I’d be lying if I said I entered the Scientologists’ sparkling new Life Improvement Centre in London with an open mind. It’s not that I have anything against people who believe humanity’s troubles began when an intergalactic ruler landed on earth 75 million years ago, imprisoning dead souls in a volcano and causing woes that can only be relieved with the expensive assistance of the Church of Scientology, it’s just that – well, OK, that stuff doesn’t help. But I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The centre used to be a shabby shop offering free personality tests. But Scientology has revamped it, and now it’s bright and welcoming, as if to forestall the accusation that they might be a secretive cult. A smiling man in a suit smiled at me and invited me to watch a video. ‘Then I’ll explain some more,’ he smiled. Did I mention he was smiling?
Space aliens notwithstanding, New Age kookiness isn’t the problem here. The more I explore self-help, the more tolerant I become of those who believe in angels and spirit guides: they’re well-meaning, mostly, and if I happen not to share their metaphors for understanding life, so be it. But Scientologists claim to be scientific. (There’s a clue in the name.) My brain, the video explained, is like two video-cassette recorders, recording my life. When traumatic things happen, the good VCR switches off and the bad one on. Scientology’s ‘auditing’ process apparently detaches the memories from the distress, whereupon the traumatised person becomes ‘clear’. One person in the video provides the following scientific explanation for the process: ‘Woo-hoo! It really works!’
The smiling man sat me down at an ‘e-meter’, the famous Scientology machine consisting of a dial with two metal cans attached by wires. I would hold a can in each hand, he explained, and an electrical charge would pass through my brain. If it hit a distressing thought, the needle would move. ‘Start by thinking of a time you felt stress.’ I thought of my university exams, but the needle didn’t move. For a while, the smiling man said nothing. Then he said, ‘Think of a time you were very sad.’ I thought about a break-up, concentrating hard, but there was no movement. ‘Sometimes this can take a bit of time,’ he said. He didn’t stop smiling.
I thought I’d better double-check that the e-meter wasn’t something comically obvious, like a heat sensor, so I squeezed the cans hard. The needle shot across the dial. ‘There!’ the man said. ‘What were you thinking of? You see. It works!’ ‘Interesting,’ I said, which wasn’t a lie. Later, he tried to enrol me in some auditing courses – he didn’t try a hard sell, to be fair – and before long I was back on the street.
I hadn’t been enlightened. Nor had I been sucked into a terrifying cult. But if the feeling you’re after is mild bewilderment, combined with the sensation that you might just have wasted a small portion of your life, I can recommend the Life Improvement Centre.
The Secret, a self-help book that is one of the most extraordinary publishing successes of the past decade, argues that there is a single, overwhelmingly powerful secret known to all the greatest humans through history. It has ‘utterly transformed the lives of every person who ever knew it’. Plato possessed this mysterious knowledge, as did Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare; all guarded it obsessively, lest it become more widely known. It has been passed down the generations, from Newton to Beethoven to Einstein. Now it has been passed to the author of The Secret, an Australian daytime TV producer named Rhonda Byrne. So, to recap: that’s Plato, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Einstein, and Australian daytime TV producer Rhonda Byrne. Is it just me, or is one of these names not like the others?
Perhaps it is just me: The Secret has sold several million copies worldwide, and a movie version on DVD has sold similarly well. Oprah Winfrey has dedicated two shows to it, and Newsweek has dedicated a cover; it has spent many weeks as the bestselling popular-psychology book on both sides of the Atlantic, and one of the fastest-selling in any genre. The reason is obvious: laziness. The Secret echoes the New Age ideas promoted by numerous other authors, but in ultra-distilled form, stripped of all vestiges of common sense. Focusing intently on what you want in life isn’t just helpful, it claims: it’s all you need to do. Scenes in the movie show people visualising expensive new possessions (unremitting materialism is a recurring theme) and thereby literally altering reality, so that they get them. That, apparently, is the knowledge behind Shakespeare’s and Einstein’s success. And there was I thinking they were just clever.
I’m sick of all this, and so I humbly present the Anti-Secret, based on hidden knowledge from, well, published scientific studies, actually:
The psychologist Julie Norem argues in her book The Positive Power of Negative Thinking that being a natural pessimist is perfectly compatible with living a happy life. Positive thinkers strain to convince themselves things will go well. ‘Defensive pessimists’ map out worst-case scenarios and thus eliminate anxiety as a barrier to action.113
Too much choice makes us miserable; believing you can do anything induces paralysis. The psychologist Dan Gilbert points to research in which students were shown a selection of photographic prints and allowed to choose one to keep. Those who were told their decision was final ended up liking their print more than those who were told they’d be able to change their minds later.114
Our circumstances affect us far less than we imagine. Paraplegics and lottery winners, a year after becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery, report broadly similar happiness levels to those they felt prior to their life-changing experience.115 About 50 per cent of your happiness is due to genetics, says Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California; 40 per cent to behaviour and ways of thinking that you can influence. Circumstances account for 10 per cent.116 The millions Byrne is raking in may not end up making her happy after all.
The bestselling self-help guru Wayne Dyer lives on the Hawaiian island paradise of Maui. We know this because he mentions it on every other page of his books, frequently irrelevantly. But don’t imagine that Dyer can’t empathise with suffering: bad things happen on Maui, too.
Twice a week, for example, a team of gardeners tends his lawns with mowers that make ‘thunderous noises’. This made him angry, he says in his book There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, until he learned to ‘send a silent blessing’ when they arrive, which calms him down. When he leaves Maui on speaking tours, things get worse: in one terribly upsetting anecdote, Dyer recalls how he once couldn’t get a sandwich delivered to his hotel room because room service was closed. He teetered on the brink of rage, but remembered what he’d told an audience the previous day – ‘Don’t put your thoughts and life energy on what you don’t want’ – took a deep breath and went downstairs for a sandwich instead. Who said the world is running out of heroes?
Dyer’s rags-to-Maui tale began in 1976 when, as a young psychotherapist, he published Your Erroneous Zones, a downto-earth work of pop psychology; when it didn’t sell, he travelled the US, hassling bookshops and giving radio interviews until it became a hit. He has produced more than 30 books since, each less down-to-earth than the last, along with CDs, TV shows and decks of ‘affirmation cards’. In a spirit of journalistic self-sacrifice, I’ve been ploughing through some of them, but having done so, I have less grasp of Dyer’s message, or the reasons for his popularity, than when I started.
Dyer’s recent books, such as The Power of Intention and Being in Balance, swing confusingly between borrowings from eastern spirituality, with some Christianity thrown in, and an approach reminiscent of the ‘law of attraction’ outlined in The Secret, involving ‘energy fields’ used to ‘attract’ (to quote another Dyer title) ‘what you really, really, really, really want’. Never mind that the Buddhist and Taoist texts he cites argue that clinging to the idea of ‘what you really want’ – and believing you’d be happy if you could get it – is what causes unhappiness. Dyer hides the contradictions under a concept he calls ‘plugging into the Source’, a cosmic power that’s a bit like God, but also like electricity, and exists to give you What You Want.
I don’t mind the corny tone. And many of Dyer’s subsidiary messages – such as seeking a sense of calm independent of external circumstances – are admirable. The real problem is harder to define. Somehow, Dyer is just unconvincing: his own happiness seems fragile; his written style is oddly frenetic. In the examples he uses from his own life, he’s always on the verge of losing the ‘peace’ he celebrates. The message is not the messenger, of course. But if your philosophy of happiness can only narrowly stop you exploding when room service won’t bring you a sandwich, even when you’re on a lecture tour to spread that very philosophy … mightn’t it be time for some introspection?
It strikes me that a basic requirement of anything calling itself a self-help technique – as opposed to, say, a scam – is that you ought to be able to do it yourself. If you have to pay someone a large sum of money before they’ll reveal their secret methods, this is called something different, such as ‘being an idiot’. (Although I accept that one can take this emphasis on doing it for yourself too far. ‘I went to a bookstore,’ says the great deadpan comedian Steven Wright, ‘and I asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me it would defeat the purpose.’)
That’s one of the things that’s so intriguing about Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, a crazy-sounding system from California that’s gaining ground in Britain and America: it’s all there, at no cost, on the website of its founder, Gary Craig, at eftuniverse.com. Which is just as well, since it involves tapping yourself repeatedly on your face and chest while reciting slogans – thus earning it the accolade of being the only thing I’ve felt embarrassed to do alone in a room. ‘It is an emotional version of acupuncture, except needles aren’t necessary,’ Craig says. ‘This common-sense approach draws its power from time-honoured eastern discoveries.’
You certainly can pay money for advanced EFT, carried out by professional practitioners, if you choose, and maybe their approach is different. But the charming, uncharlatanlike thing about Craig is that he makes extraordinarily ambitious claims for his method and implies you can achieve results in minutes – and for free. It can, he says, cure phobias, ease physical pain, eliminate negative emotions, improve your ability at mathematics and transform your golf game. You don’t even need to believe that it will work in order for it to do so.
Naturally, I set about testing it, tapping myself in an effort to a) stop procrastinating, b) get better at mental arithmetic, having first timed myself doing a set of basic multiplication sums, and c) eliminate a persistent pain in my right knee. (‘Even though I have this pain in my knee,’ Craig required me to say as I tapped my eyebrows, chin and collarbone, ‘I deeply and completely accept myself.’)
Which brings me to a dilemma. If I’m honest, I think EFT is probably nonsense: though it’s available on the National Health Service in Britain, peer-reviewed studies have not offered convincing support. Its success probably relies on distraction, since the tapping is so complicated that it interrupts any stream of depressing thoughts. The sceptic in me is supposed to be outraged by this, and if EFT promoted itself as an alternative to conventional treatment for serious illness, I would be. But if what it’s mainly doing is making people feel that they’re better at golf, or happier at work, or a little less achy, well, I’m disinclined to start getting all Richard Dawkins about it.
Personally, I found myself procrastinating less, very slightly faster at maths, and exactly as pained as before in my knee. I’ve never played golf, but for all I know I’m brilliant at it now.
Recently, for the purposes of research, I attended a workshop that promised to teach me secret techniques to make me more likeable. I wasn’t thrilled at spending the day with the kind of people who would feel the need to learn these skills. Megalomaniacs? Tragic, friendless loners? (I, of course, was there for the purpose of research, just so we’re clear on that.) In fact, almost everyone seemed strikingly well-adjusted. They were entrepreneurs, and executives, and a presenter from a cable television shopping channel, who was delightful, and who at no point attempted to sell me a gold-effect necklace with a pendant in the shape of Princess Diana’s head.
The self-improvement world is obsessed with the tricks of rapport – clearly, they’re invaluable in sales, or dating, or politics – but they’re impossible even to talk about without sounding seedy and manipulative. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for a certain breed of guru: ‘With rapport, the world bends to your whims!’ promises Keith Livingston, one such teacher, in his promotional materials. ‘Communicate on an unconscious level with everyone you meet to get what you want, when you want it!’ But all that felt a long way from the seminar room in central London, where Robbie and Ed, of NLP School Europe, who teach the techniques of neurolinguistic programming, were anxious to prove you could be decent and non-overbearing – British, you might call it – and still learn the arts of human interaction. ‘You cannot not communicate,’ as a poster on the wall declared. And so, our personable hosts explained, you might as well learn to do it well.
We spent a lot of time ‘mirroring’. The TV presenter told me about her job, and I tried to copy her movements and expressions as she spoke. The theory is that all this creates a barely conscious feeling of empathy. Mostly, it created a feeling of being ridiculous, but when I tested it later in the real world, the effect was remarkable. (Try it; it’s fun.) I managed to get absurdly precise in my copying, yet no one ever noticed. Then I’d walk away, cackling quietly to myself.
A lot of getting people to like you, though, is just about being a decent and generous sort of person. Research on the phenomenon of ‘trait transfer’ has found that if you gossip about someone for having an affair, for example, your listeners are more likely subconsciously to think of you as untrustworthy. If you praise someone as talented and generous, those qualities attach themselves to you.117 Deciding to do this consciously isn’t intrinsically manipulative, even if being liked is your goal, and it’s surely positively altruistic to behave in such a way that people enjoy, rather than hate, the experience of talking to you. The deeper problem is the state of absolute mental confusion into which I’m plunged whenever I try to hold a conversation and, at the same time, measure and modify my own contributions to it. I suspect this comes with practice. Or maybe it’s just a personal failing – one more reason the world is never going to bend to my whims.
If you were to take all the self-help books in existence, boil them up in a big stew, then reduce the bubbling broth to a pure, intense, concentrated Essence of Self-Help Book, the result would be Jacqueline Leo’s book, Seven: The Number for Happiness, Love, and Success. It is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People meets The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success meets The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, plus the insights of any other guru who has ever presented advice in a list of seven, which is a lot more than seven of them. Seven, Leo contends, governs our lives in profound ways. Our very bodies are replaced every seven years, the book notes – a claim I had dismissed as highly suspect, but the authority cited by Leo is Christina Ricci, so I suppose it must be true.
The numerological fixation with seven, of course, is largely a matter of confirmation bias. Start looking, and you’ll find it everywhere: seven seas, seven days of the week, seven deadly sins, seven dwarves, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, the seven natural notes in an octave. Leo even chucks in the drink 7 Up, the movie Seven, and the seven members of a water polo team. While reading her book, I happened to glance at my watch, and – oh, my God, this is so spooky – there was a number seven on it, right between the six and the eight!
But I’m being unfair. Even imaginary significance exerts an influence if enough people believe it, and Leo shows that cultures and religions from Mesopotamia to Hinduism to Christianity have all found the number deeply meaningful. And she marshals a sliver of bona fide psychological research to bolster her case: George Miller’s venerable 1956 paper ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’.118 ‘My problem,’ Miller writes, ‘is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals.’ One of his conclusions is that seven – or rather seven-ish, as his title suggests – is so ubiquitous in life because it represents the largest number of items, such as numbers or words, that the average person can retain in short-term memory. Seven does, in a sense, structure the way we encounter the world. Leo calls it ‘a natural brain filter’, something particularly crucial in an era of information onslaught. Her various lists of seven – ways to live simply, ways to eat healthily, and so on, which are full of good ideas – could just as easily be nine or fifteen items long, but then you wouldn’t remember them.
As self-help prescriptions go, using seven to govern your life seems comically arbitrary. But arbitrary rules, providing they’re recognised for what they are, can be some of the best. You don’t need a supernatural reason for adopting a personal rule to contact seven of your friends each week, or tick seven items off your to-do list each day. If the rule gives rise to action, that’s enough. No mystery required.
Still – seven colours in the rainbow, seven bones in the neck of a giraffe, and, Leo informs us, Nicolas Cage gets a new tattoo every seven years … You can’t help but wonder. I mean, what are the chances?
The wild-eyed Armenian-born mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, was once described by Time magazine as ‘a remarkable blend of P.T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx and everybody’s grandfather’, which is one of those phrases that means less the more you ponder it. It tells us – what? That he was part showman, part amoral charlatan, part deeply insightful student of psychology and part joker, and that he probably had some facial hair (which he did: a splendid handlebar moustache). But perhaps Time’s lack of precision was appropriate. The natural urge, confronted with those deemed to be spiritual gurus, is to categorise. Was Gurdjieff a sincere and earnest teacher – like, say, the Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh, to pick an uncontroversial example – or a fraudster and cult leader? Yet, like many of the mystical types inhabiting the borderlands between self-help and spirituality, Gurdjieff presents a challenge. Was he the real thing, or a fake? It’s not just that the question is hard to answer. It’s that when you really look closely at the man behind the moustache, it starts to seem like the wrong question.
Gurdjieff’s essential message was that humanity is asleep, and he seems to have meant it almost literally: that most of life, whether we’re talking warfare or grocery shopping, is undertaken so automatically that we might as well be – indeed, might actually be – in an unconscious trance. ‘A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born, and in sleep he dies,’ Gurdjieff said, and his mission was to wake people up, frequently by shouting at them (‘Do you want to die like dogs?’). According to legend, his follower and chief biographer P.D. Ouspensky only really grasped the guru’s point when he saw a truckload of artificial limbs being supplied, in advance of hostilities, to troops in the First World War. Something clicked in his mind: here was a society so robotic that, instead of halting the slide to war, it was calmly provisioning itself for war’s destruction. The Gurdjieff technique known as ‘the stop exercise’ aimed at inducing a similar click. When he shouted ‘Stop!’, followers were to freeze and examine their mental, emotional and physical states, and ask themselves if, up until that moment, they’d been acting on autopilot, sleepwalking through the day.
This is a good point, and it remains a good point even when you learn of the troubling cult of personality that grew around Gurdjieff, the celebrity acolytes he bewitched, and his reputation for sleeping with female followers. It’s not just that he was a flawed man preaching a good message. Rather, it was that the question posed by his every action and pronouncement – is this man real, or a fake? – was exactly what made him valuable, whether he knew it or not. For if the suggestion being made is that daily life is indeed somehow dreamlike (not just Gurdjieff’s claim, but the claim of all gurus preaching the possibility of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘awakening’), then focusing on the question of what’s ‘real’ or ‘fake’ is the whole point. This isn’t to excuse cynical fraud. But if a spiritual showman like Gurdjieff, by the very act of walking the tightrope between the two, prompts you to ask questions where previously you made assumptions, his job is done. He has shouted ‘Stop!’, and you’ve stopped.
‘My own feeling has always been that in order to be a real person you must know how to be a genuine fake,’ wrote the 1960s counterculture philosopher Alan Watts, who enjoyed referring to himself as a ‘put-on’, and probably wouldn’t have minded accusations of charlatanry. He meant that it was vital to become aware that so much of life was a charade – a web of shared assumptions, of conventions most people performed robotically – precisely in order to enjoy playing the charade, and thus to really live. For Watts, a mystic like Gurdjieff, those questionable shared assumptions included selfhood itself: we’re all part of a cosmic whole, he insisted, and our belief in our own separate selves is part of the charade. All that mattered was not to forget that it was a performance. ‘I am unashamedly in “showbiz”,’ he observed of his life spent writing and speaking on spiritual themes. So was Gurdjieff. ‘But’ – Watts’s crucial coda – ‘so is everyone.’
‘Can there really be a system for success?’ asks the insurance salesman turned positive-thinking guru W. Clement Stone in his 1960s classic, The Success System That Never Fails. (Perspicacious readers may infer his answer to the question from the book’s title.) Stone belongs to a bygone era: a pencil-moustached, bow-tied bundle of energy, he made employees of his insurance firm chant ‘I feel ter-r-rific!’ each morning, yet spent vast chunks of his fortune propping up the career of America’s least smiley president, Richard Nixon. But one thing that hasn’t changed since those days is self-help’s obsession with systems. Want to make big money telling people how to change their lives? You’ve got to have a system.
Anyone can dispense advice. To present your advice as a system, as almost every pop-psychology star from Deepak Chopra to Stephen Covey does, is to make grander claims: that it’s a comprehensive solution, and that if you master its details – which are unique to the system, of course – success is guaranteed. Good advice is usually simple and timeworn; a lucrative system should be complex and purportedly new. It’s a question of branding: relatively few people will pay much money, for example, to be told that gratitude makes you happier, though that’s a potentially transformative insight. Concoct a Gratitude System™ full of intricate routines and jargon, by contrast, and they’ll not only pay for it: they’ll spend more money, later, for your Gratitude System Thankfulness Workbook, even though it’s just a cheap notepad with a fancy cover.
The whispered promise of such systems is that they’ll render self-improvement automatic, bridging the excruciating gap between knowing how to change and actually changing. Here, at last, is the sequence of strategies that will let you lose weight without self-discipline, or the time-management method that will spare you from confronting the fact that you’re simply overcommitted. But the awkward truth is that it’s almost never the details that matter. When diets work, they may well do so largely because limiting your calorie intake works, not because lemon juice, or cabbage soup, or a specific carbs-to-protein ratio is the previously undiscovered secret to health.
It’s not just self-help. For decades, psychotherapists have argued the merits of their different schools (Freudian, Jungian, cognitive, and so on), while cynics have doubted the efficacy of therapy altogether. Then, in 2001, a study led by the psychologist Bruce Wampold shocked everyone. Therapy was definitely effective, he found – often much more than drugs – but the kind of therapy was almost irrelevant: specific techniques accounted for less than 1 per cent of variance in improvement rates among patients. What mattered wasn’t their particular system, but whether they were competent and trusted by clients.119
As for Clement Stone, he surely didn’t make millions because of a Success System That Never Fails, but because he was relentless, lucky and stubbornly determined to get rich: he tried many things, over and over, and some worked. After all, if success could be reduced to an infallible step-by-step system, couldn’t Nixon have employed it, too?
113 Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor, ‘Defensive pessimism: “harnessing” anxiety as motivation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1986): 1208–1217.
114 Discussed in Daniel Gilbert’s TED talk, available online at http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_ happy.html
115 See note 24.
116 Sonja Lyubomirsky, op. cit:20. (See note 1.)
117 J.J. Skowronski et al, ‘Spontaneous trait transference: communicators take on the qualities they describe in others’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 837–848.
118 George Miller, ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information’, Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.
119 Bruce Wampold, The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings (London: Routledge, 2001).