Are Your Self-Help Practices Actually Helping You?

The relentless pursuit of purification haunts the world of self-improvement.

The pursuit of wellness and improvement actually might just make us neurotic control freaks…

There are enough new people here this week to warrant a review and introduction—hello! I’m so glad you’re here. I started this nearly three years ago, now, and have written every week since. It’s mostly just…my thoughts about other writer’s thoughts, ideas about culture and about living in pursuit of an actually honest life.

One of my favorite topics is the world of self-development and wellness. For as much as I critique the land of self-help, and for as many times I declare I’m ‘done with’ trying to better myself, I undeniably live here. For the sake of this post, I’m generalizing self-development and wellness to encapsulate any of the practices, ideas, set of beliefs, regimes and ways of making you better and/or healthier.

I, like a lot of people, have gone in and out of being obsessed with improving myself and adopting handfuls of practices from various disciplines that I think will make me better and healthier. I, like many others, tend to become dogmatic about rituals, using “clean” products or exclusively eating a certain kind of way…and I’ve always come out of those phases realizing I’ve fallen, again, into obsessively trying to control my life. 

Overall, the industry has veered far into needing to buy things: Replace what you already own with something more expensive, or purchase a bundle of pricey sessions with some sort of specialist. The land of self-improvement is saturated with influencers trying to sell you their program or product and incite fear in you, usually about chemicals or toxins, or maybe about how your childhood beliefs are blocking your authentic self expression. Self-improvement in 2024 is rarely about seeking to live more aligned with your morals, or being a better person—it’s about how to control your thoughts, your body, and your life via implementing various products and rituals.

Self-help/improvement/development/wellness are such positive sounding terms: don’t we all want to improve ourselves? Be well and healthy? Usually, the answer is yes, of course. Let’s learn how we can become better and healthier, sure. The question we must diligently ask ourselves, in order to ‘improve’ or ‘better’ anything about our lives and selves is, “Is this actually helping?” Often, if you’re really honest about the self-improvement practices you incorporate in your life, you’ll notice how quickly they turn into attempts to control everything around you, and generate fear and paranoia. In other words, you’ll notice that it might not be helping you become a better person, after all.

For some people, the goal is to buy further into the illusion of control. It’s nice and cozy in the bubble of control—it really feels like you can control things, until you realize that, well, you can’t. It isn’t you pulling the strings, even though there are hundreds of people in this industry who claim that you can manipulate yourself and life in such ways. Manifestation gurus weave strands of neuroscience into the business of teaching people how to attract what they want and break down internal barriers preventing them from accessing their true self (for only $22/month that you must commit to for a year). Wellness influencers insist that you are 100% responsible for what transpires in your life, the good and the bad—except, they say, of course you can’t attract ‘bad’ things. (Huh?)

Sometimes, these brands, ideas, and influencers really help us. I’ve been down the rabbit holes of trying to attract exactly what I wanted in life. I’ve signed up for manifestation courses and believed it was rewiring my brain. I analyzed everything in my childhood—creating memories that might not have happened—in order to expunge the ‘harm’ they caused me and break free so that I could “uplevel” my current life. I’ve chanted affirmations in the mirror, woken up at 5am to meditate for two hours, slept with a castor oil pack strapped to my stomach. I’ve been vegan, and then a “Raw Till 4” vegan, and even did a stint with a “Salt/Oil/Sugar Free” diet. I’ve done too many coffee enemas and swallowed activated charcoal to rid myself of toxins, because I thought my liver wasn’t doing a good enough job. I tried to purge every negative thought, terrified that I would attract those negative things into my life. I sought to purify my mind, cleanse my body: In essence, I’ve tried to control myself and life in every way that has ever intrigued me. What have I learned from it? Mostly, that controlling life doesn’t work, being “well” doesn’t require spending thousands of dollars on supplements or specialists, and that acting out of fear winds up negating the potential benefits of whatever you’re doing.

Offer me sanctification, make me pure.

One of the main fixations of people in the wellness/self-improvement industry is purification. This shows up in the form of teaching people to cleanse their thoughts of negativity, purify their insides with food and meditation, and reduce as many environmental toxins as possible. Essentially, the idea is that by monitoring chemicals, eating ‘clean’, and speaking positively to ourselves, we can optimize our minds and bodies so that we may live longer, better lives.

Of course, this sounds nice, right—being clean, inside and out? People have been obsessed with detoxification and purity since…well, at least since the 16th-18th centuries, when Puritanism was the dominant religion in North America. To rid the body of sin is possibly one of the most ancient and holy endeavors, held as the one of the worthiest pursuits in life. Tenets of self-improvement or wellness culture are similarly puritanical: we must rid ourselves of toxins, assess things in the context of being good or bad for us, and become devoutly dedicated to whoever our “God” is—our practices, our beliefs, our CrossFit trainer or spiritual teacher, or that almighty god of our authentic selves.

The longing to become saved from a toxic world, to become purified, sanctified, clean, is not new. It is, in fact, very old.

I am not here to knock whatever thing you practice or whatever you believe makes you healthier or better. It probably does make you healthier! Or at least, it might! I implement plenty of wellness-y kinds of things that may or may not work, and I’ll continue to. Self-development will remain a cornerstone of my life, because I find the subject fascinating. My problem is that I have never been able to fully adopt a way of life or a set of beliefs 100% without turning into a neurotic nightmare. 

My most recent stint with remembering that purity is absolutely not what I want to devote my life to occurred last week. I listened to a podcast (of course) where the guest told the harrowing story of how she came to build a non-toxic cleaning supply company after her son was poisoned by (a toxic amount of) chemicals (that are now banned). Super relatable. I came home in a paranoid frenzy, fretting about how Dawn dish soap is probably laden with chemicals, ready to spend $100+ on new, non-toxic cleaning supplies. Now here I am, a week later, remembering that I am not a Puritan and I’ve learned the lesson before not to become obsessed with the impossible pursuit to eliminate anything potentially harmful.

Maybe for you, the threat of “harm” isn’t chemicals in food or products, but those “toxic relationships” you have. It could be anything you think you ought to go about getting rid of, because you’ve convinced yourself that it’s bad for you. Chances are, it’s not that bad. You will always be surrounded by things that aren’t “good” for you, and that has to be ok. If you’re being sold a version of purity or superiority that you’re provided a podcaster’s discount code for—this isn’t your answer to a better life. Really.

The danger of investing too much into bettering yourself (i.e., becoming obsessed with improving your health and life) is that it can, paradoxically, make you more judgmental or paranoid. If that’s happening to you, consider that what you’re doing either doesn’t matter or is actually not improving you. Consider that what you’re doing is actually making you more rigid, fearful, self-critical, or isolated. Not better at all, in fact. Consider that you might not really need that thing you’ve convinced yourself you can’t live without, or that you’ll be totally fine if you don’t do anything about that “toxic” thing you’ve convinced yourself is evil.

It’s not that self-development or health/wellness is bad. It isn’t, inherently. Most people are at least sort of interested in changing some things about themselves. (And others, quite frankly, could really benefit from trying to change some things.) The problems that arise from “self-improvement” lie in your relationship to yourself and what you’re trying to change. If you’re holding a future, healthier, better self out in the future as something to work toward, you’ll never be satisfied with who you are today. If you’re constantly thinking about all the things you’re trying to improve, or all the potentially harmful things the world contains, you are missing the point. You aren’t growing in the ways you think you want to; you aren’t loving yourself, your life, or other people. When you’re focused on eliminating things that are wrong, or trying to change what is—you’re trying to control, and control is not love. 

Are you improved enough, yet?

So what is self-development all about? What does it mean to be well or healthy? When we endeavor to improve ourselves, how do we measure if it’s working?

It’s hard to know the answers to those questions if you don’t ask them honestly of yourself. No 30-day cleanse, supplement, or creative framework for navigating life will give you any answers, as appealing as those may be. Ask yourself these question, and actually be honest with yourself about what the answers are. Exercise some true self-inquiry. Be open to where you’re deluding yourself. Look at where you’ve handed your power over to people who say they have the answers for you. Maybe, accept that you’re alright as you are, and that you can seek growth and change without veering into neurotic methods of control.

Learning to inhabit the good, soft, nuanced ground of balance instead of trying to control myself may be my life’s work. When I think about what improving myself actually means, it’s not to remove every possible thing that could harm me. It is not to seek purification, but to be ok with the mess. It means to trust myself more; to be able to discern what my intuition says. It means to continue living into my values and sense of morality, to treat people well, and to enjoy who I am, as I am.

If that’s the only way I improve for the rest of my life, well, that will have been worth it.

Maggie