Quite honestly most of them are trash in my opinion. I say this as someone who worked at a bookstore for years and has read many of them. Most of them could be condensed down to a pamphlet or they just yell at you and tell you to get off your ass and do it. That being said I have a few that I think have actually been able to help.

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear

"The Energy Bus" by Jon Gordon

"Quiet" by Susan Cain more of a psychology book

I second "Atomic Habits". It's practical and clear.

I’ve not read any. I’m sure they work for a lot of people even if they are saying things you kinda already know, it reinforces and helps focus.

The Analects by Confucius which I’m reading now and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius are more my style. I pick and choose little bits from many philosophers, historians, and thinkers and overall I think that method serves well.

I think it depends on the author's credentials and the type of book they're writing. I've read a few spiritual-leaning books that I thought were poorly executed, but I've found psychology focused ones better in general.

"Daring Greatly" by Brené Brown is one I can honestly say changed the way I approach life and decision making, and I highly recommend it. I've heard good things about her other books as well.

Self-help is 99.9% bullshit, with plenty of it being full-on scam/cult entry points.

I’ve never really liked them. The reading experience usually feels unenjoyable to me. Oftentimes, the takes are so glaringly ridiculous that I genuinely can’t believe somebody approved of the book being published at all. A majority of them feel like a bad patchwork of 2013 instagram quotes and arbitrary bullshit, or an unpolished, lazy pep talk about being tough and waking up early. Of course, this is a gross generalization and there are also a lot of well-written, interesting and well-researched ones (absolutely not The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, though). There are a couple that I found to be somewhat helpful, but I still couldn’t finish them. I didn’t finish Atomic Habits by James Clear because I started reading my friend’s copy when I was at his place, and never picked it up again, but I thought it was actually mildly interesting, so I might give it another shot someday.

I totally understand the feeling of dissatisfaction that you evoke. I think it’s mainly associated with the fact that the sense of gratification you were seeking out of reading those books isn’t immediately substantiated by a tangible upgrade in your individual experience, especially since you don’t really get any closure like you would after finishing a novel or a collection of essays for example. You feel like you’ve just come out of a calm cream-curtained yoga mom’s apartment to the middle of a busy roundabout held up by traffic and punctuated by miscellaneous noises, which is understandably overwhelming and confusing. I would much rather explore similar themes through any other piece of well-written media, that doesn’t read like a handbook to life.

Although, I have to say that it’s still not as homespun as this, and this comment is more geared towards the specific branches of self-help that I’ve personally been exposed to, which isn’t a whole lot because I dislike the genre; so take what I said with a grain of salt.

All in all, they’re definitely not for me, but I know people who say to have benefited from them; so I wouldn’t shun them from the realms of literature per se, but I’d prefer to keep them off my bookshelves.

I read 10 Percent Happier and enjoyed it. I related to Dan Harris’ anxiety issues. Tried the mindfulness and meditation so I did find it helpful since even though I’d read about meditating before, I’d never really tried it. I still meditate when I’m feeling stressed even though I’m bad at it.

Want to develop your character? Read some Russian literature lmao

I'm a retired Health and Life Coach and I've read a lot of self-help, motivational, finance, health, communication, business, productivity, and time management books. It is easy to find them written by women if you look for them.

There is a lot of crap out there, many coaches and gurus are told to write books to add to their credibility and many are not helpful. I will say that there are absolutely some that have made an impact on my life and the lives of clients over the years.

I will say that to get the most of them I treat them more like workbooks. I often read through them once to see if they are worth my time, then I go through them in more detail, doing the exercises, journal prompts, setting up the systems etc.

I do have a few that I like to read every year or two to keep me on the right track.

So I have read some that could be distilled down to a power point presentation without losing any content, some that were pure bullshit, and some that contained cutting edge psychological and neurological content, leading to very useful tips. Cal Newport, John Gottman, Dr Wendy Suzuki, Eve Rodsky were helpful to me, among others.

I also have benefited from books on psychology, sociology and philosophy that worked for me like self help even though they weren't technically self help books. Examples Flow the psychology of optimal experience by Csikzentmihalyi and Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error, and Breakfast with Seneca and Man's Search for Meaning.

I find self-help readings are works not originally published with that marketing intent.
Stoics. Scientists' memoirs (self-penned, not ghost-authored). Nautilus magazine. Historical travel diaries. Brainpickings.org (now The Marginalian). Updates from my preferred not-for-profits
All these and more lead me to reflect and are bellows on the fires of my conscious thoughts, activities, decisioning abilities and my fulfillment and happiness.
A rule of thumb (via personal observation) is one should have done a thing ten times before positioning oneself as an expert about it.

It really depends why you want a self help book. I have found books that help with people management, and books that help with the general problem of getting lots of emails and having to be organized while handling it all. But those were specific issues I had in my work. I wouldn’t recommend those to just anyone, it would be like reading a “how to fix your sink” book when your sink wasn’t broken.

Many self-help books feel like expanded blog posts. I don't think a lot of people ignore the genre because the genre is mainly written by men, as you say -- it's a popular genre.

After trying to slog through Atomic Habits, Essentialism, and other highly recommended titles in the self-help world I've dropped self-help books from my TBR list altogether. I've had more success learning from family members, friends, therapists, and diaries.

A third of self-help books are written by women. While sure, that means men write most of them, it also means it's not exactly difficult to find self-help written by women. Seems like a very silly reason to ignore a genre. A better reason would be the amount of hucksters that write these books.

I've read several self-help books that changed my lifestyle and perspective (also many that were drivel, it comes with the genre). If you're looking for books by women, these two in particular come to mind:

- The Willpower Instinct by Kelly Mcgonigal

- Dopamine Nation by dr. Anna Lembke

I have read so many from finanace to self love and marriage. At first, yeah, I was into it trying new practices and what not but long term I am who I am and I ain’t gonna change.

The problem with self help books, besides the fact that most of them could have gotten their point across better as magazine articles, is that while their points may be good, there’s no follow through or follow up. You can read the book, get some fabulous, life changing insight, and six weeks later you’ve forgotten everything and you’re back to your same old thing. Things like therapy or good support groups work better, because you have ongoing support when you’re trying to make changes.

Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done was life changing for me, though. Or at least career changing.

Didn't really like them up until recently, Atomic Habits really helped me to be a bit more productive and changed my perspective, I also like reading books from Norman Vincent Peale. They can be very helpful, I think everyone should at least try and see if it works for them.

Most people only read the pop bestseller ones designed to appeal to the masses and then are furious they didn’t help them. I’ve found that very specific issues can be addressed by highly experienced authors and those are good. Examples on my end include doctors writing about brain fog and coping techniques, PTSD and trauma and anxiety coping (as recommended by my therapist), and books about situations where normal childhoods were discussed and how to not continue the pattern of dysfunction. I’ve read some, like Big Magic, that are more of a call to action and I tend to find those inoffensive as well. The absolute worst of the genre are ones that prey on people but next worst might be trying to read rich business bro’s musings and to learn something when really the secret is to be born privileged.

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Can confirm that Dopamine Nation was an exquisite read! Highly recommend!

Can confirm that Dopamine Nation was an exquisite read! Highly recommend!

My daily lead-ball-and-chain existence consists of a formidable perfect-storm-like combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity.

Ergo, it would be very helpful to people like me to have books written about such or similar conditions involving a coexistence of ACE trauma and/or ASD and/or high sensitivity, the latter which seems to have a couple characteristics similar to ASD traits.

While self-help books are informative and useful to me in other ways, they nevertheless typically fail to mention any of the three abovementioned cerebral conditions, let alone the potential obstacles they may or likely will pose to readers like me benefiting from the book’s information/instruction.

The Autistic Brain, for example, fails to even once mention the real potential for additional challenges created by a reader’s ASD coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or ACE trauma.

As it were, I also read a book on adverse childhood experience trauma, Childhood Disrupted, that totally fails to even once mention high sensitivity and/or autism spectrum disorder. That was followed by The Highly Sensitive Man, with no mention whatsoever of autism spectrum disorder or adverse childhood experience trauma.

I therefore don't know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from such not-cheap books useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live much less miserably. I wonder whether I, when reading such self-help books, should try considering/consuming their content as might a neurotypical or non-ASD person?

While many/most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I'm wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.

The way I see it: ACE abuse thus trauma is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge it in some meaningful, constructive way?