Has anyone read self help books and felt that they helped or are they just scams?

Oh, and skip the introductions if you get a copy with them, or read them after the book.
Start at chapter one.

Some self help books are good and worth reading, but you have to be in the right mental state to make a change in your life. The book gives you pointers but ultimately it's all up to you.
Don't expect it to give you magic words of sudden motivation.

Also, my opinion is that some books may be objectively bullshit, but if they somehow give you a good feeling and drive towards making any kind of change in your life, then they're doing their job. Depends on the person reading it and how they interpret things.

You're supposed to try to take a genuine interest in other people, not completely fake it you moron

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I bought this book like 3 years ago and still haven't read it.

12 Rules for Life helped me tremendously

You just gotta find the book that helps you my dude

Growing up I read a lot of pop psychology and nonfiction in general. Don't know why. There's a lot of nonsense but you get good at sorting it out from the writing style. I've been getting help for my anxiety the past two or three years, and there's a lot of junk but some have been helpful to me. The helpful ones are helpful in the same way therapy is though OP, so it gives you things to work with and you have to be the one to implement them and use them in your life. A lot of people don't take that step.

"Feeling Good" is a very comprehensive book about cbt and depression. I don't have depression but I think I live a better life because of it, after reading it like two years ago.

"How to Win Friends" is an ok book. It's a guide for making friends but most of it is fairly obvious. You should read it but it's a lot of bulk that you don't need.

"Flow" is a book about happiness in a different way. It talks about what makes an enjoyable experience. There are a few major takeaways from the book, like how to actually make goals that will work or how important attention is to life that really changed the game for me. I had a full identity crisis at the part that about the mind and the self. I started to panic and had to stop reading a few times at that part.

"Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" is a big one too if you're messy. A lot of your messiness might be that you just have too much shit.

"A Man's Search for Meaning" is really important too for understanding a lot of concepts that will help you live a happier life, but the main idea is already covered in Feeling Good. It's still an interesting read about the holocaust, and good for perspective.

I just read one on uncertainty called "Nonsense" and it's pretty good. It covers a surprising range of ideas.

I've got a friend who's into self-help books. I can see he WANTS to become a better person by reading this stuff, but at the moment all it's doing is making him more self-absorbed, and self-absorption is a big part of his problem to begin with. So he's progressed from being an inconsiderate jerk, to being an inconsiderate jerk who's endlessly fascinated about WHY he's an inconsiderate jerk. And every time his jerkiness flares up and he acts like a complete prick to people, he thinks they're all going to be rapt to hear his self-analysis on why he acted that way.

I've never read a self-help book, but the best I can say for my indirect experience of them is that they can very much fall into the wrong hands. The problem is that they're self-indulgent. Most people get their emotional growth from having experiences, seeking out new perspectives, thinking on things themselves, etc. Self-help books attempt to reduce these things to a concentrated form and spoon-feed the outcome to its readers. Maybe it works for some people, but it's like a diet of gruel+multivitamins vs an actual balanced diet. The latter is going to take longer, it'll be more difficult and complicated and rife with errors, but there's just no substitute.
That said, you know, sometimes you've just come out of a horrific surgery and your jaw's wired shut, and gruel+multivitamin is all that's going to keep you alive.

This post is true.

I relate a lot to the self-absorbed jerk. Self help books are not intrinsically bad, but you need to understand that they won't fix you. YOU fix you, and that's the only way it'll ever happen. The way you do this is by acting in the real world, and if you indulge too far into self help it becomes just another form of escapism. So I'd say, yeah, research and find a good one, read it, but then actually try to integrate its lessons, and stop analysing your life so much.

Good lord your friend sounds intolerable.

12 Rules for Life and Jordan Peterson in general helped me quite a bit. Then again, I was already on my way to becoming a better me, so it was used more as a booster than the main motivation. I honestly believe you need to bring the spark out on your own behest, a self help book will not help you with that, but they will help you along the way.

>And every time his jerkiness flares up and he acts like a complete prick to people, he thinks they're all going to be rapt to hear his self-analysis on why he acted that way.

I had a gf that was like this, I eventually stopped listening to whatever bullshit she said. This kind of people should read some books about " not trying to look smarter than you are" instead

Self help books only tell you what you already know. Be positive, live healthy, be responsible. All of the things society has been telling you your whole life but you've been ignoring it. You shouldn't need a self-help book for these things since you already know about them. All you need is to make a decision to improve yourself and then act on it.

I've been reading them compulsively for like a decade. The good ones are life changing.

What are the good ones that changed your life?

self-help literature is mostly prescriptive garbage. prescription is largely insensitive to the dynamics of social context and is also rooted in outdated thinking

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