.
- ^ "Self-Improvement Market in U.S. Worth $9.6 Billion" (Press release). PRWeb. September 21, 2006. Archived from the original on April 21, 2007. Retrieved 2008-12-18.
Marketdata Enterprises, Inc., a leading independent market research publisher, has released a new 321-page market study entitled: The U.S. Market For Self-Improvement Products & Services.
- ISSN 0028-7369. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
We have, however, developed an $11 billion industry dedicated to telling us how to improve our lives.
- S2CID 7492660.
- ^ ISBN 9780226137797.
- ^ a b Smith, Eliot R.; Mackie, Diane M. (2007). Social Psychology. Hove.
- ^ a b O'Neill, John (1972). Sociology as a Skin Trade. London: Harper & Row.
- ^ Berne, Eric (1976). A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Penguin. p. 294.
- ^ Goleman, Daniel (1996). Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury. p. 178.
- ^ Ben-Shachar, Tal (2010). "Giving Positive Psychology Away". In Snyder, C. R.; et al. (eds.). Positive Psychology. Sage. p. 503.
- ^ Tapscott, Don. "Designing Your Mind". Edge.org world question center: What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?. p. 7. Archived from the original on 2011-01-20.
- .
- .
- ^ PMID 24467424.
- ^ a b Kunkel, Vicki (2009). Instant Appeal. p. 94.
- ^ a b McAllister, R. J. (2007). Emotion: Mystery or Madness?. pp. 156–57.
- ISBN 978-0-06-097761-0.
- PMID 3565914.
It is a somewhat beautiful fact that the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry's existence.
External links
- Self-Help at Curlie