Behavioral Self-Help Books

The self-help/pop psychology genre is about selling an idea. Buy this book and you will be better. One of the best-selling entries in recent history, 2007’s The 4-Hour Workweek, was named via Google AdWords focus group – whether or not the book delivered was ultimately not important to its popularity.

It’s complicated to understand which self-management books are impactful on self-management behaviors in their readers. A passionate reader of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (often cited as a helpful book) would have to adopt his physical organization systems, stick to them, and find them superior by some measure. And even then, how would we ever hear about that reader?

Even when books are ostensibly written by science writers, the book is, first and foremost, a product. 

But if there are two things we know about behavior analysts, it’s that they 1) know how to change behavior, and 2) don’t know how to market a product. And hence, the self-management books written by behavior analysts:

Self-Directed Behavior: Self-Modification for Personal Adjustment, Watson & Tharp

This was the first self-management text I read, specifically the 10th edition released in 2014 (and inexplicably available in full online here). The 4th edition has much cooler cover art than the 10th:

The book is designed as a self-contained textbook for a semester-long class on self-management, and takes a linear path to completing a final self-management project. Essentially all relevant strategies are described, and the reader is invited to incorporate as many as they can. The authors cite a few studies purporting to show that their book is effective (one example). It seems that most studies about behavior change project courses at the college level find a success rate of approx. 60-80%. We don’t know how that compares to reading the book outside of a dedicated class, or just reading a random self-help book. Still, it’s something.

The initial steps are well-designed, with an introductory chapter that is focused on convincing the reader that, yes, this will work. This is a clever starting point. Many people do in fact labor under the mistaken impression that change is impossible. 

They cover the expected bases, with chapters on antecedent manipulation, replacement behaviors, and consequence manipulation, with a chapter on troubleshooting. By and large they stick to scientifically proven interventions (restricting stimulus control, precurrent behavior, contracts, etc.) with some notable exceptions. 

Early in the text, it cites the questionable principle of self-control fatigue; this is the nebulous social psychology concept that posits that exerting “self-control” has certain deleterious effects:

If that sounds like nonsense (and incidentally, similar to the nonsensical reason why Mark Zuckerberg used to wear gray t-shirts and Barack Obama wore blue suits), then that’s because it might just be nonsense.

They recommend a strategy from CBT, wherein negative thoughts are challenged. For example, if you have the thought, “I’m the stupidest person on earth,” you are supposed to stop and logically challenge the thought: is there evidence that I’m actually the literal stupidest person on earth? This process is disputed by Steven Hayes from an ACT perspective, and he conducted illustrative studies. The gist here is that to challenge negative self-talk is to give it power, and you would be better off accepting those thoughts and moving on.

Later in the text, they briefly discuss making a public commitment to raise the probability of meeting the goal. While many studies have found public commitment to be effective, there have been some mixed findings, and this strategy may not be effective for all participants. 

The book itself is written accessibly, at what appears to be a grade school or highschool reading level, and full of anecdotes. Overall an easy read, but perhaps it suffers for being too simplistic, despite covering most behavior change interventions.

Self-management: using behavioral and cognitive principles to manage your life, Ed Sarafino

While available on the Internet Archive, it is not possible to borrow, though you can find used copies for sale online. Ed Sarafino literally wrote a textbook on behavior analysis, so you know that this one sticks to the facts. (The textbook is available on the Internet Archive. It’s pretty good!)

This one is also written as a potential textbook to go with an intro course, and also suggests a person formulate their own behavior change project. It’s only about half the length of the Watson & Tharp book, and is closer to the size of a paperback book. Still, it’s quite comprehensive.

Early in the book, he goes over respondent conditioning, which is a bold move. He risks alienating every acronym-hater in his audience. Watson & Tharp wait until chapter 3 to spring this on the reader, perhaps due to refining a friendlier approach over 10 editions.

And in an otherwise quite comprehensive chapter covering behavioral relaxation and other techniques, he covers…cognitive restructuring, the CBT technique mentioned above. For some reason this appears to be a well-known process in CBT, and perhaps the process seems logically sound and appealing on its face (e.g., everyone has illogical thoughts, and those can be corrected with logic). Nevertheless, I apologize for giving a hard time to both Watson & Tharp. I would like to give a hard time to Watson, Tharp, and Sarafino.

Now is as good a time as any to bring up self-reinforcement. Catania claims this is a misnomer and inaccurate; most self-management programs will discuss self-reinforcement. But inarguably, people should increase positive consequences for desired behavior – is this a battle worth fighting?

What are the strategies?

Watson & Tharp & Sarafino have the following general strategies:

Believe that change can happen

Define your goal behaviorally

Measure a baseline and plan ongoing measurement

Identify & add, subtract, or modify antecedents

Make environmental changes (increase or reduce response effort)

Add behaviors into preexisting behavior chains; disrupt undesired behavior chains

Learn replacement behaviors; rely on modeling and shaping

Manipulate consequences by adding reinforcement or punishment (or give control over consequences to a confederate)

Consider a behavior contract

Use problem-solving methods to troubleshoot any failures