Why does the self-help shelf keep growing?

In 1936 Dale Carnegie taught people how to win friends. Fifty years later Stephen Covey gave offices their seven habits. Today the Stoics are back in fashion. The covers change. The message does not: fix your thinking, find your willpower, and your life will follow.

These are not foolish books. Many of us have found comfort in them. But comfort and cure are different things.

The same reader, the tenth book

New books on an old subject prove nothing by themselves. Every generation writes its own. The real sign is elsewhere: the same reader buys the fifth book, and then the tenth.

A person who naturally wakes early and finishes his work does not buy books on discipline. The buyers are the people who struggle. They read, feel hope, try for a week, and slide back. Then the guilt returns, heavier than before.

Starting at the wrong end

Why does this happen? Because all these books begin at the top, with thought and will, and expect the body to obey.

Two findings should make us doubt this.

For years, psychology taught that willpower is like fuel in a tank, used up as the day goes on. When larger and stricter studies repeated those experiments, the effect almost disappeared.

Every poor sleeper knows the second finding in his own body. Order yourself to sleep, and you grow more awake. A century ago the French pharmacist Émile Coué called this the law of reversed effort: when the will fights the automatic working of mind and body, the automatic side usually wins.

Two burdens

So the person who fails has not failed for want of character. He was given a method that starts at the wrong end. He then carries two burdens: the original difficulty, and the shame of having failed the cure.

The better question is not "What is wrong with my willpower?" It is "How do my body and mind actually work?"

Sleep, food, noise, daily rhythm and small actions come first. Thought follows. That is the subject of our next article, Do first, feel later.

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