Which self-help books actually work?

This is the time of year resolution-botherers turns in desperation to the self-help gurus. Photo / 123RF

Matt Rudd sifts through a wheelbarrow of bestselling gurus so you don't have to.

You've had a few daysnow to recover from that bleak New Year's Eve-ning in your bubble with some bubbles. You didn't even make it to midnight, you miserable sod. If Big Ben bongs and no one is awake to hear it, has it even bonged?

Resolutions, then. Me: I shall not use alcohol as a late-stage-pandemic crutch. Little voice: Oh yes you will. Me: I shall learn a language and sort out the loft and be a better person. Littler voice: Oh no you won't. Run a marathon? Nope.

Ignore the voices. This is the time of year a nation of resolution-botherers turns in desperation to the self-help gurus. Just look at the enormous erotic spike in self-help book sales in January. We don't need to dwell on the fact that finding someone else to help is precisely the opposite of self-help. We know how far we'll get on our own. The clarinet? No.

But who to ask? What used to be a fairly manageable offering — Eckhart Tolle, Dale Carnegie and a couple of C-listers keen to overshare how they found themselves — is now a whole industry. There are hundreds of gurus offering to help you to your second mountain with the method that helped them to theirs (being a guru). No wonder the most searched phrase after "self-help book" is "self-help book that actually works".

In an effort to be self-helpful, I have spent the past few weeks reading a wheelbarrowful of self-help books. I have been the best person I can be. I have built inner strength and unset my negative mind and cleaned my sink and learnt to self-love. Stop it. I am now a self-help-guru guru. I will help you choose which self-help guru is the gur for u.

First, let's tackle the shouty-balaclava end of the market. Ant Middleton, the human upside-down triangle, the man who would punch coronavirus in its face and ask questions later, is the leader of this particular pack. The former SBS hardman is very honest about how he has struggled with anger issues all his life. Yes, he did end up eye-deep in the River Cam hiding from sniffer dogs after a police officer poked him in the chest. But he learnt from it and that's the important thing. The question is, can we learn from him? Well, it's not subtle.

His latest offering, Zero Negativity, is the literary equivalent of being shouted at by a profane but upbeat sergeant major. Don't effing brood on the negatives. Make your effing enemy your energy. "There's no trait more positive than believing in your own abilities." He would make a terrible therapist, but that's why people like him. Self-help is hard. He makes it sound easy.

Jason Fox is your more nuanced special forces guru. Discharged from the military with PTSD, he is even more honest about his struggles with mental health and his solutions are less bat-the-rat simple. "Life can be a war zone," he says in his mega-bestselling Life Under Fire. "We should prepare for it." Which is almost profound and almost a Ronan Keating song. Fox is less relentlessly positive than Middleton. "It's OK to not feel great," he writes. "Life isn't one endless success story and it's a positive step if we decide to approach any unfortunate circumstances with honesty and self-awareness." You must mission-plan your way through like an elite operator.

It's convincing stuff, but then I remember I've got three kids and that I don't have time to mission-plan lavatory breaks, let alone life. Still, a week with shouty Middleton and slightly less shouty Fox and I've learnt not to rest in the aftermath of success or ignore the frustration of failure. I've killed with kindness and I've worn the happy mask. I feel ready. Bring it on. This lasts right up until I ask my broadband provider to fix my broadband.

The key piece of advice in Admiral William H McRaven's Make Your Bed is, unsurprisingly, to make your bed. "If by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed made," he says. "A bed you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better." I am a grown, married man. I tend towards bed-making anyway. But on the admiral's orders I have really upped the bed-making stakes. I am the Claridge's housekeeping of bed-making. And it works. Yesterday, for example, was a miserable day. Two flat tyres and a parking ticket. A medicinal bottle of whisky dropped. A dog breaking her record for rolling in fox poo after having a bath (72 seconds). A day without any progress of which to speak. Except, hang on, I've made my bed. Not a complete waste then, I thought happily last night. Except then I had to go to bed and it wasn't made any more.

I cannot tell you what a relief it was to move on to the monk section of this increasingly harrowing wheelbarrow. If someone wanted a self-help book to help people recover from reading too many military self-help books, then Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk is perfect. No shouting. No swearing. A whole chapter on breathwork. Shetty spent three years in an Indian ashram before returning to the West, becoming a motivational speaker and appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It's intoxicating stuff — how to move from self-image to self-esteem, how to be happy with what you have, how to find passion and purpose, how to separate your monk mind (good) from your monkey mind (scurrilous). Like Middleton he's not keen on negativity. Unlike Middleton he has quite gentle and reflective ways to deal with it. "Happiness comes when we are learning, progressing and achieving," he says. But I know all this already. I know you should focus on happiness, not success. I know you should focus on a different special stone on each daily walk. I got the mindfulness app last new year.

Fear is a big thing for Shetty, like it's a big thing for all the gurus. Overcome your fear and you can find your passion. I was afraid he was going to say that. I am a middle-aged man with a mortgage and no broadband and those meddling kids climbing up walls in a pandemic. Of course I am fearful. Of course I am risk-averse. I'm not going to chuck it all in and become a woodsman, a sky-diving instructor or a self-help guru. I'll find my passion next year. Right now finding my car keys would be enough.

Next is Not a Life Coach by the personal trainer James Smith, which I'll skip because I'm not going to fall for that one. I like Vex King's Good Vibes, Good Life because it's the only self-help book in my wheelbarrow that doesn't have a picture of the self-help guru on the cover. Inside, though, it's more fridge-magnet monkery — be kind to yourself, forgive yourself, the more you count your blessings, the more blessings you'll have to count. Plus a whole load of hokum about the Law of Attraction. And he didn't even live in an ashram for three years. Next.

Mrs Hinch. The Instagrammer who created her own verb, to hinch. Not nearly as fun as it could have been. Hinching is cleaning your house. Cleaning your house soothes the soul. Hinch Yourself Happy is an attempt to make housework not just fun but good for your mental health. So Mrs Hinch goes in the same basket as Admiral McRaven. You make your bed. You feel good about it. You scrub your lavatory bowl, you feel great. I was with the bed-making, but the hinching is just annoying. Either there is a deep philosophy here about small steps, about gratitude, about joy in mundanity, or I've read too many of these books now and this is just a mad germophobe single-handedly killing all the polar bears with her rabid consumption of cleaning products.

Not so for Marie Kondo, that other verb-creating tidy-freak, about whom I will not have a bad word said. In my wheelbarrow Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying is by far the most practical guide. I have kondoed twice more since I first kondoed four years ago. I have gone through piles of shoes, clothes, electrical cables, photos, books, children's art and wedding photos. I have held up each item and asked it: "Do you spark joy?" Invariably it didn't and off it went to the bin. Three brutal kondos in and I have a Steve Jobs wardrobe in a Jack Reacher house. I am monklike in my lack of material possessions. There's very little to hinch because I have kondoed.

So this is the conclusion. All these books have a lot of things in common. They understand their readers: we're all stuck, we're all a bit miserable and we would like to change. And they all show it is in our power, with the help of their trademarked method, to make that change. It doesn't matter which one you pick. Pick the one that suits you. What matters is that reading a self-help book won't, in itself, help. You have to do it yourself. You have to self-help. Without wishing to sound like a particularly unhelpful self-help guru, the first step towards that is to worry less about things that might happen. That's the one thing that's helped me navigate my own midlife doldrums.

Saxophone? God, no.

Written by:Matt Rudd
© The Times of London