Can Self-Help Books Actually Be Harmful?

Somehow, after all these years of evolution, you’d think we’d know better. For centuries, salesmen have been promising something for nothing—quick fixes, no-effort results, and instant, easy solutions to complex problems. And for centuries, humans have bought and followed these regimes, without much result. Temporary gains, perhaps, but the bottom-line truth, which surely we all must know, somewhere in the midnight of our most honest souls, is that there isn’t a short-cut to lasting improvement, success, or change.

You don’t get six-pack abs and an Olympian’s body without an extraordinary amount of training effort. You don’t lose 100 pounds without increasing your exercise and reducing your caloric mix and total intake. You don’t become successful by following someone else’s three rules of success. And you don’t get the strength of a hero by reading a book on the couch that lays out a no-fail paint-by-number path to strength and knowledge.

Lasting strength, knowledge, and positive change are the end result of steady, concentrated effort. And while information and assistance can be helpful along the way, those rewards generally come along uncharted paths that most of us navigate the hard way—because each person, and each battle, is unique. In the end, we all have to find our own way home, and do the work of getting there ourselves.

Of course, if you tell people that the road is tough, and there isn’t any easy map or 3-step no-fault guaranteed short-cut to the end goal … that’s harder to sell. Enough of us want so badly to believe that there’s a short-cut, or someone with the answers to give us, that Americans spend a mind-boggling $11 Billion a year on self-help (or self-improvement) books and products that promise “the way.” Or at least a shorter way.

Not that there isn’t any worthwhile information in anything lumped into the “self-improvement” category. But I’ve always been skeptical in proportion to the simplicity and ease of the products’ claims. The more absolute, simple, and cookie-cutter the promises are, the more skeptical I am. One-size, simple solutions do not fit all, and prescribing psych-lite affirmations, without digging into the deeper reasons for someone’s unhappiness, has always seemed to me like icing without any cake.
Nevertheless, I never considered even the most simplistic products anything more harmful than an ineffective waste of money. But that may not be true, according to last week’s Economist.

In a recent study conducted at the University of Waterloo, researchers discovered a surprisingly negative impact from a common self-help method. When people who had already tested as having strong self-esteem were asked to state positive affirmations during a task, it led (as expected), to higher self-esteem ratings after the task—a score of 31 as opposed to 25 for those who didn’t repeat the affirmations. But when people with low self-esteem were asked to repeat positive affirmations during the task, it actually lowered their post-task self-esteem. Those who didn’t say the affirmations scored 17; those who did averaged a much lower score of 10.
Why is that? Apparently because we tend to reject any outside comments that don’t agree with our internal beliefs about ourselves. If we’re told we’re aloof and unfriendly, and we believe we’re outgoing and sweet, we’ll most likely dismiss the comment. Which is healthy and okay, in most cases. But when people with low self-esteem are told to say things about themselves that they patently don’t believe … without any more substantial exploration and untangling of why those negative feelings exist … they apparently end up feeling even worse about themselves, because of the dissonance. They feel stupid and untruthful, on top of unlovable. Or something like that.
“Given that many readers of self-help books that encourage positive self-statements are likely to suffer from low self-esteem, [the books] may be worse than useless,” The Economist concluded.

Which is to say, once again, that short-cuts really don’t work. They can even set you back. In addition to not ending up where you hoped you would, you can also end up with disappointed expectations, and no more useful skills or wisdom to help you further down the road. As Joseph Campbell famously said … “you enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. If you are following someone else’s path, you are not going to realize your potential.”