What if there's nothing wrong with you?
And why I broke up with "everyday" self-help content
Hi friend,
Last year, Tall Man introduced me to an app he uses to keep track of… well, almost everything. I won’t/can’t be the one to explain his system, but can only say that I think his ideas for how to stay organized are extraordinary. Unlike anything I’ve seen or heard about before. Whenever he shows me some new way he’s using it, I am truly in awe of him.
Tall Man wasn’t selling me on the idea of using this app (and I’m not trying to sell you on it either, which is why I’m not naming it), but over time I became intrigued. I wasn’t looking for a new way to organize my life or to-do list. (I’ve always been a pen-and-paper kind of girl.) Instead, I could feel that there was a gap in my support system, especially since making the decision to stop going to therapy and stop journalling.
One day, I downloaded the app and created only one list. There were no tasks or to-dos. Instead, I wrote a handful of gentle reminders I would see every day.
The first one I added: “There is nothing wrong with you ❤️”.
For the past few years, I’ve found myself in a complicated relationship with self-help content. Sometimes, I’m in a phase where I’m happy to consume it and to learn new things from the creators of it. And then every six months or so, I’ll enter a different phase entirely. It’s not just that I stop enjoying the content. It’s that I feel deeply turned off by it.
I don’t notice when I’m entering this phase. It just kind of… happens. But if I were to try to point to a tangible thing I do notice, it’s that one day I get 5-10 minutes into a podcast and just think… nope, I’m done. I can’t consume another story about the hard things we deal with as humans, and/or tips/hacks for how to improve myself. Then I unsubscribe from all the self-help things and delete anything I’ve downloaded/saved, and usually start reading fiction instead. This phase will typically last for anywhere from 1-3 months, before I decide to go back and see what some of those creators have been doing.
This hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been consuming self-help content since I was 10 years old. That’s nearly 30 years… three decades of my life1… that I have consumed content I hoped would help me in some way. And some of it it has helped. It has inspired me. It has given me practical advice for problems I actually needed help with. And even more simply, it has provided validation and helped me feel less alone. But I’ve noticed this new cycle of consumption/anti-consumption enough times now that I had to question it. And at the end of last year, I hit a point where I knew I was done for good.
I unsubscribed from all the podcasts. And I unfollowed any account on social media that was run by a “creator,” choosing to only follow people I actually know or have connected with over the years.
It’s been roughly 4 months, and for the first time: I haven’t re-subscribed to any of it and don’t want to. If anything, I’ve only continued to unsubscribe. This break (or perhaps we can call it a break-up) has given me the space to pay attention to what I’m truly enjoying at this phase in my life. Things like The Ezra Klein Show and
by . Good journalism by people who are interested in what shapes our culture and lives. This content opens my mind and allows me to think about ideas in new ways. It teaches me something about what’s happening in the world outside of me.It does not rely on me feeling bad about myself. It does not rely on me wanting to improve something about who I am or how I live my life. It does not rely on me believing that there is something wrong with me.
But that’s exactly what most self-help content relies on. Not all of it. But it’s what I’m calling “everyday” self-help content relies on. And I’ve finally figured out what the distinction is, and why it hasn’t felt good to consume these last few years.
The way I see it right now, there are two types of self-help content: everyday self-help and special occasion self-help.
Special occasion self-help is content created to help with one very specific topic or problem you are trying to navigate. This is content that is often created by experts in a particular field—and is often consumed in one package, like a book or a single podcast interview. A few examples could be: if you’re stuck in a negative conflict cycle with your partner, you could read a book like FIGHT RIGHT by the Gottmans (or listen to them talk about it on pods). Or if you find yourself in an unhealthy relationship dynamic, you could pick up DRAMA FREE by
. And there are countless personal finance books that could help you with your money! This kind of content can be extremely valuable, because when you need it, you can find it and get the help you need. Not to be consumed daily, it’s meant for special occasions.Special occasion self-help is content created to help with one very specific topic or problem you are trying to navigate. Not to be consumed daily, it’s meant for special occasions.
Everyday self-help, on the other hand, is content that covers any/every topic under the umbrella of self-help—and the creators know there’s an audience that wants to consume all of it. It’s often released as a podcast or YouTube channel or social media (or all of them). The creators might cover productivity one week, and attachment styles the week after that. Then narcissism, trauma, sobriety, creativity. The list goes on. I won’t name examples, but trust you can use your imagination or even think about some of your own. This kind of content can still be valuable, and covers topics that touch our everyday lives. But if you subscribe and consume every single piece of it, it can also feel overwhelming. By covering such a huge range of topics, it doesn’t help you with one specific thing. It simply invites you to stay in the self-help world, more broadly—and that’s not a place I want to hangout every day.
Everyday self-help content doesn’t help you with one specific problem. It simply invites you to live in the self-help world, more broadly.
I don’t want to live and breathe self-help. I don’t want to hear about all the possible things I might be doing wrong, and all the ways I can try to do better. I don’t want to constantly consume content that makes me feel like a self-improvement project, or results in even longer to-do lists of new things I hadn’t even considered doing until a creator told me to. And I don’t want to live in a world that needs me to think there’s something wrong with me, or that I’m a problem that needs to be fixed. I have enough of those beliefs to deal with, thanks to complex trauma (which is why it was the first reminder I added to my phone). I don’t need to also intentionally consume content on it every single day (outside of the regular marketing we already passively see). And honestly, doing so has the potential to be more harmful than helpful for me.
It has a huge impact on my mental health. And it has the potential to have a huge impact on my finances, too. Not just because I might buy into some of the products or services the everyday self-help content creators promote (often on topics I don’t actually need help with). And not just because other people stand to profit from me feeling bad about myself and wanting to self-improve2. If I live in the self-help world every day, I’m not actually living my life—I’m just consuming a lot of self-help content about ways I could live differently. And if I’m not living, I’m not paying attention or taking action on what’s right in front of me. There’s a cost to that.