Keep an Eye Out for Yourself! Selfish Self-Help Books Are Exploding – Do They Boost Your Wellbeing?

“Are you sure that one?” questions the clerk at the premier shop branch at Piccadilly, the city. I selected a well-known improvement book, Fast and Slow Thinking, authored by the Nobel laureate, among a group of much more fashionable books such as The Let Them Theory, The Fawning Response, Not Giving a F*ck, Being Disliked. “Is that not the title people are buying?” I inquire. She hands me the hardcover Don’t Believe Everything You Think. “This is the title everyone's reading.”

The Surge of Self-Help Volumes

Improvement title purchases in the UK grew annually from 2015 to 2023, as per market research. That's only the overt titles, not counting “stealth-help” (personal story, nature writing, reading healing – poetry and what’s considered likely to cheer you up). Yet the volumes shifting the most units lately are a very specific category of improvement: the notion that you better your situation by solely focusing for number one. Certain titles discuss halting efforts to please other people; others say stop thinking concerning others altogether. What might I discover from reading them?

Delving Into the Most Recent Self-Centered Development

The Fawning Response: Losing Yourself in Approval-Seeking, authored by the psychologist Clayton, stands as the most recent book within the self-focused improvement subgenre. You’ve probably heard about fight-flight-freeze – the body’s primal responses to danger. Running away works well such as when you encounter a predator. It’s not so helpful in an office discussion. The fawning response is a modern extension to the language of trauma and, the author notes, differs from the common expressions making others happy and reliance on others (although she states they are “branches on the overall fawning tree”). Often, fawning behaviour is culturally supported by the patriarchy and “white body supremacy” (an attitude that prioritizes whiteness as the norm to assess individuals). So fawning is not your fault, however, it's your challenge, since it involves silencing your thinking, sidelining your needs, to pacify others in the moment.

Prioritizing Your Needs

This volume is excellent: expert, vulnerable, engaging, reflective. However, it focuses directly on the improvement dilemma currently: “What would you do if you were putting yourself first in your personal existence?”

The author has distributed six million books of her title The Theory of Letting Go, boasting eleven million fans on social media. Her philosophy suggests that it's not just about prioritize your needs (which she calls “let me”), you have to also allow other people focus on their own needs (“permit them”). For example: Allow my relatives arrive tardy to absolutely everything we go to,” she writes. “Let the neighbour’s dog howl constantly.” There’s an intellectual honesty in this approach, in so far as it asks readers to reflect on not only what would happen if they prioritized themselves, but if all people did. However, the author's style is “wise up” – other people is already allowing their pets to noise. If you can’t embrace the “let them, let me” credo, you’ll be stuck in a situation where you're anxious about the negative opinions by individuals, and – surprise – they aren't concerned about yours. This will drain your time, energy and psychological capacity, to the point where, eventually, you won’t be controlling your own trajectory. She communicates this to crowded venues on her global tours – London this year; New Zealand, Down Under and America (another time) following. She previously worked as a lawyer, a media personality, a digital creator; she’s been riding high and shot down as a person in a musical narrative. But, essentially, she is a person to whom people listen – when her insights are in a book, on Instagram or spoken live.

A Counterintuitive Approach

I aim to avoid to sound like a second-wave feminist, yet, men authors in this terrain are essentially the same, yet less intelligent. Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art: A New Way to Live describes the challenge slightly differently: seeking the approval from people is merely one of a number mistakes – including chasing contentment, “victim mentality”, “accountability errors” – getting in between you and your goal, that is stop caring. Manson started writing relationship tips in 2008, before graduating to life coaching.

This philosophy is not only require self-prioritization, you must also let others focus on their interests.

The authors' The Courage to Be Disliked – with sales of 10m copies, and offers life alteration (according to it) – is presented as an exchange between a prominent Eastern thinker and mental health expert (Kishimi) and a youth (Koga is 52; okay, describe him as a youth). It relies on the principle that Freud's theories are flawed, and fellow thinker Adler (more on Adler later) {was right|was