I read 100 self improvement books. This is what they said.
What would you learn if you read 100 self-improvement books? Would they teach you lessons that would transform your life? Five years ago, my co-author Jeremy Stevenson and I set out on a giant undertaking. It began with reading over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and investigating more than 20 types of therapy. Every time these researchers said to do anything or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. This resulted in a database of almost 500
Self-help techniques. We then qualitatively analyzed each of these. We realized we could encompass all of them in just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these the 12 levers and you know, if you’re interested, we wrote a book about it and you can pre-order it now. Today, though, I want to share with you five lessons we learned during this whole process of investigating so many self-help techniques, books, and therapies. Lesson one, a lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged.
Take mindfulness for example. It’s an extremely useful technique for a wide range of challenges. It’s defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. The Pali word “sati”, roughly translated as mindfulness, appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now also used in a wide variety of modern therapies like acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and
So on and so on. Sometimes mindfulness is repackaged with a different name. For example, ACT therapists call mindfulness of thoughts diffusion and mindfulness of body sensations expansion. Mindfulness also goes by terms like decentering, acceptance, and distancing. But mindfulness, of course, is not the only example of this. There are many others. For instance, the method known as exposure shows up in numerous therapies as well as a huge number of self-help books under a variety of different names. The point is, useful techniques
Often get repackaged, recycled, and renamed again, and again, and again. Is that a bad thing, though? Well, it can contribute to a sense of overwhelm when you’re browsing bookstores trying to figure out what self-help techniques might be useful for you. Or, it can lead to confusion when you’re talking to others about those techniques. But, it can be a good thing, too, when it leads to effective techniques becoming more available or more accessible. Lesson two, a lot of self-help techniques don’t
Have as much evidence as you think. Cold exposure is a great example. It’s become incredibly popular. And from all that hype, you might think that daily cold showers or plunges would have lots of high-quality randomized control trials showing consistent benefits for all sorts of outcomes, like anxiety, depression, and energy levels. Now, there was a 2025 meta-analysis of studies, and it did find some benefits for cold exposure. So, this included things like lower physiological stress 12 hours after cold exposure, better
Self-reported sleep quality, improved self-reported quality of life after 30 days of practice, and even 29% fewer sick days that were taken. At first, that sounds really impressive, but the same meta-analysis did not find stress improvements at other time points. That means it didn’t find anything immediately, at 1 hours, at 24 hours, or 48 hours after cold exposure. This is a bit concerning. Why would it work at 12 hours, but not at 1 or 24 hours? Well,
Maybe it only works on a specific timeframe. Additionally, the meta-analysis found no quality of life benefits after 90 days of practice, and no general improvements for mood. At best, we can call this a mixed result. Here’s what the authors of the meta-analysis concluded. The current evidence-base is constrained by a few randomized control trials, small sample sizes, and a lack of diversity in study populations. Additionally, most of the outcomes examined were very short-term, that is, a few hours to a few days. To
Have more reliable conclusions, we really need more outcomes measured over longer time frames, because the sustained benefits are usually the ones that people care about the most. Funnily enough, cold exposure is also an example of a repackaged technique. References to cold exposure date back as early as ancient Greece and possibly even ancient Egypt. Another popular technique, energetic breathing, for instance, Wim Hof-style breathing, has even less scientific evidence. A 2023 narrative review did find some promising results,
Like less anxiety immediately after, as well as 1 month later and 1 year later. But, a lot of the doses in the study that were examined were extremely high, some as high as 3-hour sessions. In studies with realistic doses, though, that is less than 35 minutes per session, some show certain benefits, but the most rigorous studies to date did not find energetic breathing was superior to other breathing techniques for stress and mood. The key takeaway here is that it’s healthy to have a bit
Of skepticism when you hear about the next craze in self-improvement. New approaches can be helpful, sometimes even really helpful, but in terms of the evidence for specific self-help techniques, it’s often less robust than you might imagine. Lesson three, some techniques work better than others, but only on average. There are some psychological techniques that really are better, much better. For example, if you want to reduce your anxiety, exposure therapy is the most evidence-based approach, and it’s effective for a lot of people, but not
For everyone. In terms of other questions, like who should reframe your thoughts versus being mindful of them, or who should use cognitive techniques versus behavioral ones, not much is actually known. The reality is, while the worst techniques are actually harmful, and many techniques are useless for everyone beyond a simple placebo effect, even the best techniques don’t work for everyone. There’s a ton of person-to-person variability because our situations, biologies, and psychologies all differ. People often greatly underestimate how much variability there
Is between people. If you’re curious about this topic in particular, you can use our free unique traits test. It evaluates you on more than 80 different unusual traits to see which apply to you and how unusual you actually are. This lack of a one-size-fits-all solution in self-improvement can be frustrating. It would be nice to know which techniques are going to work for you individually. But thankfully, this also means you have a lot of freedom in choosing which
Techniques to try. Obviously, it makes sense to skip the harmful and useless techniques and just focus on the good stuff. But even if you just stick to useful techniques, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have to try a few different ones that address your challenges. That way you can find what works well for you. In our new book, The 12 Levers, we provide recommendations about which techniques are most likely to be useful to you given your specific
Circumstances and situation. Lesson four, at a fundamental level, you control surprisingly little. Focusing on what you control is actually an essential principle of life. There’s a reason why the ancient Stoics emphasized it so much. As Epictetus put it, “Some things are in our control and others not.” To illustrate, imagine you’re unjustly locked in a jail cell that’s completely empty except for a chair. You’re surrounded by concrete walls and you can’t see or hear what’s happening outside.
You’re completely alone. In this situation, what do you truly have control over? You certainly can’t control what’s happening outside of the jail cell. And you can’t change much inside the cell, either. Concrete tends to be fairly unmalleable. But you can do certain things. You can speak, even if no one can hear you, and you can move your body, even if you can’t escape. What if the guard came into the cell, strapped you to the chair, and taped
Your mouth shut? Well, you wouldn’t be able to move or speak anymore, but you’d still control some things. You could still control your thinking, at least to some extent. For example, you could choose to fantasize about how you could escape. Sure, random thoughts would pop into your head that you don’t control, but you can then choose to think about something else once you notice those thoughts. And also, you could still control your attention. For example, you
Could focus on the voice of the guard or the feeling of straps on your wrists. Even if you were blindfolded, this attentional control would still be available. In fact, it would still be available even if you were temporarily paralyzed. Attention, thought, body, and communication are the building blocks of control. That means that any self-help technique will always employ one or more of these. It may also be useful to remind yourself of these four when you’re confronted with something you
Can’t control. If you can’t change it with your body, your communication, your thoughts, or your attention, then you can’t change it at all. And that means that attempting to change it will only create frustration and unhappiness. Lesson five, hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life. After extracting nearly 500 techniques from 106 self-help books and 23 therapies, this was our biggest discovery, that there are just 12
High-level psychological strategies that encompass it all. If you want to learn more, such as what these 12 are and the concrete steps for applying them in your circumstances, we’d love it if you’d pre-order our book, The 12 Levers. You can do so by clicking the link in the description below or going to 12leversbook.com. If you pre-order now, you’ll also get five exclusive perks for free, including a tool to help you apply the techniques in the book and a curated list of our
Favorite self-improvement books that we covered in our research. If you enjoy deep dives in psychology or science-based self-improvement, we’d love it if you’d subscribe. We put out a new video every week.
Mhm.