If Self-Help Isn’t Helping You, Try Something Else

Self-help is an incredible resource. Self-help books can help you get fit, learn how to use money effectively, eat well, and a million other things besides. If you’re facing a personal problem, chances are there exists a self-help book and a therapist who can help you get that problem knocked out quicker than you can believe.

But sometimes, self-help isn’t the answer.

A few years ago, my life was one gigantic self-help project. If ever I found myself with an ounce of free time on my hands, I asked myself “How could I productively use this time?” At the time, I was traumatized and full of misery, and I was determined to turn the course of my life around. I devoted every free moment to doing things I thought would make my life better. I exercised, I cooked food, I ate well, I managed my money, I decluttered — you name it, I did it.

In one way, it did make my life a lot better. I made more money on Medium than I ever had, I was in better shape than I ever was, I was healthier than I’d ever been — hell, I was in such good shape that when I misery drank whiskey straight from the bottle, I was able to drink half the bottle before passing out (and I woke up without a hangover).

But the big problem was — kudos if you spotted it — I was still miserable enough to drink whiskey straight from the bottle.

Professionals, self-help writers, and anyone with a lick of common sense agrees: You can fix a lot of problems by taking better care of yourself. Exercise is as potent an antidepressant as actual antidepressants, financial stressors can ruin lives, and diet can make or break your health. But I did all of these things and remained miserable.¹

I was not miserable because of my body, financial situation, or social life. I was miserable because I was traumatized by the last few years of my life and didn’t know how to deal with it. In that period of my life, I didn’t do anything because it was fun, or because I enjoyed it. I did things for one reason and one reason only: to make the pain go away.

I’m a self-help writer. I love self-help. If you’re struggling, I’m always going to recommend you start exercising regularly, eating healthy, and taking care of yourself, because it always makes things better than they otherwise would be. But self-help can’t fix all your problems. It barely put a dent in mine.

It’s easy for me to look back on that period of my life and identify what I did wrong. I should have accepted at least a part of the reality of what happened to me, any part, instead of repeatedly telling myself nothing happened. I should have gotten a therapist earlier — much, much earlier. But at the time, I didn’t know I should have done those things, and no self-help book could have made me aware.² The traditional self-help advice “Wake up early, exercise, eat well” helped me deal with the pain, but it didn't heal anything at all.

If my suspicions are correct, there are a lot of people out there who’ve made self-help into a lifestyle. If they’re upset, struggling, or facing challenges, their immediate reaction is to find and apply a self-help solution until the problem has been beaten into submission. This is great for discrete problems like “I want to save money for retirement” or “I want to lose 50 pounds,” but not great for problems like “I feel directionless in my life” or “I feel nameless, sourceless, constant agony.”

If you feel like you’ve been beating yourself to death with self-help and your life still sucks, give it a rest. Go do something else for a while. Get a therapist if you don’t have one. Schedule some time to lay in bed binge-watching your favorite TV show. Run away to Europe. I don’t know. I don’t know what will help you feel better, but clearly, self-help can’t, or it would have done so by now. Seek your happiness somewhere else.

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1: That doesn’t mean they weren’t doing. If I were that miserable with intense weightlifting, a great diet, and good money management skills, imagine how miserable I would have been without these things.

2: Believe me, with the amount of self-help I’ve read in my life, if a book could have done that for me, it would have.