Imagine that in the kitchen recipes they did not put the ingredients, or that to learn to dance a tango they explained to you in writing “6 tips to dance a tango”, without images, photos, videos or drawings. Nothing. I could explain you the logic of why you have to use the frying pan and not the oven, but without the ingredients it is going to be quite difficult anyway that you cook the recipe, isn’t it?

Well, if you find that difficult, I assure you that everyone can learn to make a carrot cake in a couple of attempts, and everyone can memorize the steps of a tango by repeating them with their own feet over and over. And conversely, there are people who spend years trying to overcome a depression or personality problem. And yet, while a written article doesn’t even begin to teach you how to dance, they do believe that five minutes of reading can change your life. But they don’t. And although we may find it hard to admit, is the same deception as self-help books .

The importance of experiential learning

Let’s see, walking is learned by walking, talking is learned by talking, writing is learned by writing, swimming is learned by swimming. On this basis, it is unlikely that by reading a book you can overcome a problem that has been with you for most of your life. I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but these kinds of problems carry with them emotions and behaviors. Just as a book is not going to teach you how to dance or drive, a book is not going to teach you how to practice behaviors that are not even in your usual repertoire of behaviors. No book can teach you how to deal with fear, nor can it do so for you . It is something that you have to do and it is not easy, because if we could choose, we would not feel sadness, fear or anxiety about certain things and our life would be simpler. If you could choose, I’m sure you would already have the life you want because no emotion would be an obstacle.

Self-help books tell you things like “do things that encourage you,” “look for support in your loved ones,” “be more positive, look at everything from the point of view we explain below. But this has two drawbacks.

The lack of individual treatment

First of all, have you thought about whether the behaviors that the book talks about are going to help you? I mean, if they’re gonna help you personally. Psychological treatments are individual for a reason : you analyse what that patient values and what makes him/her feel uneasy, how and why. To him and not to another. Self-help books sell like holy water to everyone. For example, the behavior of establishing relationships and creating a greater network of support: this idea of showing off our gregariousness that many self-help manuals contain does not really go with everyone.

Although studies show that people with more positive social relationships are generally happier, introverted people do not especially enjoy getting together with large groups of friends to do things together, in fact they enjoy more of a good book and low external stimulation. So maybe the problem with your sadness is not that you need more people in your life or that you have to relate to them more.

What if you have the right people around you but you don’t know how to express yourself to them on certain occasions? To begin with, this is a different problem that some people may associate with not having adequate social skills, but in reality it may be because you experience anxiety in certain contexts, and then the problem is anxiety. But for that it is necessary to analyse in depth what happens and propose concrete solutions for that problem. Relating to people outside your circle is not the solution then, nor is maintaining interest in someone you don’t really care about. More is not better. Not to be happy, not to relate better, not to have less anxiety, not for anything. And sometimes what is missing is not what, but how. Self-help books are usually general enough to deal with certain difficulties and therefore insufficient.

The lack of experience-based learning

Secondly, these limitations lead to attitudinal learning that a book does not provide. No amount of reading can adequately teach you a learning of behaviors, or emotions and attitudes. The knowledge transmitted by reading is semantic and therefore can produce learning at a cognitive level. It is like a book teaching you to drive: it is a procedural learning, you have to practice to learn to drive, no book is enough.

This means that the self-help texts and tips teach you a new theoretical perspective and allow you to store knowledge about what might lead to happiness, but you do not integrate them into your behavioural pattern . It is as if a teacher with a lot of lip service is explaining history to you. Okay, you may remember this phenomenally, but it is still semantic knowledge (of objective and alien data and facts, because no self-help book is personalized).

What really produces a change, a learning, is the personal experience , your autobiographical memory, since it is endowed with a strong emotional charge, both the good and the bad. This means that the environmental opportunities (situations, people…) you encounter and what you do in each situation you face have a greater repercussion and influence on your personality and on your personal and attitudinal changes than any self-help book will ever have.

Now think that every day you go through more or less the same situations, you relate more or less to the same people and you act before your environment in the same way more or less than yesterday or the day before. Einstein said “if you want different results, don’t always do the same thing” and this covers up the terrifying reality that you are an active agent of your own personal change, not a passive agent , it is your behavior that matters to get the prize: to be more sociable, to be happier… Well, your behavior and the environmental opportunities, it is 50/50, but you cannot control the environment, only the way you respond. Thinking differently is not synonymous with acting differently, because between thoughts and acts there is a barrier: emotions.

That is, I can be aware that I have to study to pass (I know the behavior that I have to carry out), but the emotion of boredom, apathy or lack of motivation prevents me from carrying out that behavior. I can know that to get a job I have to have a job interview with the boss, but talking to the boss makes me anxious and afraid, and I decide not to do it. A self-help book tells you to “talk to your boss” or tells you to “talk to strangers to be more sociable” or “get out of bed to get over depression sooner,” but it doesn’t tell you how to overcome emotional barriers to do what you already knew you had to do. And I’m talking about actually overcoming them, not some motivational speech that fades from your head the next day. If that speech was effective, you wouldn’t need a self-help book anymore. But it’s just that to get over them you have to do things. And that “doing” costs a lot.

There are no magic recipes for self-help

It’s much easier to read a book, isn’t it? How tempting is the hope that without much effort you and your life will change forever . And so immediately, when you start reading, you gain more control over your own life. You are already doing something for and by yourself, and that makes you feel better, but it doesn’t change you, it doesn’t make you more sociable or happier in the long run, and that’s why you read again and again and again… Because momentarily it is a negative reinforcement that diminishes your discomfort and gives you a certain feeling of control (the illusion of control, a usual cognitive illusion derived from a bias of optimism). It is, in short, a placebo.

The happiest and most sociable people do not read these books or articles, but they have never needed to read them, because being happier and more sociable is learned through experience . There is no correlation between being sociable or happy and the amount of self-help books that are read. It is something that one builds by relating, living experiences and trying to act on one’s personal values and the life one wants to lead. And changing your behavior when you are not getting the desired results.

Progressing requires effort

There is another reality that you are not going to like either: changing hurts, restructuring your mental representations about the world, about yourself, about society, it hurts. There are restructuring therapies aimed at reconstructing the conception of the self and of relations with others that profoundly modify the meaning of many knowledge and behaviours, risking our cognitive identity . Changing these representations for others that are more effective for oneself is very costly, demanding and even causes anxiety.

The discomfort that we feel and that moves us to modify our ideas and our behavior is part of that learning: it means discovering and rethinking our representations when we see the implicit expectations that we had about the world violated. And it is complicated in the social and psychological world. For example, modifying the idea that the earth is flat by the new representation that it is round was difficult a few centuries ago (in fact it is difficult with many semantic ideas about theories of the world: is homeopathy effective? Is the evolution of species real? Many people will give you one answer and some will give you another regardless of what the data say, and that is their representations, their interpretation of the world).

However, it is much more difficult to accept other kinds of ideas such as that your partner is unfaithful to you and you should leave him/her, that you are not really comfortable with the people around you and that is why you don’t have adequate communication with them, that your friends are not real because deep down you have different values, or that the path you have chosen professionally has stagnated and you should devote yourself to something else… All these ideas hurt and all of them hide underlying problems that can affect happiness or social skills, indirect problems that are the ones that should really be dealt with more than “how to be a more sociable person” or “how to be more positive”.

More inri, it is frequent that when we detect these inconsistencies that produce discomfort between the social world and personal representations, these are so reinforced and consolidated with the implicit learning processes that they are very difficult to modify . Change is even more costly.

In conclusion

Change is not easy. Believing that change is simple is an easy idea to sell since it is what many would like, but accepting such an advertising slogan also has a cost: guilt. After reading a self-help book, you might ask yourself, “If it’s so easy, why am I not getting it?”

Guilt is also an easy trap, because it is not one writer who sells you this idea, nor many, nor all the psychologists, nor the “coaches”; it is society: from those who sell adventure, free spirit and youth when they sell perfumes and cars (“if you buy this, you’ll be cooler”), those who defend that the world is a meritocracy and that you only have to make an effort to get what you want without putting yourself on your feet (like positive psychology), to even people who deceive themselves under the pretext of not having problems or limitations, neither in their social life nor in anything else because they do such a thing and advise you without taking into account who you are, that is, without empathizing with your emotions or circumstances.

And there they are, everyone’s emotions, fears and anxiety playing a crucial role that everyone decides to ignore. Transmitting learning is more than just explaining your version of events, however much scientific and empirical support you have. I can explain to you that to start a car you have to insert the key, turn it, remove the hand brake and so on, and these are objective and real facts, but until you insert the key and until you do it a few times you are not really going to know how to start a car. And in the same way, you won’t know how to start your happiness either.