What Does "Self Help" Mean?

Take our Self-Esteem Test

Find a therapist near me

Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.

Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.

At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.

Nearly 500 techniques from 100 self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.

By Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson.

Over the past five years, my colleague Jeremy Stevenson and I have read more than 100 self-help books, studied over 20 therapies, and extracted and categorized nearly 500 techniques from those sources.

The goal was to understand the high-level patterns across all methods of self-improvement, as part of our process of writing our book, The 12 Levers, aimed at providing a complete psychological toolkit for improving your life.

Today, we want to share five lessons that stood out from conducting all of this research.

Lesson 1: A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged

Take mindfulness, defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” The Pali word “sati” (roughly translated as mindfulness) appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now used in multiple modern therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindful self-compassion (MSC).

Sometimes mindfulness is repackaged with a different name. For example, ACT therapists call mindfulness of thoughts “defusion” and mindfulness of body sensations “expansion.” Mindfulness also goes by “decentering,” "acceptance,” and “distancing.”

Is it bad that self-help........

© Psychology Today