Look Out for Number One! Self-Focused Self-Help Books Are Booming – But Will They Boost Your Wellbeing?

“Are you sure this title?” asks the assistant in the premier Waterstones location in Piccadilly, the city. I chose a classic personal development title, Fast and Slow Thinking, by the psychologist, surrounded by a selection of far more fashionable works like Let Them Theory, Fawning, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The Courage to Be Disliked. Is that the book everyone's reading?” I question. She gives me the hardcover Don’t Believe Everything You Think. “This is the book readers are choosing.”

The Surge of Personal Development Titles

Self-help book sales in the UK increased each year from 2015 and 2023, based on industry data. This includes solely the overt titles, excluding indirect guidance (memoir, nature writing, book therapy – poems and what’s considered able to improve your mood). However, the titles selling the best in recent years are a very specific tranche of self-help: the idea that you improve your life by solely focusing for number one. A few focus on ceasing attempts to satisfy others; some suggest stop thinking regarding them entirely. What might I discover by perusing these?

Exploring the Newest Self-Focused Improvement

Fawning: The Cost of People-Pleasing and the Path to Recovery, authored by the psychologist Dr Ingrid Clayton, is the latest book in the selfish self-help subgenre. You may be familiar with fight, flight, or freeze – the body’s primal responses to danger. Flight is a great response if, for example you encounter a predator. It's less useful in an office discussion. “Fawning” is a modern extension to the language of trauma and, the author notes, varies from the familiar phrases “people-pleasing” and interdependence (but she mentions they represent “components of the fawning response”). Frequently, approval-seeking conduct is politically reinforced through patriarchal norms and whiteness as standard (a belief that prioritizes whiteness as the standard by which to judge everyone). Therefore, people-pleasing doesn't blame you, yet it remains your issue, as it requires suppressing your ideas, sidelining your needs, to pacify others in the moment.

Putting Yourself First

This volume is valuable: skilled, vulnerable, disarming, reflective. Yet, it centers precisely on the personal development query of our time: How would you behave if you prioritized yourself in your personal existence?”

Mel Robbins has moved six million books of her title Let Them Theory, and has eleven million fans on social media. Her mindset is that you should not only put yourself first (termed by her “let me”), it's also necessary to allow other people focus on their own needs (“let them”). For instance: Allow my relatives arrive tardy to every event we go to,” she states. “Let the neighbour’s dog bark all day.” There's a logical consistency to this, in so far as it prompts individuals to consider not just the consequences if they prioritized themselves, but if everybody did. However, her attitude is “get real” – other people have already letting their dog bark. If you don't adopt this philosophy, you'll remain trapped in an environment where you're anxious concerning disapproving thoughts by individuals, and – newsflash – they don't care about your opinions. This will use up your time, vigor and emotional headroom, to the extent that, eventually, you won’t be in charge of your own trajectory. She communicates this to crowded venues on her international circuit – this year in the capital; Aotearoa, Down Under and the United States (once more) following. She has been a lawyer, a TV host, a podcaster; she’s been riding high and failures as a person from a Frank Sinatra song. Yet, at its core, she represents a figure to whom people listen – when her insights appear in print, on Instagram or delivered in person.

A Counterintuitive Approach

I prefer not to sound like a second-wave feminist, however, male writers in this field are essentially identical, but stupider. Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art: A New Way to Live frames the problem slightly differently: wanting the acceptance of others is just one of a number of fallacies – together with seeking happiness, “victim mentality”, “blame shifting” – getting in between your aims, which is to not give a fuck. Manson initiated writing relationship tips back in 2008, before graduating to everything advice.

The Let Them theory doesn't only should you put yourself first, you must also allow people prioritize their needs.

The authors' The Courage to Be Disliked – that moved ten million books, and “can change your life” (as per the book) – is written as an exchange involving a famous Asian intellectual and therapist (Kishimi) and a young person (The co-author is in his fifties; okay, describe him as a youth). It is based on the idea that Freud erred, and his peer Alfred Adler (more on Adler later) {was right|was