Is Self-Help Making You Miserable?

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forrest and Dr. Rick discuss what's really wrong with the self-help industry, going beyond the obvious pseudoscience and snake oil to examine deeper structural issues. They explore the industry's mixed-bag focus on individual responsibility, the risks of turning healing into a never-ending project, performative personal growth, narcissism, social media and capitalism, and honest striving vs. hustle culture. They also talk about their personal experiences navigating our relationship to the industry. Throughout, Rick and Forrest emphasize finding the middle path: balancing agency with awareness, growth with acceptance, and sincerity with skepticism. Key Topics: 0:00: Introduction 4:32: Healthy striving vs. obsessive self-improvement 8:27: The role of motivation: growth, shame, and self-worth 12:13: Problems with placing all responsibility on the individual 20:46: Performative self-help and spiritual status-seeking 26:13: Excessive self-preoccupation and narcissistic drift 34:34: Buddhist insights on “selfing” and the illusion of identity 44:43: Self-help as hustle culture 50:57: The generational shift from grindset to bed rotting 54:09: The self-help industrial complex and its incentives 58:56: Commodifying the self and seeking validation 1:04:18: Creating ethical, transparent content 1:08:12: Recap Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. Sponsors Try Daily30+, the 30+ plant prebiotic supplement from ZOE. Go to zoe.com/daily30 today, and you’ll get a free bright yellow ZOE tin and a magnetic scoop. Join hundreds of thousands of people who are taking charge of their health. Learn more and join Function at functionhealth.com/BEINGWELL. For a limited time, get Headspace FREE for 60 days. Go to Headspace.com/BEINGWELL60. Listen now to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Go to Zocdoc.com/BEING to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/beingwell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.
0:14.8	On this podcast, as you know, if you're a regular listener, we focus mostly on psychology and personal development and how to get
0:22.7	a little bit more out of life. To put it simply, and in a way that occasionally makes me
0:27.1	internally grown a little bit, we're a self-help podcast. And that phrase shouldn't make me
0:32.3	grown at all, because there shouldn't be anything wrong with hello trying to help yourself.
0:38.8	There's a lot to like about self-help. The goal of achieving some kind of reliable happiness and well-being
0:44.0	in a very chaotic and often unreliable world sounds pretty great to me. Groups are made up of
0:50.1	individuals, and it's really hard for those groups to improve if the individuals they're
0:54.8	made up of don't improve. Then why does it make me grown? Why don't I always love being
1:00.3	associated with the phrase self-help? Well, self-help has some problems, too. From cults of
1:05.5	personality to snake oil salesmen to rampant misinformation in pseudoscience, there are plenty of pitfalls to avoid.
1:13.7	But even when you get past the obvious stuff, the fake gurus trying to sell you colloidal
1:19.2	silver or whatever else, there are still all kinds of issues and complexities about modern
1:25.0	self-help content that make me more than a little bit uncomfortable.
1:29.2	So today, we're going to be talking about the problems with self-help.
1:32.6	To help me do that, I'm joined by a clinical psychologist, and some would say a self-help author himself.
1:38.2	Dr. Rick Hansen, Dad, how are you doing today?
1:40.3	I'm good, and I decided to, is consistent with the theme today, to be a little disruptive in my
1:47.4	attire. And rather than wearing the black t-shirt, I love this for you. Loosin it up. Yeah,
1:53.2	join me in T-shirt land bad. It gave me a trend rather than my kind of soft therapist, you know, costume.
2:01.8	Classic Mr. Rogers vibe, yeah.
2:03.6	Yeah, yeah, that's right.
	...

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