The subhead for this blog is A Skeptical Guide to Self-Help. What exactly does that mean? To explain, it would be best to give some examples of what it’s not.
Skeptical self-improvement is not mystical
There are some self-improvement books that tell you all you need to do is want something hard enough, or believe you’ll succeed hard enough, or put off enough positive energy, and you will achieve it. As if the universe is some sort of magical wish-granting genie that will give you everything you want if you can only discover the right mental incantation.
Skeptical self-improvement is not impractical
Then there are self-improvement books that stick to the material plane, and focus on physical actions and thoughts without relying on external magic. But the advice they give is so overly burdensome or contrary to the nature of the type of person who would be reading the book, that very few people are actually going to follow it. And often, following the advice would be downright impossible without completely upending your life.
These are the books that tell you every day you need to exercise for an hour, meditate for an hour, spend an hour in nature, spend two hours of quality time with your family, make sure to get eight hours of sleep, don’t look at screens within three hours of bedtime, spend three hours a day cooking nutritionally balanced locally sourced certified organic GMO-free plant-based paleo keto carb-free macrobiotic calorie-restricted savory meals, keep a gratitude journal, dream journal, food journal, mood journal, goal journal, general journal, and journal to keep track of all your journals, schedule every minute of your week in advance, check in with your mentor, life-coach, and therapist, get out there and network, take time every day to catch up with an old friend, spend an hour a day learning a new skill, read classic literature, volunteer for the less fortunate, keep your house perfectly organized, don’t forget to take time out for yourself, and if you aren’t spending at least four hours a day on your side-hustle, clearly you don’t want it enough.
Meanwhile you’re thinking, “I spend ten hours a day at work plus two hours commuting, and I have to get my kids to school in the morning and to bed at night, and run errands whenever I can squeeze them in, and maybe try to keep my house from being a complete disaster. I don’t have a spare minute, and if I did I would be too exhausted to do any of this stuff. Do you think there’s 90 hours in a day?”
Both of these kinds of books are worse than useless. Not only will they fail to improve your life, but they’ll leave you feeling bad about yourself. The first kind makes you think your failure to achieve magic is because you didn’t want it or believe hard enough. The second kind makes you feel like you’re a loser who just didn’t try hard enough, when really it was setting up an impossible standard.
Skeptical self-improvement is not cynicism
But you shouldn’t go too far in the other direction, and reject everything. Just as we apply our skepticism toward those who say change is magically easy, or those who suggest we have limitless time and energy, we should also apply our skepticism toward those who are fatalistic and say change is impossible. There’s a lot of unhelpful nonsense out there, but that doesn’t mean everything is nonsense. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The cynical approach would be to just declare that nothing works, and there’s no way to improve yourself or your life. Or alternatively, to seek out the things that are unhelpful, and revel in their foolishness. “Look at us, we’re so much better than those people who are trying to live better lives but haven’t figured out how to do so!”
Skeptical self-improvement is figuring out what works
So what is self-improvement for skeptics?
The difference between skepticism and cynicism is that cynicism rejects everything, while skepticism examines things closely in order to reject that which is false and find the truth. In the context of self-improvement, the goal is to figure out what does work in order to give us better lives.
Which raises the new question: what is it that works?
Skeptical self-improvement has to be advice you’ll actually follow
First of all, for self-improvement advice to be useful at all, it has to be something you’ll actually do. That seems a rather obvious point, but that’s missing from a lot of self-improvement books. The authors seem to have the attitude of, “Well, I told you how to have a better life, and if you don’t do what I said, that’s your your own damn fault.”
But if the advice is something that in reality is only going to be followed by someone who has the temperament, skills, lifestyle, and free time of a self-help guru, then that’s a flaw with the author and the book, not the reader. It would be like if LeBron James wrote a book on how to play basketball that said, “Just practice a lot and throw the ball through the hoop.” That book’s not going to be useful to you, since you don’t have LeBron James’s skills.
Step 1: Be this guy.
Skeptical self-improvement is fostering a positive attitude
This seems a bit counter-intuitive, because a lot of people think of skepticism as focusing on the negative. But as I describe in my article Self-Improvement For Skeptics Demands Positivity, there’s overwhelming evidence that a positive approach to self-improvement is what works.
In other words, I’m skeptical about negativity.
There’s four aspects to the positive approach I advocate, which as a skeptic, I believe is backed by the evidence.
I practice positivity in the kind of self-improvement advice I advocate. There are a lot of gurus who use shame, guilt, insults, and bullying to try to motivate people to change. This is extremely counterproductive. I offer advice on things people can do to make themselves happier if they so choose.
I advocate positivity in people’s internal feelings. People should accept themselves the way they are. This makes people happier in general, but it also makes it easier for people to improve their lives. Happier people are more resilient and better able to change. Those who hate themselves often find it hardest to alter the parts of themselves they hate. Additionally, people with a positive attitude are more likely to believe they have agency over their own life, which, as I say in my rules to live by, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I advocate positivity in people’s view of the world. Of course there are plenty of problems and things wrong with the world, but there’s far more that is wonderful, and constantly getting better. That’s why I consider books like Enlightenment Now and Factfulness to be mental health books. While social media and the 24 hour news cycle can depress people by giving the false impression that everything is terrible, these books present the real evidence and data showing just how great the world really is.
I advocate positivity in how to act toward others. Kindness and generosity feel good. Being upbeat is infectious. It makes others happier. It makes you more likable, which helps you make friends, form communities, and attract romantic partners. And it inspires people to treat you better in return.
Skeptical self-improvement is making small incremental changes
I’ve already criticized the kind of self-help guru that make wildly unrealistic demands. After reading over 50 self-help books, I’ve realized there’s another type of problematic book: Those that suggest a program that seem realistic for somebody to follow, but are too different from how you live your life.
You’re just not going to change everything about the way you live overnight. These books may sound great when you read them. Everything in them may seem sensible. You may be excited to try it out. Maybe you’ll keep it up for a few days. But then you’ll fall back to your old routines.
There’s a reason you live your life the way you do. You’ve built it around your natural inclinations, your job, your family, your commitments, and your habits.
That doesn’t mean you can’t change. It means changes have to start off small. They have to be things you can fit into your life. And then they can build up over time.
Skeptical self-improvement comes from building sustainable and meaningful habits
It’s not enough to do something that will improve your life. You have to keep doing it. Which means building sustainable habits. And the key word there is sustainable. As in not just something you’ll do for a few days while you’re psyched up from reading that book, but something you’re willing to do for the rest of your life.
So what makes a habit sustainable? It needs to be something that is convenient, easy, small, enjoyable, takes minimal time-commitment, offers immediate positive feedback, or is a series of small progressive changes that steadily build up over time.
If you try to make a change to your life that doesn’t fit into one (or ideally, multiple) of these categories, then most likely you’re doomed to failure. But if you can find a way to fit a change into a habit that does fit these categories, it makes it far easier to succeed. (I highly recommend The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg for more on this.)
It’s also important that a habit lead to meaningful results. This seems obvious, but ideas like the Law of Attraction miss that. Visualizing yourself as, say, a best-selling author, is enjoyable and therefore an easy habit to keep. But it’s not going to do anything if you don’t also build the habit of taking time to write. (And do the publishing, marketing, networking, and all the other less glamorous business around writing.)
Conclusion: Self-improvement for skeptics is building meaningful, attainable, self-compassionate, incremental habits
What is self-improvement for skeptics? It’s the understanding that there’s no magical easy fixes. We shouldn’t make ourselves crazy trying to do the impossible. Our attempts to better ourselves should come from a place of self-love and self-compassion. We should focus on making small changes that build up over time, and build the habits to make those changes stick.
This is the life we have, and we should do what is feasible and practical to live it the best that we can.