Self Help

“Feel better, get done more and become a nicer person” In this age of social media, fake news, individualism and information overload, the certainties we relied on in the past are gone. In our quest for assurance and support, the only seemingly dependable pillar left is other people. So we look to them. But they are unsettled too. And by looking to them, we create and perpetuate our own vicious stress-cycle. As a result, we lose our sensible selves. And we go bananas. But there is good news. If we look around us, there are people who withstand the collective lunacy and stay grounded. They do something that most of us have a hard time doing: they stay themselves. And the best news is that what they can do, you can do too. It doesn’t require any special talents or supernatural powers. It only requires doing. In this amiable, open and accessible book, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink takes you on his personal journey out of Bananaland. Drawing from cognitive psychology, martial arts, Saint Benedict, personal experience, and a wide range of other sources, the book offers a nine-step approach with some remarkably practical advice for keeping a cool head in the collective lunacy. “Free yourself from the collective lunacy and reclaim your calm and sensible self”

Mental health is . . . being yourself. A prescriptive and positive guide, illustrated with line drawings, making the case that mental well-being, like physical health, can be strengthened over time and with specific techniques We all want to feel less anxiety, guilt, anger and sadness. We want to obsess less and be less lonely, free ourselves from our demons, compulsive habits, and stress. But as humans (unlike rocks) we experience all of these. And paradoxically, trying to avoid and control them only makes things worse. Having struggled with serious mental illness for many years himself, Mark Freeman has become a dedicated mental-health advocate and coach. He makes the case that instead of trying to feel less and avoid pain and stress, we need to build emotional fitness, especially our capacity for strength, balance and focus. With wit, compassion, and depth of experience and anecdotes, he shows that we can recover from many mental disorders, from mild to very serious, at all ages and stages of life, and even if other methods have failed. Freeman's innovative approach makes use of a range of therapeutic techniques, mindfulness training, peer support, humor, and common sense.

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

The bestselling author of Your Erroneous Zones, Pulling Your Own Strings, and Wisdom of the Ages combines psychological insights and guidelines for achieving spiritual fulfillment to present a three-step program designed to help readers look inside themselves to find a new sense of self-awareness and spiritual joy. Developing the sacred self, Wayne Dyer explains, brings an understanding of our place in the world and a sense of satisfaction in ourselves and others. In Your Sacred Self, Dyer offers a program that helps listeners establish a spiritually-oriented, rather than an ego-oriented, approach to life. Step by step, Dyer shows us how to progress from emotional awareness to psychological insight to spiritual alternatives in order to change our experience of life from the need to acquire to a sense of abundance; from a sense of one's self as sinful and inferior to a sense of one's self as divine; from a need to achieve and acquire to an awareness that detachment and letting go bring freedom. Your Sacred Self is an inspiring, hopeful, illuminating guide that can help everyone live a happier, richer, more meaningful life.

Why doesn't self-help help? Micki McGee explores the demand for self-help & what it tells us about ourselves.

“Gay Hendricks is a great role model for true success. He enjoys abundance and a deep connection with his own spiritual essence, and at the same time has lived for three decades in a thriving marriage. Now, he shows us how to do it for ourselves.” — Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of Cracking the Millionaire Code In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks, the New York Times bestselling author of Five Wishes, demonstrates how to eliminate the barriers to success by overcoming false fears and beliefs. Fans of Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, and The Secret will find useful, effective tips for breaking down the walls to a better life in The Big Leap.

A hilarious and heartwarming rampage through the world of self-care Marianne Power was a self-help junkie. For years she lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guide after definitive guide on how to live your best life. Yet one day she woke up to find that the life she dreamed of and the life she was living were not miles but continents apart. So she set out to make a change. Or, actually, to make every change. Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive perfect life—the one without debt, anxiety, hangovers or Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town with perfect teeth to meet the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams—lay in the pages of those books. So for a year she vowed to test a book a month, following its advice to the letter, taking the surest road she knew to a perfect Marianne. As her year-long plan turned into a demented roller coaster where everything she knew was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?