Over the last few years, I’ve read over 50 self-help books. And I’ve noticed certain pieces of advice that tend to come up over and over again. (At least in the better, more scientific ones.) The reason these come up repeatedly is because they work, they’re true, and there’s evidence to back them up.
You shouldn’t expect any of these to completely transform your life. As I said in my last post, expecting any sort of self-help advice to provide a radical change overnight is unrealistic. But each of these is very likely to make your life a little bit better and make you a little bit happier. Taken all together, they just may build up over time into making your life a lot better and making you a lot happier.
1. Keep a gratitude journal
Every night before you go to bed, write down at least three things that you are grateful for. Ideally this should be things people have done for you or things that happened that day. But if you can’t think of anything gratitude-worthy for that day, you can use things from the state of your life. Do you have good friends? A loving family? Your health? Are your parents or loved ones in good health? Do you have food and a roof over your head? It can even be someone as silly and mundane as your socks. (I mean, your feet would get cold and chafe in your shoes without them.)
You can certainly come up with more than three things to write each day, but force yourself to write down at least three, even if it’s a struggle.
This helps to improve your happiness level because it shifts your focus to thinking about reasons why life is good instead of reasons why life is bad. And being grateful toward other people increases your connection and caring for those people.
2. Meditate
You may think meditation is some woo woo nonsense that is only for hippies. I used to believe this. But in fact, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that it has significant benefits for your mental health, and even your physical health. It improves your focus, decreases anxiety, lifts your mood, helps fight depression, combats hypertension, and makes you better able to keep you cool and handle stress.
Meditation is simple to do, and you can get these benefits from practicing it for only a few minutes a day. See my post on Meditation for Dummies for easy instructions.
3. Write down what you want to accomplish for day, week, month, three months, and year
We’re all busy people. We tend to get pulled in a million different directions at once while getting sidetracked with a million different distractions. With all that going on, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important.
What is important? Well, that’s going to vary from person to person. You’re going to have to figure out what specifically is important to you.
But here’s the important thing: You have to actually take the time to figure that out. And then write it down.
Every morning, write down the things you would like to accomplish that day that will move you toward your goals. Every week, do the same for the week. Every month, do the same for the month. You should also have lists for the next three months and the next year, though I’d recommend reviewing those lists monthly, as your goals and situation may change. Then check back to that list often (Or pin it up on your desk or somewhere you will frequently see it) to make sure you’re staying on track.
An important note about this: The list should be aspirational, not a to-do list. Think of it as “Here are the things I’d like to accomplish in an ideal world.” Which means that if you don’t accomplish items on your list, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just put them on the next period’s list without any self-judgement. (Or don’t put them on the next list, if they’re no longer relevant or important to you.) This is a tool for guiding your focus, not a means of keeping score or an excuse for self-criticism.
4. Limit social media time
I’m not one of those people who is anti-social media. I think there’s a lot of good that comes from people being able to communicate and stay in touch with an enormous network.
While I do think social media is a net good, I’m not going to pretend that the negative aspects of social media don’t exist. I’ve written many posts about the downsides of arguing on Facebook, and I won’t rehash that here. The other huge problem with social media is that it is a huge time-suck. It’s very easy to decide to check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, etc. “For a few minutes,” and before you know it, half your day is gone. These sites are specifically designed to capture your attention and keep it for as long as possible, so they have more eyeballs for their advertisers.
Some self-help books recommend going cold turkey, deleting the apps entirely, and blocking the sites from your computer. That’s a bit extreme. And let’s be honest, you’re not going to do that no matter who recommends it.
But it is a good idea to give yourself limits on how much time you spend on social media. Maybe set a rule for yourself that you won’t look at social media before a certain time of day, or after a certain time of day. Or you won’t check it at work. (Or you’ll only check it at work, if you have a day job you don’t really care about and when you’re home you want to focus on your side-hustle or time with your family.) Or set a timer to remind yourself when to stop. Or install apps and browser extensions that will automatically cut off the sites after a certain amount of time.
A moderate amount of social media enriches our lives. But your life’s goals probably aren’t to spend all day on Facebook, so don’t do that.
5. Willpower is a limited resource that gets drained throughout the day, but your willpower can be built up over time
Have you ever played a video game where casting spells consumes your character’s mana, and once they run out of mana, they can’t cast any more spells until their mana replenishes?
Willpower is kind of like that. It’s a finite resource, and every time you use it, there’s that much less willpower available for you. Only you can’t just drink a blue potion to max out your willpower pool again. The only way to get your willpower back is to get a good night’s sleep. Additionally, willpower isn’t just drained by using it, but also by dealing with anything stressful, unpleasant, or boring.
Few of us are lucky enough to be able to avoid everything stressful, unpleasant, and boring in our lives, especially at work. What this means is that we have less and less willpower as the day goes on.
We should make plans based on this fact. If there’s something you want or need to do that will take willpower, schedule it early in the day. Plan your exercise session in the morning and not the evening, or clean out the garage right after you get up. Conversely, recognize that your willpower will be at its weakest late at night, so stay away from temptations. Don’t go to that midnight buffet. Don’t do a late-night work session with that attractive coworker. Don’t play Candy Crush for “a few minutes” before bed when it might turn into a few hours.
However, the more you regularly use willpower, the stronger your willpower gets over time. So over a period of months or years, future uses of your willpower will consume less and less of your willpower pool. Kind of like how as a video game character levels up, casting low-level spells consume a smaller and smaller portion of their mana.
6. Build good habits and eliminate bad ones
Even better than consuming less willpower is consuming no willpower at all. And that’s where habits come in. You get up, and brush your teeth. You aren’t thinking about the specific actions of walking over to the sink, picking up the toothbrush, squeezing the tube of toothpaste, and moving the toothbrush around in your mouth. Your brain just does all that on autopilot. Similarly, you head out the door in the morning, and drive to work. Again, you don’t think about all the myriad individual actions involved in physically driving a car and navigating it through city streets. Your brain just does it as a background process. And it doesn’t take any willpower for you to brush your teeth or go to work. You just do it, because that’s what you do when you get up in the morning.
A habit is when a certain stimulus triggers an action or series of actions without having to think about it. Of course you aren’t an automaton, you have free will, and you could do something different if you wanted to. But the habit is what you do by default.
The best way to improve your life in the long term is to build good habits, and eliminate bad ones. To build a habit, you need to keep repeating a task on a regular basis until the neural pathways become fixed in your brain, and which point it will become automatic.
As a side note, this is why athletes, musicians, artists, and craftsmen need to spend an enormous amount of time practicing in order to become highly skilled. No matter how much natural talent someone has and how much theory they know, there’s no other way to form the neural pathways in the brain they need to excel than to repeat specific actions over and over.
Conversely, there are often bad habits that are holding people back or a source of unhappiness in their lives, and breaking these habits would bring about huge long-term improvement. Breaking a bad habit is much harder than creating a good one, because once the neural pathways are formed, you can never really get rid of them. The best thing to do is to try to alter the habit into something similar but benign. For example, instead of reaching for a cigarette, reach for a stick of gum. I don’t have room to go into more detail on this here, but I highly recommend the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg for more information on this.
7. Create nudges for yourself to make good habits and actions easier and noticeable, and to make bad habits and actions harder and out of mind.
One way to give yourself an edge in forming good habits and/or doing the things that will move you toward your goals, and breaking bad habits and/or refraining from doing the things that will move you away from your goals, is setting up little nudges.
Do things that remind you of good practices, or make them a bit more convenient. While you hide any reminders of bad practices, and make them a bit less convenient.
Lay out your gym clothes and running shoes next to your bed, so you see them right when you wake up. Put a bowl of fruit on your kitchen counter, while you hide the candy at the back of the top shelf. Turn off notifications on your phone for social media, and if you really have a problem, consider logging out each time so you have to go through the hassle of logging in whenever you use it. Delete the Dominos app, so ordering unhealthy food isn’t so easy. Set an alarm for when it’s time to start winding down and getting ready for bed, so you’re able to get to bed at the right time to get a good night’s sleep.
These are just a few ideas. You can come up with your own based on your own specific goals, and what you’re trying to stop doing.
8. Get enough sleep
Your body needs sleep. Your brain needs sleep. Your mental health needs sleep.
Don’t sacrifice sleep to try to get more done. That doesn’t work. You’ll just end up making poor decisions, having less willpower, working less effectively, and ultimately not getting as much done than if you had slept, while being completely miserable.
I recognize that if you’re a new parent, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. But there’s a reason new parents tend to be wretched zombies. Don’t voluntarily choose this without having a new human life to show for it.
9. Be part of a community
One of the most important factors in determining your happiness is being part of a community. It’s important to have close friends, family, and loved ones that can be your intimate confidantes. It’s also important to have a wider network of people who care about you. These are people who can pick you up or help you out when you are down, and in turn who you can help. Who you can attend social events with. Who you can be part of a team with.
If you are religious, the easiest way to find a community is to become active in a church/synagogue/mosque. If you’re not religious, find a secular community to be part of. Some examples include fraternal lodges, charity organizations, knitting circles, gaming groups, PTAs, neighborhood organizations, or parents of groups that your kids are in.
Since I started this odyssey of reading an unreasonable amount of self-help books, the one thing I’ve done that has had the biggest positive impact on my happiness was to join Sunday Assembly, a secular organization that recreates the community aspects of a church. I’ve seen firsthand just how much difference having a community that cares about me has made in my life and happiness.
10. Charity and friendliness will make you happier
There is an enormous amount of research showing that doing acts of charity make you happier. Aside from any ethical or religious considerations regarding what we owe to fellow humans and what duty we have to help the less fortunate, giving to the needy simply feels good.
It’s okay if you don’t have spare money to give. Giving your time and energy is going to be more personally rewarding than giving money anyway. Especially if you are able to see the people who are receiving the fruits of your efforts. From my personal experience, I once volunteered with my Sunday Assembly group to be a “delivery elf,” bringing Christmas gifts to underprivileged children, and it was one of the most joyful days of my life.
On a similar vein, being friendly to others will brighten up their day, and brighten up yours as well. Saying “please” and “thank you,” telling people to have a good day, and giving meaningful compliments. (Note that I’m talking about friendly compliments here, which are very different from creepy harassing compliments.)
In both of these cases, you are taking the time and effort – no matter how small – to show someone that you value and care about them as a human and want them to be happy. This forms a connection between you gives you a hit of serotonin, and a nice little warm fuzzy.
There’s also the secondary effect that being kind and generous makes it more likely that people will be kind and generous to you in return, which makes it far easier for you to be happy and achieve your goals. But even without this, charity and friendliness make you happy directly.
11. Don’t visualize success. Visualize what you need to do to achieve success, and then do it.
Some very unhelpful books will tell you to visualize success. But this is just fantasy. Everyone imagines success. Every little kid dreams of being a princess or Superbowl MVP or astronaut or cowboy or billionaire or Instagram influencer or whatever kids are into these days. But no matter how hard you fantasize, wishing won’t turn your dreams into reality.
Visualizing what success looks like is fun, but not useful. Instead, put your imagination to work visualizing what you need to *do* to achieve success. Work backwards to figure out the specific steps needed to get from where you are to where you want to be. What are the challenges and roadblocks, and what do you need to do to overcome them? Where are you likely to stumble, and what will you do to pick yourself up again? Then use that visualizing to develop an actionable plan.
Or, you may not be able to visualize the way to succeed, because it’s impossible. Or the path may be so difficult or so unlikely to succeed that it isn’t worth pursuing. And that’s okay. As a 42-year-old man who isn’t in exceptionally great shape, I’m never going to be an Olympic athlete, astronaut, or princess. If you realize your dreams aren’t realistic, you can move on to new dreams that are more attainable, instead of wasting your life thinking that “someday” you’ll do something that is going to be forever out of your reach.
12. Don’t be too hard on yourself
If your best friend was trying to lose weight, and told you she had a bad day where she ate too much, you wouldn’t respond by saying, “That’s because you’re a pathetic fat pig, you big fat fatty!”
If your mother was trying to launch her own business so she could leave her soul-crushing job, but wasted an evening on Facebook instead of working on her side-hustle, you wouldn’t tell her “Then you deserve to fail and be miserable because you’re so lazy, you dumb stupid loser!”
These responses seem shocking and appalling, because we’re used to treating the people we care about with compassion. Well, you should also care about yourself, which means you should treat yourself with compassion as well.
Most people are aware that there’s overwhelming evidence that positive reinforcement is better than negative reinforcement when it comes to training animals, children, and employees. This is also the case when it comes to training yourself.
If you have a bad day, slip up, fail to do the things that move you toward your goals, or actively move away from your goals, don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t hate yourself. That will just compound the error and make it harder for you to succeed.
Simply acknowledge the error and try to do better going forward.
On the other hand, when you are making progress, you should take the time to be proud and congratulate yourself over that. Give yourself that positive reinforcement, the same way you would congratulate an animal, child, friend, or loved one for their successes.
13. Make Self-Improvement easy
The last lesson wasn’t something I read in the self-help books. It’s something I learned from all the advice in the books that I didn’t follow.
There were many times books would recommend a challenging task, or an entire complicated system, and I’d think, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. I should totally do that.” Then a few days later, I’d think, “I should get around to starting that soon.” Then a few days later, I’d think, “I should definitely implement that system in the next couple of days.” And eventually I’d forget about it and move on.
Or perhaps I’d follow their advice once or twice, but it would be really complicated and time-consuming. Then after a few days, I’d wake up without enough time to follow it before leaving for work, and then the same thing would happen the next day, and the day after that, and then I forgot about it and moved on.
Finally, after reading 50 books, I realized the most important lesson about self-improvement: For self-improvement to work, it has to be easy. Because if it is difficult, complicated, or time-consuming, you’ll end up not doing it.
Now, certainly there are people who improve themselves in difficult ways, such as quitting smoking, drugs, or drinking for alcoholics. And I wouldn’t want to discourage such people. But these tend to be cases where people are eliminating vices that are destroying their lives or their health, so they have extreme motivation.
On much rarer occasions, there are people who are capable of making extreme changes not to avoid dire consequences, but because they want to grow as a person. The kind of person who’s sat on their couch their whole life and then suddenly decides they want to run a marathon in six months. If you are capable of doing this, I envy you, but this is very rare. (Though these kinds of people are heavily over-represented among those who write self-help books, and they often fail to realize that this isn’t normal.)
For most of us, who are looking to improve our lives because we’re vaguely unhappy, dissatisfied, or feel like things could be better, radically changing the way we live just isn’t realistic. Stick to the small changes that you’ll be able to consistently do, and give you a big bang for your buck.
A small improvement you make is infinitely more valuable than a large improvement you never get around to making. (Especially if you then feel guilty about not making it).
So there you have it. Fifty self-help books distilled down into thirteen easy to follow tips. Please let me know if you find this useful in improving your life, or you have any tips of your own.
#10: When I decided I wanted to get better at painting, I knew that motivating myself to paint every day would achieve that faster than not painting every day. I also knew that announcing I was going to paint every day would help, because now I was actively showing Facebook what I was painting, every day. And I wanted to DO something with those paintings.
So in the past 18 months I have send out over a thousand cards to people I know (and sort of know, thank you facebook). And it’s been lovely. I don’t even care that much about the quality of my painting improving; I love being able to send people mail that they like. It makes me happy, and allows me to help make other people happy in a really simple (and introvert friendly) way.
That’s a wonderful way to spread joy in the world. And it also incorporates #6 and #7. You’ve built the habit of painting every day, and friends asking you for paintings is giving you a nudge to remind you to paint.