 and welcome everyone to the YouTube channel to the podcast, the Being Human podcast from now on. I really appreciate your ears, your eyes, your attention, and you taking the time to dive into a topic that's very, very important to me. And my job here in this episode is not to bore you to tears. That's never been the case, but to maybe invite you to question a few things about the industry and your relationship to self-help. Because since 2008, any self-help book that's come out, I've read it. But in 2020 I stopped. And I'd like to tell you why I stopped reading self-help books and why I feel so much better about life in general since I stopped reading these kinds of books and dove into more fiction. And I'm really curious if you'd like to comment, send an email about your experience with self-help books. Have they helped? How do you know that they've helped? Have you put things that they've talked about into action? Have you not? Why not? Why do you keep buying them? When did you stop? Have you stopped? Do you find them useful? What kind of books do you read? Please put all that stuff in the comments. But first let's talk about it. Because again, I wanna see if we're on the same page. When it got page books. I told you it wasn't boring. When it comes to these books, I wanna see if we're really in the same frequency here about why I have no use for them anymore in life. I'm done with them. It's over. Okay, so let's get started. First things first though, I'd first like to thank you all. Every one of you. Everyone listening and watching right now. I'm looking at you. I'm seeing you wherever you are. In the car, on the toilet, going for a run, going for a walk. You're in the kitchen doing dishes. You're putting leather conditioner on your new Honda Civic. You got a 2004. You bought it off some guy off the street for $680. It needed conditioning. You're like, I can't believe it came with leather. And I'm gonna condition the leather. And now you're so proud of your new Civic. Maybe you're even driving around right now. You can't wait, you're like Scott. I'm gonna put pause on your podcast. I wanna go test out these new conditioned leather seats in my new Civic. Whatever you're doing right now. I'd like to thank you for watching and listening. And also for your attention. And here's why this podcast, the Being Human podcast is all about what it means to be human, man. That means I'm gonna say things that I'll regret in a few years. That means I'm gonna do inappropriate things. That means I'm gonna say awesome stuff and then stuff that I didn't really well thought out. And the reason I like to do that is because I just am not a fan of the fully scripted. The fully scripted media, the fully scripted podcasts and this robotic sense of speaking and language and everything needs to be so precise and calculated today. Now it's not my objective to offend or to throw anybody off course. But I just, what you're gonna hear in this episode is me rambling, maybe some longer pauses. Maybe a train of thoughts gonna go off track and it's gonna crash and burn. I'm gonna get on a new train and see where it goes. I'd just like to thank you all if that's kind of your style of listening because that's the kind of stuff I like to listen to and watch. That's what you're getting, he, okay. So let's go. As I look at my bookshelf to the left of me, I have a few what you would call self-help books, the organized mind, lost connections, wherever you go, there you are. I have even to the right of me a book called Loneliness which I would highly actually recommend but it's not self-help, it's more just research to the max by of course my friend John Katchopo who I, every single talk I do to schools, to parents, to teachers, to staff, I always quote John Katchopo because we're in a loneliness epidemic. Yeah, obesity, yes, mental health crisis, mental health crisis and loneliness completely linked. So in 2020, I think you know my story from the last video I posted in the last podcast episode, it was time for complete change and revitalization in my life. And I've been reading self-help books since 2008 and the reason I started in 2008 was that's when a doctor told me that my brain was broken and that my chemicals weren't working the way they should and I'm like, oh okay, I have a disease that cannot be cured and it means I have a chemical imbalance and the story is the story as you know from then on. So I kept reading all of these books since 2008 trying to fix myself, trying to get myself better to know more about what was going on. What does depression mean? How can I beat depression? What does anxiety mean? How can I learn about social anxiety? What's going on in these mechanisms in the brain? What's the mind-gut connection? What's happening there? How can I be more confident? How can I be more happy? What are the steps to be more content, more mindful, more present? How can I win friends and influence people? How can I think and grow rich? You know all of these. What are some rules for life that I need to adopt? Isn't there some rule, this guidebook I need to follow? And each and every book I bought, there was a new answer to how to live a little better. To be a better person, to be a better listener, to be a better friend, to be a better meditator, to get in better shape, to eat healthier, to literally be a better human being. And I think you're probably listening, yeah, there is something maybe wrong with that. Wrong with that kind of chase. Personal development, self-development, it's all in balance, everyone. Obviously, read a book here and there. But for me, it just, I was looking for a solution. To what? What was I looking for? And maybe that's a question you can ask yourself if you are on this kind of journey like I was with self-development and self-help. What are we looking for? What are we really searching for? Let me give you an example. Happiness, like I can never be happy enough. It's a tough thing. It's something that I deal with for sure. It's like, you know, okay, so back in the party days, I'm 32, I'm not going to clubs anymore getting smashed. I'd literally rather cut my dick off than be in that environment. But back in the day, that was a thing to do. You go to the bar, you have some drinks and now everyone at one certain point reaches three, four beers and that's a good buzz. Like that's tipsy. You're loosening up, you get to flirt a little bit and that's what's going on. Somehow you're better at pool now. I don't know. Somehow you think a bartender is like the coolest person ever and you get to chat with them and people are just the most incredible beings ever after four beers and everyone's so interesting. And then everyone keeps drinking. It's like five beers and six and seven and now people are just sluggish and the pool queue is now being snapped over the other guy's back and now instead of flirting, now people are in the bathroom stalled doing stuff they'll regret and then one beer after another. Why did we keep drinking? Like we are at such a good level but what we do as human beings is we seek more and more and if I feel this good, I must be able to feel even better and now that I feel better, how can I top that? How can I top that? How can I top that? And we all have this in us. Some people deal with this impulse control a little more effortlessly than others. But you think of that drinking example or when you smoke weed, right? It's like or take an edible like I feel it but it didn't hit yet. It didn't really hit. Even though it can take up to like two, three hours people take another one and then boom they both hit at the same time and that's one hell of an experience. Even with me with coffee everyone, I stopped drinking coffee and I tried it once or twice since quitting and it's like a psychedelic experience. You can talk to Michael Pollan about that, listen to his stuff. If you need me to talk to God for you, give me a coffee and I'll tell you what he says. So there are all types of ways in which this seeking for more takes effect in our lives. Of course, it's like through relationships, that person on board of them, I'm getting someone better I'm getting someone hotter. I went from the A to the B to the C to the D cup need more, something to squeeze. So where do you get more? For me, a lot of it was like self-help. So there was never enough. I could never know enough intellectually. Here's where it comes into play. Intellectually, I wanted to know more. Intellectually, to be honest, I know a heck of a lot about depression and anxiety. I know a heck of a lot about how the human brain and nervous system works in digestive system. Know a lot about it. But when is enough knowledge, enough knowledge? When would I have been fixed? Again, we ask the question through self-help books, what are you looking for? A solution to what? Anxiety, depression, low self-esteem. And we keep reading these books, looking to intellectualize these emotional questions and sensations that we have. Now here's the problem with the self-help book. Number one, it's a one-way street. You're reading the book, you're absorbing the information, you can't ask the damn author a question, you can't call them up. If you're confused about something or they put something really, really potent in the text and it makes you really question a lot and it's almost unsettling, that new truth or new found thing is now there and it's just between you and a page. So you can't really have a dialogue here which is important when you're doing some self-discovery. For me, community is very important and someone to talk to. So that's one thing about self-help which is why I stopped reading them. It's too much of a solo experience. The second thing for me is that with self-help and a lot of people talk about this too on YouTube, you get such a dopamine hit when you're reading a self-help book because you're learning and your brain loves to learn. It loves new things. The whole human niche is around us not having a niche or a niche, whatever you say. It's that we don't have one. We make up new ones as we go along. So progress for humans is the ultimate name of the game and it doesn't matter where we make it. Progress feels good. Learning something new feels good. So when we pick up a self-help book and we read this new way of looking at the world or this new technique to deal with anxiety, it makes us feel good even if we don't implement it into our lives because just the act of learning alone is enough to make us feel better temporarily. So the big thing with self-help is why I stopped is I realized that I felt better reading it but my overall life didn't change. That was, I wasn't implementing it straight up. I wasn't really doing the stuff. I would when I felt terrible, but the self-help book felt so good that when I was done it, I rode the high for a little bit and then you pick up a new one because you see some new enticing title on the bookshelf and you're like, that's a trick that I gotta know. I gotta know that extra thing. I need one more tool in my toolbox. There's still lots of room and there's a point in time where learning intellectually and then experiential learning needs to take over. Of course we know this. You can't read a book on how to beat social anxiety. You need to get out there. Get out there gently, softly, make small progress like little baby steps. If you're scared of the outdoors or if you're scared of public places, just one foot out the door and then shut the door real quick, boom, progress. That's experiential learning. We can read all the books we want about traveling around the world but you don't know the smells. You don't know the people. You don't know the experience of it and that's a big thing I'm learning about yoga practice is it's the experience. You don't read about yoga. You don't look at a page and look at the pose and while you're sitting down on your chair, you go do yoga. You become yoga. You become the pose. It's all about the experience and what's help books, my friends. The intellectual experience is it only gets you so far and you may be in a point in your life like I am. You know, maybe you're 20s, 30s. Maybe you've read a lot of them and you're like, Scott, I'm still anxious, man. Like I'm still depressed. I'm still dealing with these things. I don't have a lot of friends. I don't have a good community. Let's drop the book. Let's drop the book. What happens when you drop the book? What happens when I drop the books? I honestly felt better about my life because what a self-help book does is it advertises that you're missing something. Clearly. How to win friends and influence people. The happiness equation. How to be happy. Happiness 101. How to be confident. Atomic habits. All of this stuff. Like you're not happy. I got the answer in the book. I can show you things that you don't know and that's gonna change your life. At what point do you say maybe I just gotta fucking live, man. Like it got to the point for me where I just became angry. I was just like, enough's enough. I'm just gonna live, fuck off. As I walked through the bookstore, I would always run to the self-help. What else is out there? What else can I learn about the disease that I have? I want to know more. And when you look back at your life and the experiences you do remember, do you remember reading a book? Do you remember sitting down reading? You remember getting lost in a fictional story and your imagination but I don't remember myself studying. I don't look back on those times as profound of me at a desk writing, learning. So when you put it all into practice and you head out in the world and say, let's see if it works. Let's see if this stuff really works. And then you tweak it on your own and you take all of those tools and you finally have that screwdriver and you put it in the screw and you twist it and you're like, damn it. It's the wrong way, I tightened it more. Okay, let's go back to the drawing board and let's go back into the world and I got the same screwdriver but oh, that's how you use it. I had to get back out there and try something new. So the reason why self-help books are great in practice is, sure. Like they can show you things that you didn't know about yourself and about psychology, physiology, what motivates you, what drives people, or biological factors, or evolutionary history. But it's only so useful as long as you put it out there into the world and explore it within yourself. It's not enough to read it and then put it on your shelf for your background on Zoom meetings. It's not it, man, that's not it. And the only reason I can say these things is because that was me. And I get it and I get it. And there comes a certain point where you just boom from intellectual to experiential and what's the balance between that? What's the balance? And we have to figure that out for ourselves. We really do. And I gotta tell you, there's less of a lack, a feeling of lack. Now that has to do with me getting off social media for a while and then only posting stuff and not looking at anything. That's a big thing. Less use on my phone, but also the self-help. The lack, it doesn't need to be there. You guys, so let me talk about you now. If any of that resonated, please put something in the comments or click a star on Spotify or write a review on iTunes so I can see it or write me an email because I'm gonna answer questions in every podcast now. I wanna do like a Q&A thing. If that resonates for you, let me know. But the other thing too is like just to everyone listening, there's always a balance in what I say. So you don't lack anything. You know what I'm saying? Like we're always pushed down our fricking throats and into our minds since day one that we need to be better, that we need to be more, that we need to plan, that we need to be the best possible human beings. Think of who you could become. Go strive, go get it. And it came to me. Finally, I'm just like, shut the fuck up. Self-help books, podcasts for help, all the shut up, man. Enough. Let me live. Let me go travel. Let me meet new people. Let me develop a yoga practice. Let me get in shape. Let me go socialize. Let me live. And man, it's time to live. No one's the same after COVID. And if you sat with yourself and through meditation to realize that you're enough as you are and if you want some extra goodies in balance, yeah, become a better this, learn a new skill, maybe get better at meeting new people if that's a skill you want to develop but to think that you're broken as you are right now and you need to be fixed is complete and utter bullshit. And if I have to tell you that, I will get on a call with me. I'll scream at you if you need it. You're not someone that needs to be fixed. You're not broken. Your mind isn't garbage. You don't need to always strive and wake up and hustle and be better and learn more and act better and be more polite, be a better person, shut the fuck up. You're awesome the way you are right now. Strive towards some different stuff. Take a nice stride, take a stroll to new avenues. Be patient with yourself. But if you're like me and I'm very sensitive to the world, man, you know our energies can pop off into different countries it can catch so far. And you just gotta be gentle. I had to be gentle and just to say enough. But let's deal with what's in here first instead of chasing what's out there. So with the self-help industry, I'm not spitting out facts to you about why it's the most popular genre people buy in book sales, the most popular ones, ones to buy that are actually worth it. I don't think we need to go over that right now because there are useful books out there that would be useful for someone maybe dealing with anxiety, maybe dealing with depression and need to know more about gut microbiome, maybe cognitive behavioral stuff, fantastic. But this is a general idea of if you're in that position of overconsumption and thinking that you're lacking something and that you're getting that dopamine hit every time you finish a book and you need more and you need to learn more, you need to know more. What happens if you say chill for a bit? What happens if you chill for a second? Just chill, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Oh, I got it, I'm enough. I don't need anything else right now. What happens if I use what's in here as a resource? You got enough as a resource right in there. You got a lot in there to deal with what life throws at you already. You really do. Self-help, it's a nice crutch sometimes when you let go of the crutch, what happens? You integrate other different muscles that maybe haven't been used in a while and you get that core strength going and you now use your own body as a resource and you slowly get that crutch away and you use those quick twitch muscle fibers and those stabilizer muscles that you weren't being used before because you had the crutch and the body and mind adapt. I think for a lot of people, I think just as a society, and this is maybe just big in the West, I don't know how book sales are in India and throughout Europe and Australia, I'm not sure, but for me, it was time for enough. And I wonder if a lot of you feel the same. So that's my little rant doozy dingy on self-help and you are awesome the way you are and if you wanna learn some more, if you wanna shed some pounds, if you wanna learn a new skill, whatever it is, then go for it and go at it gently and at your own pace instead of striving, just stride and take a nice stroll through it, man. And I'd just like to thank you all for your ears and listening and watching and I haven't taken a sip of tea yet, hold up. Now, in the future podcast, I will probably have a sponsor. I won't talk about them yet, but it is the tea and since I don't drink coffee anymore, I gotta share this tea with you very soon. So the last few announcements here, it's like we're at congregation, it's like you're at church or something and now it's time for announcements after the mass, right? And announcements, everybody. So obviously, this is called the Being Human Podcast. If you're not subscribed, please subscribe to the YouTube channel, turn on your notepad questions. And if you're on Spotify iTunes, if there's a review you wanna leave, there's gonna be a lot of juicy episodes and we're just gonna talk about what it means to be human. I'll put up a trailer or something soon. And in every episode, there's gonna be some links in the description. And those links I'll probably reference, whether it's my website, whether it's free videos for meditation and anxiety and maybe some self-help book links, something like that. So that is that. And I also wanna show you something for those listening on the, or watching on YouTube. See, remember this journal, everyone? If you've been with me a while. Remember that journal? I wasn't sure to give credit to the artist yet. Come on, focus, there we go. Remember that? Yeah, I hope to make those available again and those listening. That journal, I'm showing everyone. That's the, it has the design of the Being Human Podcast, that new artwork. That's on the journal and it's dope. And I use it all the time. I have like 10 of them and once for lyrics, once for drawing, once for to-dos, once for gratitude. So I hope you like the new artwork and I hope to make those journals available. So that's really it. Thank you very, very much for listening. I hope you learned something. I hope you just leave this podcast, asking questions about self-help and whether you need it and whether it's useful and what your relationship is with these kinds of books. For me, the imagination is a tool to learn more about yourself. A friend of mine told me that yesterday as we were at Indigo. That's what she said. She's like, fiction in itself teaches you who you are. What character you reside with? What character you love? Could you picture yourself in that situation? What would you do? How do you imagine things that you read rather than just straight up facts and self-help gurus just telling you how to live? How do you wanna live? My friends, thank you so much and I'll see you all soon. Namaste and good night, good evening, good afternoon. Bye-bye.