What a Decade of Self-Experimenting Revealed to Me About Self-Help, Healing, and Relationships

Big changes solve problems. Then you move on to tackle bigger problems. So if the problems keep getting bigger, what’s the point?

I had an amazing introduction to the whole self-help thing. I’d never really even heard of it. Yet, while reading an introduction to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) book, I felt like I was having revelation after revelation.

It genuinely felt magical.

I’d come from a low point in my life, and I’d committed to making myself a better person. I’d committed to not stopping until I was finally a confident, happy person.

It continued for years. I found more books from all sorts of angles. More self-help. I learned about all kinds of therapy. Things really felt like they were changing.

But nothing really was.

That’s the first problem I found with self-help. Maybe it’s a problem — or maybe it’s a necessary stage. Everyone is different, I guess. But regardless, the fact is this: Reading through books can give the impression that things are changing when nothing really is. You can feel what’s possible and truly believe you’re doing something amazing. And then you walk out the front door, and everything is still as it was. And so are you.

As I say, though, this may be a necessary part. It may be that we need to have our old beliefs about ourselves and the world properly challenged before we can change them and move forward. And even though we’ll change through action more than reading, it may be difficult to act until we’ve given our old beliefs a bit of a beating with a book or two. Everyone is different, but that was the case for me.

But beating up old beliefs can come at a cost. There’s a lot of nonsense in some self-help books. A lot of pseudoscience. It isn’t the ideal stuff to be forming new beliefs around.

There are varying degrees of nonsense — from the harmless to the money-making scams to the outright dangerous.

But there’s also genuinely helpful and really quite therapeutic stuff, things that genuinely made me happier and more confident. They changed my life.

Then things really did start to get better.

A Decade in 4 Paragraphs

I’d read a lot of stuff. A lot. I became knowledgeable in NLP and trained in hypnotherapy. I learned about transactional-analysis therapy and CBT. I read about the psychology of happiness and stoicism. I read dangerous nonsense about curing cancer with visualisations and how people with eczema hate themselves. I read about comfort-zone stretching and psycho-cybernetic imagination.

I learned how to fight. I learned how to sing. I learned how to act and be funny. I traveled the country sleeping in the backseat and boot of my car. I got parts in films and on stage. I hypnotised myself. I worked as a bouncer and ordered a pizza from McDonald’s to deliberately make a fool of myself, just to teach my brain that embarrassment isn’t fatal. I checked up on the science behind it all. I studied it and lived it.

Eventually I traveled to Asia twice, came home and took illegal drugs (which are showing to be hugely therapeutic in clinical trials), and when all the dust settled, I found myself right where I needed to be. I got there in the end. I fulfilled my promise to myself. But what a windy road it had turned out to be.

I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. But most of all, I learned the real value of putting this work in. It turns out that solving my own problems wasn’t the point of it, after all.

Some Common Self-Help Methods

There’s a lot of stuff out there. It can be pretty hard to know where to start, and even harder to know when to finish. So here’s a quick overview of some common areas of self-improvement.

NLP

Neuro-linguistic programming is huge in the self-help world. It promises to be therapeutic, to improve performance, and to allow you to be more persuasive.

The thing is, it’s all a bit dubious, and there’s little science to support it. A lot of it has been shown not to work at all. But there’s also some useful stuff that really does work. You could spend years disentangling it all.

Some of it is genuinely brilliant. The NLP-based phobia treatment, for example, allows people to be cured of phobias in a session — instead of weeks of counseling. I’ve done it with someone myself as part of my hypnotherapy training. The girl who fled from her car, leaving it at the traffic light because of a spider, is no longer scared of spiders. It’s amazing.

I also recommend the modeling technique, not for lasting change as much as for quick, big boosts for improving your work and thinking.

But a lot of it isn’t so useful, I think. It’s fascinating, but if you decide to go down the NLP route, you’ll want to be skeptical at every claim, and that’s time-consuming.

Self-hypnosis

I love self-hypnosis. It’s easy and safe, and the use of guided imagery is backed by plenty of science as a good way to help with stress and anxiety — and even depression.

Like NLP, hypnotherapy also makes a lot of claims that haven’t been backed up with science. That’s the reason I didn’t get into it as a career after I trained. I believe anyone who’ll take your money to help you lose weight as a hypnotherapist is either a fraud or, more likely, has fallen for the claims themselves. But that’s just my belief. Like so much of this stuff, opinions differ hugely.

But if you disregard the big claims and keep it to the simplest relaxation and guided-imagery techniques, it can be really useful. The metaphors you’ll find in hypnotherapy scripts can be quite beautiful and I suspect healing for some. Like NLP, hypnotherapy isn’t black and white. But the good stuff is really good.

Comfort-zone stretching

This is such a huge part of growth. I’ve used it in a lot of ways to great effect.

I worked as an actor for years and now teach it, which stretches the comfort zone in many ways. I worked as a nightclub bouncer for three years to stretch it in other ways and came away more confident in conflict and being able to be much more assertive.

I trained my brain to realise that looking stupid wasn’t fatal after all — by doing stupid things like ordering a pizza from McDonald’s and outright asking for rejections. It all added up, especially with the consistent comfort-zone stretching of living in the acting world.

Just be sure to only lean out of your comfort zone and not jump too far at once — that can do more harm than good.

Stoicism and logotherapy

Stoicism is having a bit of a resurgence at the moment and is helping people with its ancient but now psychologist-supported concepts. It tackles the big pictures like loneliness and fear of death.

Logotherapy also uses perspective and the big picture — finding meaning in our lives. With meaning and happiness being strongly correlated, finding meaning is an important but often overlooked part of self-development.

The Problem Is That Our Problems Aren’t the Problem and Never Were

I began this giant mission of self-development because I had problems I wanted to solve. I had a problem with social anxiety and the problem of low self-worth. I had financial problems. I saw a route out of them, and I worked hard to take it.

But in life, problems aren’t the problem. We’ll all always have problems. Solving one just reveals another.

Humans always have problems. But problems aren’t really problems because they’re not in any way controllable, so they’re just part of life. As we grow, these things start to become within our control and become problems. It’s a never-ending treadmill.

For a comedy lover with severe social anxiety, worrying about a crowd not liking a stand-up routine probably isn’t a problem because many of them wouldn’t even consider going on stage and doing comedy in the first place. By the time they’d work through the anxiety, making it not a problem anymore, they get up on stage and that cold audience is now the problem. When they gets so good at it that no audience is a problem, now they’ve got tour venue clashes, agent arguments, and social media trolls. None of those were problems when they were hiding in their lounge watching stand-up on Netflix.

When I had no money, knowing when to sell Bitcoin wasn’t a problem because I never had any anyway.

Your problems grow with you — and always will. You can’t lose your house if you don’t have one.

It’s the whole principle video games are based on. Video games are all about solving problems, be they as simple as shooting low-graphic alien ships or beating complex armies with your own complex armies, solving problems as they come.

Level 1 is easy. Anyone can solve the problems, and you learn the game. Level 2 is a little harder, with problems within each level also getting more difficult as you go — the classic end-of-level big boss is a prime example. As you move up through the levels, your problems get harder and harder but so do your skill levels, giving you the feeling of progress and the psychological reward that brings.

If you were to stay on level 1 too long, you’d get bored. But once you’ve beaten the level 5 big boss, level 1 is boring, unfulfilling, and a waste of time.

And so it is with self-improvement. Whatever methods we use to solve our problems, were just revealing more. But that’s fine because in doing so we’re getting more skillful and gaining the psychological rewards of making that progress, and that’s good for us. It’s how we get better. We level up.

If you choose to get comfortable with everything in life and make sure you have no problems ever again by sitting around doing nothing, you’ll be bored out of your mind. And that’s a problem.

We’ll never solve all of our problems. That’s absolutely fine. More success will create more worry. I don’t need to worry about a stock-market crash because I don’t have $1 million in stocks. Before I had a car, I didn’t have to worry about the expensive-sounding noise it’s prone to make. My life improvements bought me that problem.

This is where the angle of self-help changes a little for me. If we can’t ever solve all our of problems but doing so is good anyway, what’s the most useful thing we can find to help us? Solving problems faster will create bigger ones faster. So what’s actually useful?

Life Is Enjoyable

What is effective in self-help becomes somehow less important when you realise that the most effective things will just bring bigger problems along quicker. So we might as well have fun playing with things.

So this brings me to the first thing I think is truly important in self-help: fear. If we’re scared of too much, life can’t be much fun. We miss out on so much of life due to fear: fear we won’t know anyone at the party, fear things will go wrong, fear they’ll say no.

So that’s the first place self-help can make our lives so much better. We can make ourselves less fearful with a lot of what self-help teaches. We’ll still always have problems, but we can tackle them with less fear. Life is so much better when you’re not scared of half of it. I know that because I’ve been there.

You can’t freely play with life when you’re scared of it. There’s a quite beautiful metaphor used in hypnotherapy about two fish in a river. One is having huge amounts of fun letting himself get blown around the river in the current. The other is clinging on to the riverbank, too scared to let go. Only when it lets go does it feel the joy of going with the flow and playing with life, whatever gets thrown at it. So many people are still clinging to that riverbank. It’s safe to let go. The fish is in a river, right where it’s supposed to be, whatever the water does.

That’s been one huge thing for me. Of all the books, ideas, techniques, and theories, it all comes down to letting that fish let go of the river bank. Get into the current in the river. It’s safe.

Self Help Is First Aid Too

There’s another important thing in self-development: It’s not so much about making big changes. Big changes solve problems that lead to bigger problems, after all.

This is more to do with the small-but-painful things: the sting of rejection that can hurt for days but, over a lifetime, isn’t that significant; the sadness accompanying a loss that all humans have to face sometimes; the down and off days that are all part of being human but people take to heart and beat themselves up about; and the things that alone aren’t significant but can come along in such a regular stream to make things difficult and painful.

I like self-development because it has answers for these little things, and that makes life consistently better, day after day. Nothing can make everything better, of course — nothing apart from maybe a parent when you’re four years old. There’s nothing with such power on the self-help or therapy shelves. But there’s plenty there that can make life better by helping out with life’s continuous little pinpricks and the grazed knees in our minds.

But further, for me, it gets better.

Because it’s not just me in this constant stream of little painful things. It’s everyone, and because I’ve found ways to deal with them, I can share them. And then other people don’t have that pain to deal with either. And if I do my writing properly, for those who connect with it, they won’t be so fearful either.

What’s the Point?

One thing I’ve learned over the years of studying and reading psychology and therapy is people do well with meaning and structure. Having meaning in our lives is one of the biggest things that leads to a happier life. That’s why even pseudoscience like the law of attraction may have value after all. It can provide structure and meaning, even if there are no verifiable facts behind it.

Religion has served this purpose for almost forever. So as long as something isn’t dangerous — and claiming that visualisations can cure terminal diseases so people don’t get real help is dangerous — then it can still make someone feel happier and more fulfilled.

Psychedelic drugs are also a very quick route to finding intense, profound meaning, which is probably why magic mushrooms are showing so much promise for treating depression.

The best thing about having done all this has nothing to do with my own problems. I still have them, of course. The best thing for me now is I can help other people. I see so many people struggling in the places where I used to be, and I have some answers for them. Not the answers necessarily — but some answers. I can help people. I can be more useful to people. I’m more relaxed for them to be around and can do more for them.

I can finally be there for people instead of hiding from them. I can be a better friend. A better partner. A better human. I’m better at life now and can make life better for others, too. When you’re scared of everything, that’s very hard to do, however many books you’ve read.

So here I am. Self-help and self-development have been amazing. For me, it concluded with a couple of months of intense self-therapy involving psychedelic drugs and MDMA that cemented all of my learnings from the previous decade. Without that, I fear it may have been never-ending. It still is, kind of, but it’s not so urgent. I’m OK now. And I can use everything I’ve learned to make things better for others, and though I didn’t know it from the start, that’s what makes self-improvement so amazing.

If you make your own life better, you make the world better, if only for just a few people. But like ripples in a lake, if that helps a few others, they’ll make their own ripples too. Others will be helped by that, and the lake will be full of ripples. The lake will change.

I didn’t make the first ripple. Far from it. Ripples from others reached me long ago and kept coming until I could make my own. I’m just one teeny tiny part of a huge beautiful ecosystem of people making themselves better, and because so many people are, it makes the whole world better. I’m grateful to be that little ripple among the millions of others.