By Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson.
Over the past five years, my colleague Jeremy Stevenson and I have read over 100 books. self help books, studied more than 20 healing methods and extracted and classified about 500 techniques from these sources.
As part of the process of writing our book, the goal was to understand higher-level patterns across all self-improvement techniques. 12 handlesaims to provide a complete set of psychological tools to improve your life.
Today, we want to share five lessons that stand out from all of this research.
Lesson 1: Many appliances are recycled or repackaged
Take it vigilancedetermined by meditation teacher John Kabat-Zinn as “consciousness arising through payment attention intentionally, in the present, and without judgment. The Pali word sati (roughly translated as consciousness) is found in early Buddhist teachings. get to know about 2500 years ago. Mindfulness is applied now many modern treatmentssuch as 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 under a different name. For example, ACT therapists call awareness of thoughts “defusion” and bodily sensations “expansion.” Mindfulness is also done through “decentering”, “accepting” and “distancing”.
Is it bad for self-help products to be recycled and repackaged? This can contribute to an overwhelming sense of frustration as we browse the shelves in the self-help aisle of a bookstore. But that’s a good thing if it means using more efficient methods. And it’s good if it makes it easier to understand old techniques that may be described in obscure language.
Lesson 2: Many Self-Help Techniques Don’t Have As Much Evidence As You Think
Cold exposure is a great example. It became extremely popular. And from all the hype, you’d think that daily cold showers or dips have few randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showing consistent benefits for a variety of outcomes. worry, depressionand energy levels.
A 2025 meta-analysis They found some benefits of cold exposure, including less physiological stress after 12 hours, better sleep, improved quality of life after 30 days, and a 29% reduction in sick days. But he did not benefit from stress immediately – after 1, 24 or 48 hours; No quality of life benefits after 90 days; and the general mood does not improve. At best, the evidence is mixed.
Here are the authors meta-analysis It concluded: “The current evidence base is limited by few RCTs, small sample sizes, and lack of diversity in study populations.”
(Interestingly, exposure to cold is also an example of a “repackaged” technique. ancient Greece and perhaps even ancient Egypt.)
Lesson 3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average
Some psychological techniques are actually better than others. Very good. For example, if you want to reduce your anxiety, exposure therapy is the most evidence-based approach, and it works for many people (but not for everyone).
As for other questions, such as who should change their thoughts and remember them, or who should use cognitive versus behavioral techniques, or who should use DBT versus CBT techniques, not much is actually known.
The truth is that the worst techniques are useless for everyone (except for potential giveaways). the placebo effect), even the best techniques don’t work for everyone.
The lack of a one-size-fits-all solution to self-improvement can be frustrating. Fortunately, this means you have a lot of freedom in choosing which technique to try.
4. At a basic level, you have surprisingly little control
Focusing on what you have control over is an important principle in life. There’s a reason the ancient Stoics emphasized this so much. As Epictetus said, “Some things are within our control, others are not.” If you try to change things beyond your control, you can waste a lot of energy and cause yourself a lot of unnecessary suffering. This is also the main reason why our book focuses on the most useful self-help techniques, because the techniques are controlled processes.
Essential Self-Help Readings
What we’ve discovered from reviewing many self-help books and therapies is that there are four things that each of us has primary control over. Only four! You have control (though not complete control) over your body, communication, thoughts, and attention. It’s not like that!
To illustrate, imagine that you are unjustly imprisoned in a prison cell that is completely empty except for a chair. You are surrounded by concrete walls and cannot see or hear what is happening outside. You are completely alone.
What can you control in this situation? You certainly have no control over what happens outside of prison. You can’t change much inside the cell either (concrete is too soft).
But there are some things you can do. You can speak even when no one is listening. And even if you can’t run away, you can move your body.
What if a guard walks into a cell, ties you to a chair, and tapes your mouth shut? Well, now you can’t move and you can’t talk. But you still control some things. You can still control your thoughts, at least to some extent (like you can choose). to fantasize about how you can escape).
And you can still control your attention (for example, you can focus on the voice of the guard or the feeling of the belt on your wrists). Even if you were blindfolded, this attention control would still be present. In fact, even if you were temporarily paralyzed, it would still be there.
Remembering that we can only control four things helps us remember to focus only on the things we can control, rather than trying to change the things we can’t.
5. There are hundreds of self-help techniques, but they all boil down to just 12 broad strategies to improve your life.
After sifting through nearly 500 techniques from 106 self-help books and 23 therapies, we’ve found that just 12 top-level psychological strategies cover nearly every way you can improve your life.
For more information: Jeremy and I will describe each of these 12 levers in detail in our upcoming book, 12 handles.
