Self-Help Books—Do They Help? | February 27, 2007 | On the Couch with Dr. Gail Saltz

Self-Help Books—Do They Help?

On the Today show this morning, I spoke with one of the teachers of The Secret, the wildly selling book and DVD that has reached number one on the New York Times Best Sellers List. This is a testament to how badly everyone would like to believe that there is a solution to their suffering — better yet, a solution that requires you only to think to receive it. The truth is that positive thinking (part of what The Secret promotes) is a valuable tool and has been known about and written about for well over a century. Positive thinkers are more likely to work toward their goals, are more open to seeing possibilities as opportunities and have less stress (which is good for both the mind and the body). These results have been seen in reproducible studies.

But some self-help books promote ideas that are not only not helpful — they are potentially damaging. The Secret is, according to the author and the contributing teachers, “the law of attraction” which they say means that your mind sends out vibrations that will attract like vibrations. In other words, if you think it, you will get it.

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I did not have the opportunity to see Dr. Saltz on the Today show, so I can only comment on what she has written on her blog and the many angry responses to it. Positive Thinking, in scientific behavioral  terms, is called "self-talk." Our internal dialogue can have both proscriptive and prescriptive functions (in other words, our thoughts can both limit our possibilities and define what we see as potential actualities).

If you convince yourself that your efforts will be fruitless, that you are bound to fail, these internal thoughts will naturally increase your anxiety, make you "look" only for failure cues, and make you "miss" any potential success cues. Looking only for failure signs and ignoring success signs will make your interpretation of the world become a "self-fulfilling prophesy."

What self-talk does is focus our attention.  If our focus of attention is filtered in such a way that we see only the possibilities of ridicule and humiliation, our performance is likely  to suffer. This is not due to any magnetic, vibratory, or physical process. It is psychological. The same is true for positive thoughts. If our thoughts are unrealistically self-centered and egomaniacal, our distorted perceptions of what is possible will lead us to engage in behavior that is unlikely to be productive. So if I believe that I can become President of the United States, but have never taken a political science course, never served on any governmental committees, never participated in any political party meetings, and have no economic resources to wage a political campaign, I'm unlikely to succeed with even the most positive of thoughts and beliefs.