Self-help promises to fix yourself. But what if you’re just on a treadmill—running harder, sweating more, yet never moving forward?

You read book after book after book. You followed all the gurus You were told to follow, listen to the podcast, meditating, taking cold showers, highlight the quotes, visualizing your goals, repeat the affirmations, and tell yourself this time—this time—it’ll finally click.

But a strange thing happens. Instead of feeling lighter, you feel heavier. Instead of progress, there’s pressure.

The more advice you consume, the more inadequate you feel. It’s like chasing a finish line that keeps moving just out of reach.

Here’s the truth.

You’re Not Broken—You’re Overloaded

The next big secrets loosing weight, the next big business model to land yourself in the world of financial freedom.

The new hidden secret to unlocking your charismatic self. That one meditation trick that will unlock your your third eye and so on and so on and so on.

You think to yourself that you just need one more thing before you find the secret before everything changes.

As you continue consume thinking to yourself that this time thing are gonna be different your wallets continue to dry up and you never truly find yourself progressing or improving yourself.

Welcome to the dark side of self-help: a cycle where growth becomes obsession, inspiration becomes comparison, and improvement becomes never-ending to-do list.

Where self-help becomes its own kind of trap, keeping you stuck in the very place you hoped to escape.

I want to clear up the room upfront by saying that I’m not hare to take down self-help.

Self-help is not inherently bad—it can be life changing. But, the energy and information you gain from reading self-help needs to be channeled correctly.

Why We Reach for Self-Help

Are you looking to improve your life? Do you want to change your current situation?

Have you have enough of having enough? Do you want more happiness? Money? Do you want to be liked?

Do you want people to notice you more? Do you want to prove them wrong the people that you know don’t believe you can achieve something great?

One of the biggest reason someone wanting to improve themselves is because they have a dissatisfaction with where they currently at.

When people decide they are going to change their life or do something dramatically improve themselves they don’t just do that if their life is already going pretty well. right…

Most people get to self improvement because they want to get better at something.

And Usually, lets be real, that’s going to come from some kind of experience they had with negative impact, Right..

Like, they got dumped in a relationship that they really care about, they can’t make money, they are behind other people in this scenario and they seem to not be able to get ahead,

they are having tough time moving forward with their life that’s why they turn to self help and kind of analyze what’s wrong with them.

You don’t get into that framework if you are loving everything in your life. You just don’t.

People who are doing 100% ok in their life they are not gonna be like lets read a book on how to do better. No, there just out there living it.

If you are the kind of persons who feels like you are a little bit of an outsider. And everybody seems to get it. And you don’t 100% click. And you just wanna know how to get back on track with what seems to be so normal for everybody else. You turn to self-help.

The Dark Side of Self-Help

Self-help has nice lure to it. A world of people trying to be better versions of themselves. A world where you take control over your life and decisions.

A world that makes you feel like you are making progress like you are maturing, and doing what nobody else is.

This is it, you tell yourself. While everyone is partying and indulging in short-term pleasures, I’m gonna be working on myself.

It feels great. Doesn’t it? You feel better about yourself. Don’t you? It feels like you’ve climbed right out of that dark place you were in.

You’ve taken the bait. You’ve trusted a new voice in your head. And that when you become blind to the traps that lie in wait.

Self help makes you feel good. There’s no doubt about it. There’s this amazing feeling of satisfaction that you felt after finishing the final page of every self help book you’ve read.

You had a rise in motivation. You felt like you just completed the level of some video game and your character had just leveled up.

You see, after every self-help book that you read. After every self help video that you watch., there is a surge of dopamine that rises straight into your brain.

That feeling of accomplishing something after reading each book made you feel incredible.

You finish one book, feel that rush of motivation… and straight to Amazon you go, ordering a stack of new ones.

The cycle repeats—read, hype up, buy another, repeat. Over and over and over again.

If you still don’t see the problem with what’s going on here lets take a look at the addictive side of dopamine.

The reason anything becomes addictive is not because of the thing itself. The reason someone becomes addicted to a drug is not the drug, It’s what the drug does to your brain.

That rush of dopamine is what gets you hooked. And make no mistake it easy to get hooked with self help.

Whether it’s planned or just how it happens, the self-help world can pull you into a massive illusion—the illusion of progress.

After reading that book you feel accomplished. After attending that seminar you feel accomplished. After watching that self help video you feel accomplished.

You feel like you’ve achieved something great and dome something really productive. That motivation lingers in your system.

Urging you to buy the next book, attend the next seminar, watch the next video. It’s only when you take a second to pause and reflect , you realize nothing has changed.

One of my favorite author MJ DeMarco has a concept in his book called action faking.

Which is doing things that make you feel like you’ve accomplished something even though no actual progress has been made.

It’s that weird urge to clean your room when an important assignment is due. It’s creating a schedule and then calling it a day’s work once you’re finished. It’s reading about business but never actually starting one. It’s buying the business cards instead of actually picking up the phone and making a sale.

Action faking is an even more lethal form of procrastination because you are tricking yourself into thinking that you are actually making progress.

So let this be your first warning you don’t need to read every self help book out there or attend every seminar or buy every online course, or listen to every business podcast.

There’s a time when you’re doing too much consuming and the action that needs to taken is postponed. This is the trap that so many people get themselves into and it has dramatic consequences at the end of it.

An empty wallet, a whole bunch of temporary motivation, and a gut wrenching realization in the back of your mind that knows you haven’t achieved anything yet. You haven’t made any progress. You only got better at convincing yourself you did.

Self-Help vs. Self-Improvement

Self-help runs on borrowed fuel. It’s extrinsic—external voices pushing you forward. That’s why you get the surge after a book, a podcast, a guru’s “one more secret.”

But here’s the catch: borrowed fuel burns out fast.

The Goggins-types are right when they scream, “Fuck motivation. Discipline is all you need.” But let’s be real—that’s only half the truth.

Self-help does give you something valuable—if you use it right.

• It gives you a spark of motivation.
• It hands you a concept that could shift your life.
• And, most importantly, it shows you how to apply it.

The real magic? It’s never in the spark—it’s in the application. That’s when self-help crosses over into self-improvement.

Self-help = temporary hype.
Self-improvement = lived experience, discipline, and results.

One keeps you chasing the next high.
The other keeps you growing long after the high fades.

The thing that can fuck you up.

Not all self-improvement is built the same.

Here’s the hard truth: what works for someone else might not work for you, and that’s okay. We’re humans—unique, messy, complicated. Trying to force a one-size-fits-all approach is a fast track to frustration.

This is where the anti-self-improvement mindset creeps in. You try a concept, it doesn’t click, and suddenly you’re convinced it’s useless—and you tell everyone else the same. Meanwhile, someone else swears by the exact same thing.

Take the gym. Bench press. Some people love it, some hate it. Some call it essential, others call it worthless. Mechanics, genetics, noobie gains—forget all that. You can’t know if it works for you without showing up consistently.

Stick with it. Push the weight up week after week, month after month. Six, twelve months. Then decide if it’s helping or not.

Life’s concepts work the same way. Trying something once, hating it, and quitting? That’s a shortcut straight to frustration. That’s how you trick yourself into thinking you’re failing, when really you never gave it a real shot.

Consistency is the filter. Time is the test.

Awareness + Direct Experience = Growth

Real self-improvement starts with awareness—and only becomes real when you actually do the work.

Books, courses, TikToks—they point out what’s wrong. They hand you steps like a roadmap. But reading the map isn’t the journey.

The moment you follow those steps, stumble, tweak, and keep going—that’s when life actually changes.

Awareness without action is just decoration.

If you’ve spent time trying and the results aren’t showing, awareness swings back around—and the cycle keeps spinning. That’s continuous improvement.

Take meditation, for example. Your mind’s a storm, a book says ‘meditate.’ You actually sit, day after day, and see what it does. If it works, cool. If it doesn’t, also cool. The point isn’t blind obedience—it’s honest experimentation with yourself.

Self-help isn’t magic—it’s a boost to your awareness. The real test? Direct experience. You try it. You live it. You see if it actually works for you.

If it does, intrinsic motivation kicks in. You start moving because you want to, not because someone told you to.

If it doesn’t, you loop back to awareness. Most people skip this. They bail. They write off all self-help.

That’s how you end up living an average life.

Show me anyone you truly want to be like who isn’t constantly improving. You can’t. And if you think you can—chances are, they aren’t worth idolizing.

Your business won’t grow if you don’t grow. Your relationships will crumble if you don’t evolve alongside them. Your health? It’ll betray you if you ignore the quiet problems brewing beneath the surface.

Improvement isn’t optional—it’s non-negotiable.

Final Thoughts

The trap isn’t really in the books, the courses, or the gurus. The trap is in believing that the next book, the next podcast, the next hack will finally unlock the “perfect you.” Self-help is not a magic fix—it’s raw material. The real transformation comes from what you do with it.

Life is going to throw situations at you that make you uncomfortable. No textbook, no lecture, no formula can hand you the answer. Life isn’t physics or math—it’s messy, unpredictable, human.

So what do you do? You look for clues. You study how others handled something similar. Sure, it won’t map perfectly to your situation—but it gives you a sense of direction.

Then you get creative. You combine what you know, what you’ve experienced, and what you’ve learned from others. You form a hypothesis. You execute. You gather information.

This isn’t about failing. It’s about collecting enough insight to make a move, to figure out if the situation is even worth solving, and to adjust as you go.

Growth isn’t about stacking hacks or chasing the next shiny strategy. It’s about actually living—reflecting, experimenting, stumbling, and rising again.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from learning more. They come from having the guts to use what you already know—to take the tools in your hands and actually play the game.

So pause for a moment and ask yourself:

👉 What’s one lesson you’ve been collecting but not living?

Chances are, that single act of application—not the next shiny idea—might be the key to finally stepping off the hamster wheel.

“Growth begins the moment you stop consuming and start embodying.”

Prince Shanto