I've spent several years studying scientific self-help. I'm sharing some of what I've learned in my sequence The Science of Winning at Life, but I probably won't have time to write additional posts in that series for a while. In the meantime, those who are interested in what mainstream scientists have discovered so far about effective self-help methods may want to read some of my favorite popular-level scientific self-help books:
- Wiseman, 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute
- Steel, The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done
- Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
- Halverson, Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
- Burns, Feeling Good
I've recently read Compassion and Self-Hate by Theodore Ruben, which builds on Karen Horney's idea that people who were abused, neglected, or overly manipulated as children are apt to conclude that being a human wasn't good enough, and then they invent inhuman standards (always right, always victorious, the perfect martyr, etc.) in the hopes that they can find a way to be good enough.
I'll add that self-hatred can lead to overreacting to ideals from fiction. I found the book to be a very specific salve to some damage I'd picked up from Ayn Rand. Her preferred characters are very passionate and energetic, and I'm not like that. I hadn't realized how much my concern with the mismatch was (and probably still is) haunting me. I described the book to a friend, and that made him realize he was haunted by Heinlein characters, and not in a good way.
Ruben addresses self-hatred as a semi-autonomous and very debilitating pattern, with compassion towards oneself as a not fully comprehensible or optimizable system as the solution.
Will's "being flawless along a set of dimensions the designation of which as desirable is itself considered flawless reasoning" strikes me as one of those inhuman standards.
If I am trying to live up to an unreasonable standard then I am being unreasonable aka flawed. This is where Taoism is really important. Effortless action, keeping the gears from grinding needlessly, from wasting the chi, the money, the metaness, the subtelty, the self-correcting-ness of the world, building better institutions with low transaction costs...