Is Self-Help Self-Harm After 40 years Old?
With so many “experts” offering wellness and life coaching as a side business, how can you separate the genuine from the jester?
Self help gurus sometimes have valuable advice among the hyperbole.
THE BRIEF
Time to read: 5 minutes
Time to action: 5 minutes
Mantra: Put the SELF back into SELF(ish)
Main message: Spot the Insta-famous from the info-famous
Stat: Gen X have an average stress level of 5.8/10, higher than millennials (3.4) and baby boomers (4.4)
Plug the search term “self-help advice” into Google, and you will get over 24 million pages of free information.
There is a tonne of practical, accredited, well-balanced practitioners. And nestled right next to them are, inevitably, countless charlatans making wild claims about their abilities. They willfully blur the boundaries between “I’m accredited and know what I’m doing” and “I’m so famous, I must be doing something right”.
What are the rules to help find the right approach to change your life where you want it most?
To help you make the most decisive start on your self-help journey, we have aggregated the most common self-improvement approaches and separated fact from fiction.
“Follow your dreams”
THEORY: To be happy, do not lose sight of what you desire the most. Set goals and clarify what you want to achieve. Visualise them. Affirm consistently. And voila, they will manifest.
FICTION: Unless you choose your dreams carefully, you almost certainly lack the resources, mind space, and external support for the plan. This idealistic goal-setting often leaves people depleted and deprived of fulfilment. Without practicality of application, there is a risk of leaving yourself feeling worse for trying.
FACT: It is not dull to say if you have dreams and goals, ensure they are realistic and meaningful to you (and not conceived for others' perception of you). Look at them to provide a series of challenges, measured in steps.
Say you want to be a millionaire. You’ll unlikely get there in one step – not even with the next crypto bubble. Instead, can you turn your savings into investments that target higher yearly yields? Can you use compound interest on that yield to invest? What sum must you hit to warrant a capital outlay of a secondary income source?
Use this approach to grow as you steadily fulfill your dream without pushing yourself to an extreme. This approach has the beautiful side effect of still giving the feeling of satisfaction that achievement brings. That’s true even if you don’t hit the magic £1million marker.
“Feel good, think better”
THEORY: Body chemistry and brain chemistry are indelibly linked. So, QED, if you can make your body look and perform better, your body’s chemistry will send happiness signals to your brain. As a start, it creates a virtuous, feel-good circle of self-love.
FICTION: Exercise undeniably has its place in cognitive therapy, and we at FORM are huge advocates. But we’re also realists and recognise it’s just a single part of a larger puzzle that is you.
If focused on non-essential goals (like getting a great body) over the long term, people become not more but less happy and fulfilled. A short-term high is before a “hedonic adaptation” reaction sets in. You grow accustomed to your gains, and they become pedestrian. This puts you back to where you started, cognitively speaking.
FACT: Focus on dual goals that deliver more. Feeling good about your body is terrific, but there is more.
Harness the fitness energy and apply it to different areas of your life to avoid feelings of demotivation and a lack of progression. Suppose you can continue to feel better about yourself and your world. In that case, it represents much stronger self-help development than adding value to something fundamentally worth less.
“Big changes get big results”
THEORY: The prompt to “take action” comes with the belief that the size of the change must be proportional to the size of the discontent you are feeling. Give up the job you hate, for example, and you’ll be poorer, but happier. The theory is that scale change allows you to squeeze more juice out of life.
FICTION: The risk/reward factors are imbalanced, and the physical, emotional, and possibly financial costs are astronomic.
Dividing the things you’d like to change by subject matter, rather than one enormous feeling of unhappiness, ensures your sense of worth isn’t eroded, nor is your existing stability.
FACT: Make incremental advances in the most pressing discontent channel, i.e. the one you feel most unhappy about, before even trying to take on anything else. Do not take a giant leap where you do not need to.
As a quick check, always think PBC – perspective before change. It’s a cognitive safety net to ensure that what you do next doesn’t undermine all you’ve achieved.
“There are no bad ideas”
THEORY: There is a glut of information about health and fitness, some valuable and perhaps based on empirical scientific research. If verified it can all apply, so arguably, it does.
FICTION: Continuous learning is undeniably the road map to a good life. However, so is the practice of listening to your “inner intelligence” (II) – a more reliable guiding force for everyone, but fundamentally, of course, you.
FACT: You process so many things in the blink of an eye. You’ve probably read Blink or Wilful Blindness, which explains the concepts beautifully. Listen to what you think as much as you listen to what you feel. If there is even the slightest uncertainty around a decision or the application of a change, take it to step 2 and attune to this innate inner intelligence by taking time out for reflection.
Go running. Attend a yoga class. Maybe listen to music. Whatever it is for you, these are the times to allow the questions to sit in your head and process properly. If you allow yourself the time and space to tune in, you can become more discerning in looking at who and what self-help approach might benefit you most.
Self-hell?
Self-help fundamentally means allowing yourself to engage in the SELF(ish). This is the opportunity to look after yourself, enabling you to look after others whenever needed.
So take the time to consider what you want and what you need. Once you are ready, implement changes in your world and the new infrastructure that action creates. To be guided by a mentor with a wealth of experience can be valuable. However, don’t allow a desire for personal change to make a route one path to easy affirmation.
A quick win or a drastic change could undo all the progress you’ve already made. Always remember to be all about the SELF(ish) – it’s a genuine way to build better for you and your long-term happiness.
DR DOG
A cognitive psychologist specialising in those most 21st Century of issues: anxiety and depression. Dog is especially good at delivering actionable answers, removing the rhetoric and hyperbole, and focusing simply and directly on practical information that can be used to help mental health on a daily basis.
ANTHROPOLOGY ANTELOPE
Sociology may have been that degree way back when, but can you honestly think of a time when we needed to understand our society more than we do today? Antelope is a respected and published author of numerous thesis on the human condition and the nature of human interactions.
