Self-help or self-improvement is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
When engaged in self-improvement, people often utilize publicly available information or support groups, on the Internet as well as in person, where people in similar situations join together. From early examples in self-driven legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the word have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychology and psychotherapy, commonly distributed through the popular genre of self-help books. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging.
Many different self-help group programs exist, each with its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders. Concepts and terms originating in self-help culture and Twelve-Step culture, such as recovery, dysfunctional families, and codependency have become firmly integrated in mainstream language. 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 clearing-houses for educational material. Those who help themselves by learning and identifying about health problems can be said to exemplify self-help, while self-help groups can be seen more as peer-to-peer support.
History
Within classical antiquity, Hesiod's Works and Days "opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of." The Stoics offered ethical advice "on the notion of eudaimonia—of well-being, welfare, flourishing." The genre of mirror-of-princes writings, which has a long history in Greco-Roman and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of Biblical wisdom-literature. Proverbs from many periods, collected and uncollected, embody traditional moral and practical advice of diverse cultures.
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 own initiative to remedy a wrong.
For some, George Combe's "Constitution" [1828], in the way that it advocated personal responsibility
and the possibility of naturally sanctioned self-improvement through
education or proper self-control, largely inaugurated the self-help
movement;" In 1841, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Compensation, was published suggesting "every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults" and "acquire habits of self-help" as "our strength grows out of our weakness." Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) published the first self-consciously personal-development "self-help" book—entitled Self-Help—in
1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves",
provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the
oft-quoted maxim that had also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733–1758).
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, whilst lowly
thoughts make for a miserable person. Several decades later, 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".
Around the same time, in 1936, Dale Carnegie further developed the genre with How to Win Friends and Influence People. Having failed in several careers, Carnegie became fascinated with success and its link to self-confidence, and his books have since sold over 50 million copies.
Late 20th century
In the final third of the 20th century, "the tremendous growth in self-help publishing...in self-improvement culture" really took off—something which must be linked to postmodernism itself—to the way "postmodern subjectivity constructs self-reflexive subjects-in-process."
Arguably at least, "in the literature of self-improvement...that crisis
of subject hood is not articulated but enacted—demonstrated in
ever-expanding self-help book sales."
The conservative turn of the neoliberal
decades also meant a decline in traditional political activism, and
increasing "social isolation; Twelve-Step recovery groups were one
context in which individuals sought a sense of community...yet another
symptom of the psychological of the personal" to more radical critics. Indeed, "some social theorist [sic]
have argued that the late-20th century preoccupation with the self
serves as a tool of social control: soothing political unrest...[for]
one's own pursuit of self-invention."'
The market
Within
the context of the market, group and corporate attempts to aid the
"seeker" have moved into the "self-help" marketplace, with Large Group Awareness Trainings, LGATs
and psychotherapy systems represented. These offer more-or-less prepackaged solutions to instruct people seeking their own individual betterment, just as "the literature of self-improvement directs the reader to familiar frameworks...what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called 'the grooves of borrowed thought'."
A subgenre of self-help book series also exists: such as the for Dummies guides and The Complete Idiot's Guide to...—compare how-to books.
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"
in the United States alone. By 2006, research firm Marketdata estimated
the "self-improvement" market in the U.S. as worth more than $9
billion—including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivation-speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, weight-loss and stress-management programs. Marketdata projected that the total market size would grow to over $11 billion by 2008.
In 2012 Laura Vanderkam wrote of a turnover of 12 billion dollars.
In 2013 Kathryn Schulz examined "an $11 billion industry".
Self-help and professional service delivery
Self-help and mutual-help are very different from—though they may complement—service delivery by professionals: note, for example, the interface between local self-help and International Aid's service delivery model.
Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some
professionals considering that "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."
Research
The
rise of self-help culture has inevitably 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" so as 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."
Placebo
effects can never be wholly discounted. Thus 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."
"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 tape: even though the tapes
don't work, people think they do."
One might then see much of the self-help industry as part of the "skin
trades. People need haircuts, massage, dentistry, wigs and glasses,
sociology and surgery, as well as love and advice."—a skin trade, "not a profession and a science"
Its practitioners would thus be functioning as "part of the personal
service industry rather than as mental health professionals."
While "there is no proof that twelve-step programs 'are superior to any
other intervention in reducing alcohol dependence or alcohol-related
problems'," at the same time it is clear that "there is something about 'roguishness' itself which is curative."
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."
Some psychologists advocate a positive psychology,
and explicitly embrace an empirical self-help philosophy; "the 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."
They aim to refine the self-improvement field by way of an intentional
increase in 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 the
study of psychological phenomenon and effects; and personal effectiveness,
focusing primarily on analysis, design and implementation of
qualitative personal growth. This includes the intentional training of
new patterns of thought and feeling. As business strategy communicator Don Tapscott
puts it, "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."
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 by empowering,
action-promoting messages. Psychologists have designed a series of
experiments that are intended to shed light into how self-talk can
result in self-improvement. In general, research has shown that people
prefer to use second-person pronouns over first-person pronouns when
engaging in self-talk to achieve goals, regulate one’s own behavior,
thoughts, or emotions, and facilitate performance.
If self-talk has the expected effect, then writing about personal
problems using language from their friends’ perspective should result in
greater amount of motivational and emotional benefits comparing to
using language from their own perspective. When you need to finish a
difficult task and you are not willing to do something to finish this
task, trying to write a few sentence or goals imaging what your friends
have told you gives you more motivational resources comparing to you
write to yourself. Research done by Ireland and others have revealed
that, as expected, when people are writing using many physical and
mental words or even typing a standard prompt with these kinds of words,
adopting a friend’s perspective while freely writing about a personal
challenge can help increase people’s intention to improve self-control
by promoting the positivity of emotions such as pride and satisfaction,
which can motivate people to reach their goal.
The use of self-talk goes beyond the scope of self-improvement
for performing certain activities, self-talk as a linguistic form of
self-help also plays a very important role in regulating people’s
emotions under social stress. First of all, people using
non-first-person language tend to exhibit higher level of visual
self-distancing during the process of introspection, indicating that
using non-first-person pronouns and one’s own name may result in
enhanced self-distancing.
More importantly, this specific form of self-help also has been found
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. Additionally, these self-help behaviors also demonstrate
noticeable self-regulatory effects through the process of social
interactions, regardless of their dispositional vulnerability to social
anxiety.
Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005 Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movement—he uses the acronym SHAM: the Self-Help and Actualization Movement—not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful.
"Salerno says that 80 percent of self-help and motivational customers
are repeat customers and they keep coming back 'whether the program
worked for them or not'." Others similarly point out that with self-help books
"supply increases the demand... The more people read them, the more
they think they need them... more like an addiction than an alliance."
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."
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".
In 1987 Gerald M. Rosen reported that people do not gain as much
from reading self-help material as people would from the same material
received in therapy. In general, he was critical of proliferation of
self-help books.
In the media
Kathryn Schulz suggests that "the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry’s existence".
Parodies and fictional analogies
The self-help world has become the target of parodies. Walker Percy's odd genre-busting Lost in the Cosmos
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". In their 2006 book Secrets of The Super optimist,
authors W.R. Morton and Nathaniel Whiten 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. 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.
