The Trap of Self-Help Books and Articles

Something as simple as reading a book will not make us become a new person.

Imagine that in cooking recipes they don't give you the ingredients, or that to learn how to dance a tango they explain in writing "6 tips to dance a tango", without images, photos, videos or drawings. Nothing. I could explain the logic of why you have to use the frying pan and not the oven, but without the ingredients it's going to be quite difficult for you to cook the recipe anyway, isn't it?

Well if that seems difficult to you, I assure you that everyone can learn how to make a carrot cake in a couple of tries, and everyone can memorize the steps of a tango by repeating them with their own feet over and over again. And on the contrary, there are people who spend years trying to overcome a depression or a personality problem. And yet, while a written article doesn't even think about teaching you how to dance, they do believe that in five minutes of reading they can change your life. But they don't. And as hard as it is to admit, it is the same deception as self-help books..

The importance of experiential learning

Let's see, to walk you learn by walking, to speak you learn by speaking, to write you learn by writing, to swim you learn by swimming. On that basis, it is unlikely that by reading a book you will be able to overcome a problem that you have been dragging along for a good part of your life. I don't want to be a spoilsport, but this kind of problems drag emotions and behaviors. Just as a book is not going to teach you to dance or drive, a book is not going to teach you to put into practice behaviors that are not even in your usual repertoire of behaviors. No book teaches you how to face fear, nor can it do it for you.. It is something you have to do and it is not easy, because if we could choose, we would not feel sadness, fear or anxiety about certain things and our life would be simpler. If you could choose, surely you would already have the life you want because no emotion would be an obstacle.

Self-help books tell you things like "do things that cheer you up", "look for support in your loved ones", "be more positive, look at everything from the point of view explained below". But this has two drawbacks.

Lack of individual treatment

First, have you thought about whether the behaviors the book talks about are going to help you? I mean, are they going to help you personally? Psychological treatments are individual for a reasonYou analyze what it is that the patient values and what it is that causes him/her discomfort, how and why. To him and not to someone else. Self-help books sell like hot water to everyone. For example, the behavior of building relationships and creating a larger support network: this idea of showing off our gregariousness that many self-help manuals pick up on doesn't really go for everyone.

Although studies show that people with more positive social relationships are generally happier, introverted people don't particularly enjoy getting together with large groups of friends to do things together, in fact they enjoy a good book and low external stimulation more. So maybe the problem with your sadness doesn't lie in the fact that you need more people in your life or that you need to interact with them more.

What if you have the right people close to you but don't know how to express yourself to them on certain occasions? To begin with this is a distinct problem that some may associate with not having adequate social skills, but in reality it may be because they experience anxiety in certain contexts, and then the problem is anxiety. But But for that it is necessary to analyze in depth what is happening and to propose concrete solutions for that problem. Relating to people outside your circle is not the solution then, nor is maintaining interest in someone you are not really interested in. More is not better. Neither to be happy, nor to relate better, nor to have less anxiety, nor for anything. And sometimes what is missing is not the what, but the how. Self-help books are often quite general in dealing with certain difficulties and therefore insufficient.

Lack of experiential learning

Secondly, these limitations entail attitudinal learning that a book does not provide. No reading can adequately teach you to learn behaviors, or emotions and attitudes. The knowledge conveyed by the readings is semantic and therefore can produce learning at a cognitive level. It is like a book teaching you to drive: it is procedural learning, you have to practice to learn to drive, no book is sufficient.

This means that self-help texts and tips teach you a new theoretical perspective and allow you to store knowledge about what could lead you to happiness, but you don't integrate them into your driving pattern. you don't integrate them into your behavioral pattern. It's like having a professor with a big mouth explaining history to you. Okay, you may remember it phenomenally well, but it is still semantic knowledge (of objective facts and data that are not related to you, because no self-help book is personalized).

What really produces a change, a learning, is personal experience.Your autobiographical memory, since it is endowed with a strong emotional charge, both the good and the bad. This means that the environmental opportunities (situations, people...) you come across and what you do in each situation you face, have a greater impact and influence on your personality and on your personal and attitudinal changes than any self-help book will ever have.

Now think that every day you go through more or less the same situations, interact with more or less the same people and act towards your environment in more or less the same way as yesterday or the day before. Einstein said "if you want different results, don't do the same thing all the time" and this masks the terrifying reality that you are an active agent of your own personal change, not a passive agent.Well, your behavior and the environmental opportunities, it's a 50/50, but you cannot control the environment, only the way you respond. Thinking differently is not synonymous with acting differently, because there is a barrier between thoughts and actions: emotions.

That is to say, I can be aware that I have to study to pass (I know the behavior I have to carry out), but the emotion of boredom, apathy or demotivation prevent me from carrying out that behavior. I may know that in order to get a job I have to have a job interview with the boss, but talking to the boss causes me anxiety and fear, and I decide not to do it. A self-help book tells you "talk to your boss" or tells you "talk to strangers to be more sociable" or "get out of bed to get over depression sooner", but it doesn't tell you how to overcome the emotional barriers to do what you already knew beforehand you had to do. And I'm talking about actually overcoming them, I'm not talking about a motivational speech that vanishes from your head the next day. If that speech were effective, you would never need a self-help book again. But to overcome them, you have to do things. And that "doing" costs a lot.

There are no magic self-help recipes

It's so much easier to read a book, isn't it? How tempting the hope that without much effort you and your life will change forever.. And so immediately, as you start reading, you gain more control over your own life. You are already doing something for and for yourself, and that makes you feel better, but it does not change you, it does not make you more sociable or happier in the long run, and that is why you read another and another and another... Because momentarily it is a negative reinforcement that reduces your discomfort and gives you some sense of control (the illusion of control, a common cognitive illusion derived from an optimism bias). It is, in short, a placebo.

The most sociable and happy people do not read these books and articles, but they have never needed to read them, because they have never needed to read them. to be happier and more sociable is learned through experience.. There is no correlation between being sociable or happy and the amount of self-help books you read. It is something you build by relating, living experiences and trying to act on your personal values and the life you want to lead. And changing your behavior when you are not getting the desired results.

Progress requires effort

There is another reality that you will not like either: change hurts, restructuring your mental representations about the world, about yourself, about society, hurts. There are restructuring therapies aimed at reconstructing the conception of the Self and of relationships with others that deeply modify the meaning of many knowledge and behaviors, risking our cognitive identity.. Changing these representations for others that are more effective for oneself is very costly, demanding and even a source of anxiety.

The discomfort that we feel and that moves us to modify our ideas and our behavior is part of this learning process: it means discovering and rethinking our representations when we see the implicit expectations we had about the world violated. And it is complicated in the social and psychological world. For example, modifying the idea that the earth is flat for the new representation that it is round was difficult a few centuries ago (in fact it is difficult with many semantic ideas about theories of the world: is homeopathy effective? Is the evolution of species real? Many people will give you one answer and some will give you another regardless of what the data say, and it is their representations, their interpretation of the world).

However, it is much more difficult to much more difficult is to accept other kinds of ideas, for example that your partner is unfaithful to you. and you should leave it, that you are not really comfortable with the people around you and that is why you do not have an adequate communication with them, that your friends are not real because deep down you have different values, or that the path you have chosen professionally has stagnated and you should dedicate yourself to something else... All these ideas hurt and all of them hide underlying problems that can affect happiness or social skills, indirect problems that are the ones that really should be treated more than "how to be a more sociable person" or "how to be more positive".

To make matters worse, it is often the case that when we detect these inconsistencies that cause us discomfort between the social world and our personal representations, these are so reinforced and consolidated with the implicit learning processes that they are very difficult to change.. Change is even more costly.

In conclusion

Change is not easy. Believing that change is easy is an easy idea to sell since it is what many would like, but accepting this advertising slogan also has a cost: guilt. After reading some self-help book you might ask yourself "if it's so easy, why am I not getting it?"

Guilt is also an easy trap, because it is not a writer who sells you this idea, nor many, nor all the psychologists, nor the "coaches"; it is society: From those who sell adventures, free spirit and youth when they sell perfumes and cars ("if you buy this, you will be cooler"), those who defend that the world is a meritocracy and that you just have to strive to get what you want without putting yourself on your feet (like positive psychology), to even people who self-deceive under the pretext of not having problems or limitations, neither in their social life nor in anything because they do such a thing and advise you without taking into account who you are, that is, without empathizing with your emotions or circumstances.

Y there they are, everyone's emotions, fears and anxiety playing a crucial role that everyone chooses to ignore. that everyone chooses to ignore. Conveying learning is more than explaining your version of the facts, no matter how much scientific and empirical support it has. I can explain to you that to start a car you have to insert the key, turn it, remove the handbrake and so on, and these are objective and real facts, but until you are the one who inserts the key and until you do it a few times in reality you are not going to know how to start a car. And likewise, you're not going to know how to start your happiness.