Self-help books: Selling common sense under the guise of science

There is a video in which Spanish psychiatrist Marian Rojas Estapé uses the history of human evolution to explain the way people behave today, a common practice in self-help. “Prehistoric men only did one thing: hunt. Men in the 21st century do one thing: hunt. Prehistoric women gathered: little flowers, information about the wind, the rains. The woman of the 21st century goes out and gets all kinds of information, anywhere,” she states in the first seconds. With this peculiar vision of gender roles, both ancestral and current, and aided by the supposed knowledge of human nature that the study of our evolution provides, she emits a common-sense opinion on the differences between men and women.

The psychiatrist is one of Spain’s most successful writers, the best-known face of a kind of self-help that uses brain science to give advice on how to live, a thriving phenomenon in a climate of growing emotional discomfort in which more and more people seek scientific explanations and solutions for their ailments. “There is a misunderstanding. People think that neuroscience consists of applying common sense, and we often see neuroscientists on television explaining things with no neuroscience whatsoever, applying psychology or just common sense,” states psychobiologist Ignacio Morgado, author of several books aimed at making neuroscience accessible to the general public. “That a pleasant environment has a positive effect on a person is not neuroarchitecture, it is psychology or common sense,” he insists. “There is a growing interest in mental health and people search in psychologists for what used to be searched for in other places. Explaining your problems to someone you trust and having that person give you advice and be with you can help to put your mind at ease. That used to be done by people in confessionals, and now the psychologist sometimes replaces the priest.”

The advice of someone reliable and authoritative has always been in demand, which also explains the success of psychological self-help. However, as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists are very reluctant to offer dogmatic recipes, and science is more effective at detecting falsehoods than at revealing the truth. Daniel Sanabria, professor of psychology at the University of Granada (Spain), is one of many killjoy scientists that spend their time questioning established truths that many take as recipes for life. In a review of studies published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, he and his team concluded that the evidence accumulated to date is not enough to state that regular physical exercise produces cognitive benefits, something that is widely accepted.

For him, much of the advice from self-help professionals revolves around stating the obvious. “I don’t need to be told by a neuroscientist that doing things I like, such as playing an instrument or sports, improves my well-being,” he says. From their point of view, many of these authors, who give advice based on their own experience or beliefs, justify their authority with science, speaking “of the activation of a region of the brain, or a hormone,” for example. Regarding this, he agrees with Morgado, who warns: “People love it when you simplify tremendously complex matters for them using a chemical substance. That you say that oxytocin is the love hormone, for instance. There is some truth to that, because it is a prosocial hormone, but it would also have to be said that this hormone can lead to suspect strangers and trust our loved ones too much, to believe that they have the truth, even if it’s not the case.”

Sanabria believes that certain claims made about the application of neuroscience to everyday life have the potential to undermine the credibility of the field, painstakingly obtained through meticulous work to find the real effects that sometimes exist, but do not apply to our lives. He uses music as an example: “Imagine that you give an intelligence test to people who have practiced with an instrument and to people who have not. Those who play may have slightly better performance as a group, but if you randomly pick one person from the group of musicians, the probability that they are more intelligent than those from the other group is 57%. Therefore, although the scientific literature seems to show that playing a musical instrument improves cognition, it doesn’t mean that we can advise, on an individual level, that playing an instrument will improve your intelligence. We are not at that point yet,” he explains. “I think we have to be cautious. Some people that offer recipes that work for everything – something typical of pseudoscience – generate expectations that, if they are not met, produce frustration in people, who will think that psychologists just say anything and will end up looking for answers in worse places,” he points out.

Nazareth Castellanos is the director of Nirakara Lab and the Extraordinary Chair of Mindfulness and Cognitive Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. Along with her research work, she has published successful books and gives talks where she goes beyond what could be considered a scientific approach. “Science is wonderful, but it doesn’t provide many answers,” she laments. “In addition to doing my job, placing cables and making very precise measurements, I turn to poetry, spirituality and mythology,” she says. “Not only what is scientifically proven exists.” Castellanos, a graduate in theoretical physics and a PhD in medicine (neuroscience), adds: “The world of science does not make an effort of dissemination to make everyone understand us, and we cling to formalisms for fear of being dismissed as frivolous.” The researcher believes that scientists must loosen up so that their place will not be taken by charlatans with no scientific training. She follows her own advice: in a television interview, Castellanos assumed that adults generate new neurons, something widely debated, and that exercise makes it happen, even though so far no studies have proven this.

Although many books that promote brain science can be classified as self-help, the differences are important. In her recently published essay El Murmullo (’The murmur’), writer Belén Gopegui contemplates: “Self-help as a genre encompasses too many things. However, should we see a book like Behave, by [Robert] Sapolsky, or Being You, by Anil Seth, as self-help? Not from my perspective, as these books aim to transmit knowledge. In what is usually understood by self-help, there is always a promise of improvement; that is where something breaks, because it’s a promise that, even if it does transmit knowledge sometimes, it often abstains from taking the responsibility of elaborating on its arguments, and one almost never sees to what extent they can be misleading and incomplete,” she explains.

José Miguel Cuevas, professor of social psychology at the University of Malaga (Spain), also believes that it is necessary to discern who can benefit from this kind of read and who cannot, because giving universal advice is risky, especially among people with pathologies. “If you give a depressive person a book on positive thinking, you will only mess them up, because they will feel worse. They won’t understand why, despite doing what they’re told, they don’t feel good, they don’t feel that life is wonderful, as the book says,” he explains. “Something quite different is to recommend a specific book to a specific patient,” he adds. For some, certain self-help books can be “a nice placebo,” but some have sect-like messages, Cuevas warns. “There are books that give you practical exercises so that you can unlearn what you have learned, so you can start from scratch and create your successful self; they even recommend to distance yourself from people around you because they hold you back,” he continues. “If there is a message of a total change of identity or values, we are talking about manipulation, because we don’t seek improvement while respecting the person. You are treated as a human failure. They tell you that you are special, a diamond in the rough, to then cancel out your interests and experience,” he sums up.

Another critique of self-help could also apply to some psychiatric approaches to mental illness or to the interpretation of brain studies. Although the person who suffers is an individual who can make changes in their life to have better habits and adapt to their environment, we must not forget that this environment has a great influence on their well-being, and it can be changed. A recently published worldwide study on the increase in emotional distress showed that people with fewer resources had worse mental health. Some self-help books promote the idea that only individual responsibility matters, which generates frustration in those who are trying to improve their quality of life, a problem whose solution is mainly collective.

Despite its deficiencies, neuro-help responds to a human need for certainties and encouraging arguments in the face of an existence that is full of confusion and fears, and it will always have a market. Scientists themselves, even the most serious ones – particularly at the end of their careers – want to transcend the basics of their work. “When I was 25, I loved explaining physics, chemistry, neurotransmitters, I learned it all and enjoyed learning and teaching, but now that I’m older I want to project all of that further, into real life,” acknowledges Morgado, who started the faculty of psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “There is a need to transcend, to see what has been the use of all your studies, but there are people who climb a rope and when the rope runs out they continue climbing,” he says, ironically. Even a scientist like Humphrey Davy, one of the fathers of modern chemistry and an example of the power of science to transform the world, was aware of how little help it can sometimes be when seeking comfort. In his memoir Consolations in Travel, written near his death, he states that the art of living happily is the art of being pleasantly deluded; faith, he wrote, is superior to reason, which in old age is nothing more than a dead weight. In a bad moment, anyone can accept that men only hunt and women do nothing but gather flowers and information.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition