I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I (Spencer Greenberg) read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in an attempt to answer the question: What are all of the most useful psychological strategies for improving your life? Every time a book or therapy said to do something or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. We then carefully categorized the ~500 techniques.
Our conclusion, which surprised us, was that to a reasonable degree of approximation, we were able to subsume all of these numerous approaches within just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these "The 12 Levers," which is also the name of our book. We also investigated the evidence behind each of these levers. The book does include stories, but they are not the focus - we choose one or two stories to tell about the history of each Lever or a person who embodies it to help make it vivid and memorable.
If this sounds interesting, we'd love for you to pre-order the book (pre-orders help books get noticed and succeed). As a thank you for pre-ordering, we give 5 free perks, including access to a tool to help you apply the techniques from the book.
With that, here are some lessons we learned during this process of researching and writing this book:
1. A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged
Take mindfulness, an extremely useful technique for a wide range of problems. It’s defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” The Pali word 'sati' (roughly translated as mindfulness) appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now used in multiple modern therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindful self-compassion (MSC).
Sometimes mindfulness is repackaged with a different name. For example, ACT therapists call mindfulness of thoughts “defusion” and mindfulness of body sensations “expansion.” Mindfulness also goes by “decentering,” “acceptance,” and “distancing.”
Another example of a (very useful) technique that has been repeatedly recycled or repackaged is exposure, which involves confronting what you fear until your fear fades. Exposure shows up in many therapies by a variety of names.
Is it bad that self-help techniques get recycled and repackaged? Well, it can contribute to that sense of overwhelm when we’re surveying the shelves of the bookstore’s self-help aisle. But it’s a good thing if it means making effective techniques more available. And it’s also good if it means making existing techniques easier to understand and apply.
2. A lot of self-help techniques don’t have as much evidence as you’d think
Cold exposure is a great example. It has become incredibly popular. And from all the hype, you’d think that daily cold showers or plunges have multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showing consistent benefits for all sorts of outcomes like anxiety, depression, and energy levels.
A 2025 meta-analysis did find some benefits, including lower physiological stress 12 hours after cold exposure, better self-reported sleep quality, improved self-reported quality of life after 30 days of practice, and 29% fewer sick days taken. But the same meta-analysis did not find stress improvements at other time points (immediately, 1, 24, and 48 hours after exposure). This is a bit concerning—why would it work at 12 hours but not 1 or 24 hours? Maybe it only works over a specific time frame. Additionally, the meta-analysis found no quality of life benefits after 90 days of practice, and no general improvements for mood. At best, we can call this a mixed result.
Here’s what the authors of the meta-analysis concluded: “the current evidence base is constrained by few RCTs, small sample sizes, and a lack of diversity in study populations.” Also, most of the outcomes examined were very short-term (e.g., a few hours to a few days). We really need more outcomes measured over longer timeframes, because the sustained benefits are the ones many people care about most.
Another popular technique, energetic breathing (for instance, "Wim Hof" style breathing), has even less scientific evidence. A 2023 narrative review did find some promising results (like less anxiety immediately after, as well as one month and one-year later), but a lot of the doses in the studies examined were extremely high—some as high as three-hour sessions. In studies with realistic doses (e.g., ≤ 35 min per session), some show certain benefits (e.g., Balban et al., 2023), but the most rigorous study to date did not find that energetic breathing was superior to ordinary breathing for stress and mood.
A further problem we found in the research is that self-help techniques are often bundled together, so it’s hard to discern which specific techniques from the bundle are doing the work. For example, techniques like cold exposure, mindfulness, thought reframing, and problem-solving are often used in various protocols like CBT, ACT, and DBT, alongside other techniques. So, is the mindfulness helping? Or is it the thought reframing, or some other ingredient? The evidence usually isn't clear.
Thankfully, multiple techniques like exposure, behavioral activation, and mindfulness really do have robust research behind them.
3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average
Some psychological techniques really are better than others. Much better. For example, if you want to reduce your anxiety, exposure therapy is the most evidence-based approach, and it's effective for a lot of people (though not for everyone)
In terms of other questions, like who should reframe their thoughts versus be mindful of them, or who should use cognitive techniques versus behavioral techniques, or who should use CBT versus DBT, not much is actually known.
The reality is that, while the worst techniques are useless for everyone (beyond giving a potential placebo effect), even the best techniques don't work for everyone. There's a ton of person-to-person variability, probably because our environments, biologies, and psychologies all differ. For instance, our recently launched Unique Traits Test helps you discover ways you may be unusual, by assessing you for over 80 different uncommon traits.
This lack of a one-size-fits-all solution in self-improvement can be frustrating. It’d be nice to know which techniques are going to work for you individually. But thankfully, this also means you have a lot of freedom in choosing which techniques to try. You might just need to try a few different evidence-based techniques that address the challenges you're facing, so you find what works well for you personally. In our book, we provide a bunch of recommendations on which techniques might be suitable for whom.
4. At a fundamental level, you control surprisingly few things.
Focusing on what you control is an essential principle of life. There’s a reason why the ancient Stoics emphasized it so much. As Epictetus put it, “Some things are in our control and others not.” If you try to change things outside of your control, you can waste a lot of energy and potentially cause yourself a lot of unnecessary suffering. This is also a major reason why we wrote a book about the techniques of self-help, because techniques are controllable processes.
One thing we discovered from reviewing scores of self-help books and therapies is that, when you really think about it, there are only four things we each fundamentally control. Just four! You have control (albeit not total control) over: your body, your communication, your thoughts, and your attention. That's not very much!
To illustrate, imagine you’re unjustly locked in a jail cell that’s completely empty except for a chair. You’re surrounded by concrete walls, and you can’t see or hear what’s happening outside. You’re completely alone.
In this situation, what do you truly have control over? You certainly can’t control what’s happening outside of the jail cell. And you can’t change much inside the cell either (concrete tends to be fairly unmalleable).
But you can do certain things. You can speak, even if no one can hear you. And you can move your body, even if you can’t escape.
What if the guard came into the cell, strapped you to the chair, and taped your mouth shut? Well, you wouldn’t be able to move or speak anymore. But you’d still control some things. You could still control your thinking, at least to some extent (e.g., you could choose to fantasize about how you could escape). Sure, random thoughts would pop into your head that you don't control, but you could then choose to think about something different once you notice those thoughts.
And you could still control your attention (e.g., you could focus on the voice of the guard or the feeling of the straps on your wrists). Even if you were blindfolded, this attentional control would still be available. In fact, it would still be available even if you were temporarily paralyzed.
Attention, thought, body, and communication are the building blocks of control. So, any self-help technique will always employ one or more of these. This brings us to our biggest takeaway.
5. Hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life
Our biggest surprise is what we ultimately focused the book on: that 12 high-level psychological strategies (the "12 Levers") encompass just about every psychological technique for improving your life. If you want to learn more—such as what these 12 are, and concrete steps for applying them—we'd love it if you'd preorder our book, The 12 Levers, by clicking here.
I'm publishing a book that I think can fairly be described as a rationalist approach to self-improvement. Whereas many self-help books focus mainly on stories and what worked well for the author, our book takes a very different approach. My co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, and I (Spencer Greenberg) read over 100 of the most popular self-improvement books of all time and carefully reviewed more than 20 types of therapy in an attempt to answer the question: What are all of the most useful psychological strategies for improving your life? Every time a book or therapy said to do something or provided a method or technique, we extracted it. We then carefully categorized the ~500 techniques.
Our conclusion, which surprised us, was that to a reasonable degree of approximation, we were able to subsume all of these numerous approaches within just 12 high-level psychological strategies. We call these "The 12 Levers," which is also the name of our book. We also investigated the evidence behind each of these levers. The book does include stories, but they are not the focus - we choose one or two stories to tell about the history of each Lever or a person who embodies it to help make it vivid and memorable.
If this sounds interesting, we'd love for you to pre-order the book (pre-orders help books get noticed and succeed). As a thank you for pre-ordering, we give 5 free perks, including access to a tool to help you apply the techniques from the book.
With that, here are some lessons we learned during this process of researching and writing this book:
1. A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged
Take mindfulness, an extremely useful technique for a wide range of problems. It’s defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” The Pali word 'sati' (roughly translated as mindfulness) appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now used in multiple modern therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindful self-compassion (MSC).
Sometimes mindfulness is repackaged with a different name. For example, ACT therapists call mindfulness of thoughts “defusion” and mindfulness of body sensations “expansion.” Mindfulness also goes by “decentering,” “acceptance,” and “distancing.”
Another example of a (very useful) technique that has been repeatedly recycled or repackaged is exposure, which involves confronting what you fear until your fear fades. Exposure shows up in many therapies by a variety of names.
Is it bad that self-help techniques get recycled and repackaged? Well, it can contribute to that sense of overwhelm when we’re surveying the shelves of the bookstore’s self-help aisle. But it’s a good thing if it means making effective techniques more available. And it’s also good if it means making existing techniques easier to understand and apply.
2. A lot of self-help techniques don’t have as much evidence as you’d think
Cold exposure is a great example. It has become incredibly popular. And from all the hype, you’d think that daily cold showers or plunges have multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showing consistent benefits for all sorts of outcomes like anxiety, depression, and energy levels.
A 2025 meta-analysis did find some benefits, including lower physiological stress 12 hours after cold exposure, better self-reported sleep quality, improved self-reported quality of life after 30 days of practice, and 29% fewer sick days taken. But the same meta-analysis did not find stress improvements at other time points (immediately, 1, 24, and 48 hours after exposure). This is a bit concerning—why would it work at 12 hours but not 1 or 24 hours? Maybe it only works over a specific time frame. Additionally, the meta-analysis found no quality of life benefits after 90 days of practice, and no general improvements for mood. At best, we can call this a mixed result.
Here’s what the authors of the meta-analysis concluded: “the current evidence base is constrained by few RCTs, small sample sizes, and a lack of diversity in study populations.” Also, most of the outcomes examined were very short-term (e.g., a few hours to a few days). We really need more outcomes measured over longer timeframes, because the sustained benefits are the ones many people care about most.
Funnily enough, cold exposure is also an example of a “repackaged” technique. References to cold exposure date back as early as ancient Greece and possibly even ancient Egypt.
Another popular technique, energetic breathing (for instance, "Wim Hof" style breathing), has even less scientific evidence. A 2023 narrative review did find some promising results (like less anxiety immediately after, as well as one month and one-year later), but a lot of the doses in the studies examined were extremely high—some as high as three-hour sessions. In studies with realistic doses (e.g., ≤ 35 min per session), some show certain benefits (e.g., Balban et al., 2023), but the most rigorous study to date did not find that energetic breathing was superior to ordinary breathing for stress and mood.
A further problem we found in the research is that self-help techniques are often bundled together, so it’s hard to discern which specific techniques from the bundle are doing the work. For example, techniques like cold exposure, mindfulness, thought reframing, and problem-solving are often used in various protocols like CBT, ACT, and DBT, alongside other techniques. So, is the mindfulness helping? Or is it the thought reframing, or some other ingredient? The evidence usually isn't clear.
Thankfully, multiple techniques like exposure, behavioral activation, and mindfulness really do have robust research behind them.
3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average
Some psychological techniques really are better than others. Much better. For example, if you want to reduce your anxiety, exposure therapy is the most evidence-based approach, and it's effective for a lot of people (though not for everyone)
In terms of other questions, like who should reframe their thoughts versus be mindful of them, or who should use cognitive techniques versus behavioral techniques, or who should use CBT versus DBT, not much is actually known.
The reality is that, while the worst techniques are useless for everyone (beyond giving a potential placebo effect), even the best techniques don't work for everyone. There's a ton of person-to-person variability, probably because our environments, biologies, and psychologies all differ. For instance, our recently launched Unique Traits Test helps you discover ways you may be unusual, by assessing you for over 80 different uncommon traits.
This lack of a one-size-fits-all solution in self-improvement can be frustrating. It’d be nice to know which techniques are going to work for you individually. But thankfully, this also means you have a lot of freedom in choosing which techniques to try. You might just need to try a few different evidence-based techniques that address the challenges you're facing, so you find what works well for you personally. In our book, we provide a bunch of recommendations on which techniques might be suitable for whom.
4. At a fundamental level, you control surprisingly few things.
Focusing on what you control is an essential principle of life. There’s a reason why the ancient Stoics emphasized it so much. As Epictetus put it, “Some things are in our control and others not.” If you try to change things outside of your control, you can waste a lot of energy and potentially cause yourself a lot of unnecessary suffering. This is also a major reason why we wrote a book about the techniques of self-help, because techniques are controllable processes.
One thing we discovered from reviewing scores of self-help books and therapies is that, when you really think about it, there are only four things we each fundamentally control. Just four! You have control (albeit not total control) over: your body, your communication, your thoughts, and your attention. That's not very much!
To illustrate, imagine you’re unjustly locked in a jail cell that’s completely empty except for a chair. You’re surrounded by concrete walls, and you can’t see or hear what’s happening outside. You’re completely alone.
In this situation, what do you truly have control over? You certainly can’t control what’s happening outside of the jail cell. And you can’t change much inside the cell either (concrete tends to be fairly unmalleable).
But you can do certain things. You can speak, even if no one can hear you. And you can move your body, even if you can’t escape.
What if the guard came into the cell, strapped you to the chair, and taped your mouth shut? Well, you wouldn’t be able to move or speak anymore. But you’d still control some things. You could still control your thinking, at least to some extent (e.g., you could choose to fantasize about how you could escape). Sure, random thoughts would pop into your head that you don't control, but you could then choose to think about something different once you notice those thoughts.
And you could still control your attention (e.g., you could focus on the voice of the guard or the feeling of the straps on your wrists). Even if you were blindfolded, this attentional control would still be available. In fact, it would still be available even if you were temporarily paralyzed.
Attention, thought, body, and communication are the building blocks of control. So, any self-help technique will always employ one or more of these. This brings us to our biggest takeaway.
5. Hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life
Our biggest surprise is what we ultimately focused the book on: that 12 high-level psychological strategies (the "12 Levers") encompass just about every psychological technique for improving your life. If you want to learn more—such as what these 12 are, and concrete steps for applying them—we'd love it if you'd preorder our book, The 12 Levers, by clicking here.
(Most of this is a cross-post from an article we wrote on ClearerThinking.org)