Maybe Stop Binging Self-Help Content?
A few years ago, I stopped watching the news. As I explained in a previous blog post, the news still finds me—without me intentionally seeking it.
Recently, I hit pause on another major content source in my life: personal development. Books, blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, educational Instagram accounts—you name it.
I realized I was oversaturated. Worse, I was doing exactly what I advise my clients not to do: binging content that keeps me busy without giving myself space to digest and actually apply what I’m learning.
Consuming is easy. Integrating is hard.
I’m the type of person who will read five books on sleep hygiene before making even one real change to my bedtime routine.
Why? Because consuming self-help gives me the illusion of productivity. It feels like progress, but without real action, it’s just motion.
MOMENTUM
I think of momentum as the sum of : action and motion.
James Clear, in Atomic Habits, differentiates between motion and action as follows:
Motion involves planning, strategizing, and learning, but it doesn’t produce direct results. It feels productive but doesn’t lead to tangible outcomes. (e.g., researching workout routines or making a list of potential business ideas).
Action is the execution of a task that leads to real results. It moves you forward. (e.g., actually going to the gym or launching a business).
Motion can be a form of procrastination because it keeps you busy without requiring you to take risks or to actually change anything to your daily habits. Action, on the other hand, is what creates change.
Action requires more effort than motion.
Plus, consuming self-help content feels productive, but unless you actively implement what you learn, it’s just entertainment disguised as growth.
Ask yourself: Am I actually improving my life, or just collecting knowledge?
I see this all the time with my Type A clients—they devour every book, every podcast, every article… yet the real work they need to do (most of the time) starts with learning to connect with their body and emotions.
They stay in their heads, trapped in analysis mode, because that’s where they feel safest. Dropping into their body? Feeling emotions and ‘sitting with it’? Even worse. That’s unfamiliar. That’s the real challenge.
Overconsumption Leads to Paralysis
Another reason to stop binging self-help content is that drowning in information distorts your sense of what’s actually attainable for your current stage of growth.
It’s like an illiterate person wanting to become a poet—it’s possible, but probably not in the next two weeks.
Plus, too much advice can be overwhelming. Should you prioritize mindfulness? Productivity? Relationships? Habits? With so many options, you might end up doing nothing at all—frozen in indecision instead of taking meaningful action.
The Illusion of Deficiency
Overconsuming self-help content can trick you into believing you’re far more behind in your personal development than you actually are.
Sometimes, I'll look at my "Watch Later" list on YouTube and see all the topics I want to improve on, all the things I’d like to learn, and it makes me feel behind.
When you're constantly exposed to endless advice, expert opinions, and "life-changing" strategies, you start noticing all the things you haven't mastered yet. Instead of seeing how far you’ve come, you fixate on gaps and shortcomings that might not even be real problems.
Self-improvement should help you grow, not make you feel like you’re perpetually broken.
The Overload of Conflicting Advice
As a professional in the field, I often feel frustrated because I can see just how confusing self-help content must be for someone who isn’t trained in it.
Experts “contradict” each other all the time—and that’s completely normal. You could put me and five other therapists in a room, give us the same case to analyze, and we’d likely all have different takes. Why? First, we come from different theoretical backgrounds. Second, even when we share the same school of thought, our interpretations will still vary based on our experiences, biases, and perspectives.
And that’s okay.
We’re dealing with human beings, not chemical reactions that follow a fixed formula. It’s like five artists painting the same object—one in pop art, another in impressionism, another in abstraction. The output will look different every time.
The School of Life, a YouTube channel I love, attributes 90% of people’s issues to their childhood—because their perspective is rooted in the psychodynamic approach.
Similarly, if you compare Psychology Today in the U.S. to its French counterpart, the contrast is striking. The European edition leans heavily on Freud and psychodynamic theory, while the American version is shaped by B.F. Skinner (et al.) and cognitive-behavioral approaches.
But the average consumer doesn’t know that when they read Psychology Today or when they listen to The School of Life.
They’re searching for clear, specific answers to their lives, yet they inevitably end up consuming broad, generic advice that may or may not apply to them and likely stems from just one approach.
The Struggle to Filter What’s Actually Relevant
One of the biggest problems with overconsuming self-help content is that people don’t have the tools to distinguish what’s actually relevant to them. Just because something is interesting doesn’t mean it’s what they need.
Most people aren’t trained to separate the signal from the noise—so when they binge self-help, they’re just adding more noise to their internal chatter. They struggle to hear an expert’s advice and recognize, This isn’t for me. This doesn’t apply to my situation. Instead, they internalize everything, even when it’s not useful, or they react to some expert’s opinion when it didn’t concern them in the first place.
Through my experience with journalists and podcasters, I now understand that their job is to make their content as compelling as possible. But from my perspective, it’s frustrating because they tend to ask impossibly broad, one-size-fits-all questions—Can we be friends with an ex? Are men good lovers? How do you heal from trauma?—as if there’s a universal answer.
To those questions, my instinct is always to respond with "It depends." or "Compared to what? What’s your reference point?" But the constraints of articles and podcasts often don’t allow for that level of nuance. The format demands quick, digestible answers—when in reality, the truth is rarely that simple.
The Price of Personal Branding: When Experts Become Slogans
My brother recently started listening to Mel Robbins. “Her thing is the Let Them theory,” he told me. “She talks about it in every episode and milks the shit out of it.”
I responded, “She’s not milking it—she’s branding it. As a public figure, she needs to be known for something specific. Audiences need a quick mental shortcut to associate her with a core idea. She can’t be an expert in Italian cuisine, modern jazz ballet, and personal development. So, naturally, every platform she appears on will invite her to talk about Let Them.”
This isn’t unique to her. Every public-facing expert has to carve out a niche. One therapist is known for eroticism and infidelity, another for her views on high-value men. Their expertise is vast, but branding forces them into a narrow box.
The problem? That box leaves little room for nuance. Real life isn’t one-size-fits-all, but for a message to spread, it often has to be.
From Performance to Presence
Binging self-help content often keeps us stuck in performance mode—a mindset deeply ingrained by society that equates worth with constant doing, achieving, and optimizing. One of the core philosophical shifts I guide my clients through is learning to move away from this performance-driven state and into existence mode—a state where simply being is enough.
The problem is, most of us don’t know how to access this mode, let alone adjust the dimmer between the two. We’re so conditioned to perform that even our attempts at healing or growing become performative. I used to be impressed by people who boasted about reading 50 self-help books a year. Now, I find myself wondering: How much of that was actually integrated?
It reminds me of literal binging—consuming a lot only to purge it, absorbing nothing. Insight without integration is just noise.
Conclusion: Stepping Away to Tune In
For all these reasons, I’ve decided to take a break from personal development content. Plus, consuming all this content is not coherent with my goal to slow down this year.
Like many therapists tell their clients, I’ve come to realize that the answers aren’t out there—they’re already within me.
Or, as Alex Hormozi would put it: You already know what to do. It’s just boring, and you’re trying to avoid it.
Have a good weekend guys, and I’ll try to go to sleep earlier :P
-kanica