I wanted to be in self-help but I couldn’t help myself.

Let me sell you something

There was always a different path for me, one that could have led something lucrative. But first, let me give some context. I hold an advanced psychology degree with graduate work in behavioral medicine and human performance. I have spent years reading the actual literature on habit formation, motivation, and skill acquisition. Which all means I am literally and formally credentialed for the single most lucrative wing of the internet, the self-improvement industrial complex, and I cannot bring myself to enter the gates.

This could have been a genuine career fork. Somewhere out there, there’s an alternate version of me who has a podcast (maybe 2), a supplement code, and a morning routine that involves waking up at an hour I associate with medical emergencies. Bizzaro Joe is thriving. His engagement metrics are impressive. He even paid cash for the Porsche1.

Here he is, zooming off to sell you another focus vitamin. (Photo credit: stock)

I think about him, and then I remember why he can’t exist, why I cannot enter the parking lot of the complex. Simply put, the job has requirements I can’t force myself to live up to.

If you want to have a chance at all at succeeding then the initial load-bearing requirement of self-help content is confidence. “The protocol works.” “The framework changed my life.” “Do these five things and your cortisol will apologize to you personally.” I’m exhausted just joking about it.

If I summon my training, here is what I would say: “the effect exists in some populations”, “the effect size is modest and it may not survive replication”, and this banger, “the intervention’s success probably depends on eleven contextual variables we didn’t measure.” Now we are selling courses, try putting that on your next video thumbnail. Yet the honest version of most behavioral science findings reads like a pharmaceutical disclaimer, and nobody has ever built an audience on “results were mixed.”¹

The subsequent requirement is anti-stagnation. The genre cannot remain stagnant because content necessitates novelty, but there is a small issue with this, human behavior has remained largely unchanged since its inception. Therefore, something must constantly evolve, which, in turn, leads to an escalating (poor) advice. Cold showers transformed into ice baths, which then became cold plunge tubs that exceeds the cost of my first car. Adequate sleep transitioned into sleep hygiene, and subsequently, it became a wearable device that evaluates your sleep quality and sends you a report via email, allowing you to commence each day with a performance review from your own mattress. The hypocrite in me does track my sleep but I will use the excuse that it is primarily to enhance my overall recovery. It is something important to my overall well-being. With that, I certainly do not offer any advice on improving sleep quality. At best, I can suggest adopting a mindset that anticipates perpetual fatigue when raising young children.

However, my favorite development in this space is the dopamine detox. Shut off those pleasure centers. If you break it down, the dopamine detox is a simple concept that has become an purposely overly complicated and obtuse concept. It suggests that people should abstain from pleasure to reset a neurotransmitter system that operates quite differently than what “gurus” would have you believe. It is comparable to unplugging your router to address plumbing issues. This approach gained widespread popularity because it possesses two qualities that the market values: it appears to be based on neuroscience and allows individuals to feel superior to those who indulged in their weekend activities.

The endpoint of this escalation is the full protocol lifestyle, where a day stops being a day and becomes a stack of blocks. This is the nirvana for self-help influencers and gurus alike. Sunlight exposure window. Zone 2 block. Focus block. Gratitude block, penciled in for 9:15, because feeling grateful at an unapproved hour would throw off the afternoon. For me, I read these schedules with the anthropological interest of someone watching a documentary about a cult he nearly joined. What they describe is a person who has outsourced every decision and pre-committed every emotion, and the behavioral science term for that person is “machine,” and the industry term is “optimized,” and nobody in the second camp seems troubled that both words are pointing at the same guy, sitting under a sunrise lamp at 5:40 a.m., waiting for permission to be awake.²

Here’s the part that actually keeps me out of the building, and it’s the part I find funniest. To sell behavioral mastery, you have to at least perform being a person whose knowledge governs his behavior. And I have run that experiment on myself, results are mixed³.

I’m well-versed in the sunk cost literature, and yet, despite this, I have previously (and foolishly) invested two years of my attention and money in a product that was doomed to fail. Shutting it down felt like admitting defeat, which is a classic example of motivated reasoning. I can explain this concept at a graduate level and to top it off, am currently using it in real-time to justify my decision to buy the objectively worse of two cars. I’m acutely aware of this process that I’ve even developed software to enforce deliberate practice on myself. This demonstrates my profound understanding of it, as I recognize that I won’t engage in it voluntarily. The self-help premise is that understanding behavior lets you control it, and my entire adult life is a longitudinal study returning a null result.⁴

Behavioral science offers valuable insights, albeit unsellable. Its core principles appear simple, but they are more complex than they seem. Most changes arise from restructuring your environment rather than relying solely on willpower. Most interventions are effective until their novelty wears off, commitment devices surpass intentions, and the individual at the moment of decision is outmatched by the person who removed the option. This last point is the closest approximation to a genuine trick I believe in, and it operates precisely because it assumes I can’t be trusted.

However, observe what this framework promotes. It suggests that you won’t transform into a different person, and the optimal strategy is to design around your current state. There’s no transformation arc in this approach. No one films a before-and-after comparison where the after is the same person with fewer decision-making options. While this is accurate, beneficial, and unlikely to become a trend, I’ve come to believe that this combination of qualities is akin to a definition of genuine knowledge.

So this is my compromise with the alternate-universe podcast, pill promo code guy. I will write about behavior regardless, but from inside the specimen jar instead of behind the podium. I can’t tell you five habits that will change your life, because I don’t know your life and the literature suggests I barely have jurisdiction over mine. What I can do is watch myself ponder these ideas, write down how I perceive it, and let you recognize yourself in the wreckage. That’s the whole product, sorry, there will be no promo code at checkout.

It’s a non-existent business model and not a good way to become a self-help influencer. If you’re wonder how I can be so sure. Just trust me, I’ve run the numbers and ignored them, which at this point you should have expected since the results continue to be mixed⁵.

1. The replication crisis hit social psychology hardest of all the fields, meaning the branch of science that supplies self-help with most of its raw material is the branch least likely to survive being tested twice. The industry’s response to this news was, as far as I can tell, to speak louder and sell you focus gummies.

2. Also, there is no way these people are doing this every day. If it sounds performative, its because it is performative.

3. Boom, callback.

4. The study is ongoing. Funding is provided by the same guy producing the errors, which the review board would flag as a conflict of interest, and the board would be right. The results are mixed so far (sorry).

5. I know, I know, enough of this already…