Why Most Self-Help Books Are Trash (And Which Ones Aren't)

Atomic Habits — James Clear ★★

The core idea is solid. Habits are built through cues, cravings, responses, and rewards. Make good behaviours easier and bad ones harder. Stack habits. Start small and build up compounds from your molecules.

This concept can be summarized in a sentence, and fully described with examples in about 2,000 words of actual content. The book, however, is 320 pages.

It’s almost all padding: anecdotes about athletes, repeated restatements of the same framework, and the kind of motivational filler that belongs in a company newsletter. Atomic Habits is a very good blog post that was padded into a book because books sell better than blog posts. It would be better suited to an email digest: five ideas, five minutes, done. Which is what the author originally did, by the way, before deciding to write a book.

James Clear(ly) knows his material. The format is doing him no favours (well, he made stacks of cash, but it’s doing the readers few favors).

Stolen Focus — Johann Hari ★

I’m a proponent of the general concept. Our attention spans have been considerably shortened like a kid preferring simple sugary treats over complex carbohydrate meals. So I jumped in expecting to hear some solid advice about enhancing one’s mental fortitude to the invasion of dopamine-hitting content (e.g. TikTok, YouTube shorts, Bluesky and X). I had real hopes for this one. Attention is worth taking seriously.

Early in the book, Hari describes a formative incident where he noticed he couldn’t put down his iPad, and from there launches into a sweeping argument that we’re experiencing an unprecedented civilisational attention crisis. His iPad. That’s the anchor data point. He then anecdotally prescribes everything he views around him in his friends, family and strangers as problematic. Where is the nuance? Where is the science? A few studies were referenced but, my guy, you aren’t convincing me on your point, you’re convincing me that you’re a dogmatic ideologue.

What follows is a series of interviews with experts mixed with Hari’s personal narrative, all building toward conclusions that aren’t supported by the rigour required to justify them. There’s a meaningful conversation to be had about attention, phones, and modern life. This book doesn’t have it.

Lastly, here’s what I originally put in my Goodreads review - it captures my feelings more viscerally than anything I could write in hindsight:

From the book:

“look hun, if you swipe left the screen goes left. If you swipe right, the screen goes right”

I crouch down and say to the man, “you can also do it the old fashioned way and look left, then turn your head, and look right!”

My review:

This is the most insufferable pretentious book I’ve had the ill conceived idea to read. It makes me gag at the cringey points.

Yes, screens can steal away our attention and can cause a loss of focus, but they’re also a portal to the collected knowledge of all humankind. For God’s sake — this very book is available on Kindle.

Count me firmly on the “it’s a tool, and up to us to manage our own (and children’s) screen time, and what we do with our screens” side, rather than the “screen = bad” crowd.

Building a Second Brain — Tiago Forte ★★★

This one is more useful than the others and gets three stars for actually containing practical content: the PARA system (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) is genuinely a decent framework for organising notes and tasks.

But the whole operational substance of PARA could fit on a single A4 page. Front and back if you wanted to provide an example structure, or a directory listing.

The bulk of the book is scaffolding: justifications for why you need a second brain, stories of how the second brain changed lives, philosophical framing that circles the drain around four actual ideas. Forte clearly built something that works for him, and the system is worth knowing about. It just didn’t need 270 pages to explain it. But you can’t sell an A4 page and call it a book.

Indistractable — Nir Eyal ★★★★★

Eyal wrote Hooked first (a book about how to build habit-forming products). Then, to his credit, he wrote Indistractable about how to resist them. The combination is more honest than it sounds, and the second book is the better one.

What distinguishes Indistractable is the references to peer-reviewed literature throughout (what an idea!). When Eyal makes a claim about motivation, internal triggers, or the psychology of distraction, he points to research. Some of it is contested, as psychological research often is, but he’s playing by the right rules. He’s making arguments, not assertions.

The framework of managing internal triggers, making time for traction, cutting external triggers, using pacts etc. is practical, grounded, and proportionate to the length of the book. Additionally, the author uses anecdotes to provide accessible examples to the audience, then backs it up with research. Chef’s kiss.

Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker ★★★★★

I have not stopped talking about this or thinking about it since I read it in August 2024. This is a must-read. Not for everyone who wants to be more productive. For everyone. We are, as a society, suffering from culturally induced chronic sleep deprivation. This book can help snap you out of it.

And it doesn’t just repeatedly say “This book has the answer! Hey! Read this book!” while you’re already reading the book (looking at you, most self-help books in existence). It actually, you know, explains how. Specifically. Clearly. Want to lose weight? Process thoughts more clearly? Improve your memory? Reduce stress? Maximize your gains at the gym? It’s literally one of the most important things we can do with our health.

Walker makes the case, with considerable force and evidence, that nearly everything you do in your waking life is affected by how much you sleep. The research he draws on is extensive, the writing is clear, and the conclusions are not softened for palatability.

The book has drawn criticism, most notably from researcher Alexey Guzey, who challenged some specific statistical claims and the framing of certain studies. Walker has partially acknowledged these critiques. The core argument, that sleep deprivation is widespread and genuinely harmful, is well-supported across the broader literature. The contested points don’t undermine the central thesis, instead they refine it.

Why We Sleep treats the reader as an adult. It shows its evidence. It makes you change your behaviour. Read it.

Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman ★★★★★

This made me change how I think, not just what I think about. A Nobel Prize-winning researcher summarising decades of work on how human judgement and decision-making actually function. System 1 and System 2 thinking. Cognitive biases. The flaws in our intuitions, documented in experiment after experiment. He doesn’t oversimplify, he doesn’t pretend the research resolves cleanly into life advice: he presents what was found, what it implies, and where the limits are. It earns every page.

A bit of a tangent but bear with me: paired mentally with The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives ★★★★★, these both really opened my eyes. Kahneman helps you realise how little control you have over your own thoughts and psychology; Mlodinow helps you realise how much of the universe is governed by randomness, contingency, luck, and noise. Between them, you start to see how inflated our sense of agency usually is. We tell ourselves neat stories about why things happened, why we succeeded, why we failed, why we chose what we chose, but the truth is that the story is cleaner than reality.

And that was strangely comforting to me. Not as the heroic author of everything in my life, but as a mote of dust in an absurdly large universe, subject to bias internally and randomness externally. That is not a depressing conclusion. If anything, it is something of a relief. I think it helps me feel humbler and a bit less fooled by my own narratives and more compassionate to how others experience their lives.