SPENCER: Jeremy, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

JEREMY: How's it going? Good to see you.

SPENCER: This is a very special episode because our new book is coming out, and for those who don't know, Jeremy Stevenson is here with me right now as my co-author on the book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. Today, we're going to talk about the self-improvement world, some of the really interesting things we learned writing this book, and tell you a little bit about the book as well. I think both Jeremy and I share this view that self-improvement has lots of BS and lots of not useful stuff, but also that there's a lot that's really valuable in it, and if you go through it and try to find it, you can find the value. To prepare for writing this book, we read over a hundred of the most popular self-improvement books and went through 20 of the most used therapeutic modalities, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems. Every time they gave a method or technique, we extracted it and built this giant database of over 500 or roughly 500 self-improvement techniques. We analyzed that, and that's where we actually got the 12 levers. We realized, much to our surprise, that with just 12 high-level psychological strategies, you can encompass the entire genre of self-help. That's really what our book, The 12 Levers, is about. But to start, Jeremy, why don't you tell us how you first got into trying self-help, and what was your first kind of aha moment when you realized this could be really life-changing?

JEREMY: As with many people, it all began with suffering. When I was young, as a teenager, I experienced all the standard kinds of suffering: shame, not feeling like I belonged, anxiety, and so on. I remember looking around for stuff that could help me and just struggling to find anything good. For a long time, I couldn't find anything decent until a turning point for me was when I had just finished college. I was scrolling through the web one idle Tuesday afternoon and stumbled upon a blog article that explained how approval-seeking basically erodes your self-esteem. It all sounds pretty basic now, but at the time, it hit so hard that I literally got up from my desk and stumbled across my room with my head in my hands. It really had a lasting impact. I definitely had a lot of youthful overcompensation during that phase of life, but it helped me accept myself more and suffer less, especially in social interactions, and start to form my identity more strongly. It showed me that there is good stuff out there, but it can take some doing to find.

SPENCER: Yeah, obviously the content that someone needs can differ for the person based on stage of life, their personality, and their context, and that sounds like it was just the perfect information for you at that moment. But why do you think it was so impactful for you? What about that content really hit you?

JEREMY: I think it was definitely a timing thing. I was going through a period of life where I wanted to try and branch out, form my own identity, and do things for myself, but I think even more so, I just hadn't realized how much this behavior of approval seeking was making me suffer. I had never formed that connection, and the blog article made the connection so clearly that it hit me really hard. It was this understanding, which is related to one of the levers in the book, of the controllable behavior that was causing my suffering, and then there was a fairly clear solution to that, which was reducing the approval seeking and increasing self-acceptance.

SPENCER: This actually relates well to one of the levers of our book, the first lever — unravel the causes — which is all about the ways that we can try to figure out what's really going wrong. It's fascinating how often people don't have a very detailed model of the exact problems they're facing when they are suffering. In our book, we discuss a number of different techniques for really getting to the root cause and understanding it on a level where you can then intervene, but it sounds like for you this was sort of an intervention, saying, "Hey, this is the cause, this is what's going wrong," and once you knew that, that was enough to start unlocking new behavior.

JEREMY: Totally, yeah, the insight in this case was enough to make the solution clear, and then I could make big changes in my life. So, yeah, it worked really well.

SPENCER: I think one of the most common misconceptions a lot of people have is that you have to understand the cause that happened deep in your history in order to solve a problem today. Let's say you had childhood trauma from parents that mistreated you, or bullying, or maybe you were in a really terrible accident as a child. In order to solve the anxiety you experience today that might have been traceable to that, you have to realize, "Oh, it's because of the way my parents treated me," or "Oh, it's because I was bullied," and tie that together. What do you think of that perspective?

JEREMY: I think it's understandable, and we see it a lot in therapy with clients. It can be a long-term desire to understand what happened when I was a kid, or it could just be a more short-term thing of what happened this morning when I woke up that made me so anxious today. I think, especially for long-term childhood issues, the benefit of understanding can be really validating. Of course, I have trust issues in relationships if I got mistreated when I was younger. Of course, I have social anxiety if I got bullied relentlessly when I was in school. But knowing the original cause doesn't always lead us to know what the current intervention is for that. It can be validating, but then it can leave us a bit empty-handed about what to do. That's one thing we tried to do in that chapter: distinguish the controllable causes, like what am I doing right now that is contributing to my suffering. "Oh, okay, I'm trying to seek approval in every interaction. I'm trying to impress people in every interaction I'm going into." That's actually causing a lot of anxiety.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think one example helps illustrate this. Suppose you were in a really terrible car accident, and because of that, you now have panic attacks when you think about driving. The fact that you know that was caused by the car accident doesn't stop your panic attacks. The same goes often for things that are more subtle, where we don't quite know why we have them. The moment you figure out, "Oh, it's because of this," it doesn't stop the thing happening today. I think it's easy to confuse the original cause with the current cause. Understanding the current cause, understanding exactly what's going on today, what thoughts you're having, what behaviors are happening, and what's in your environment that's interacting to lead to your current feelings and thoughts and emotions, is really useful. Sometimes understanding the past can give you insight into the current causality, but you don't need it. To me, one of the most compelling examples of this is that we see lots of evidence that techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, which typically don't delve into your history at all, can be really effective for things like anxiety and depression without ever understanding why you are the way you are.

JEREMY: Yeah, I think there's a time and a place for it. In other therapies, like schema therapy, you do it quite a lot, and there are certain techniques where you do go into memories of the past. The whole rationale of techniques like imagery rescripting, where you go back to a memory and rescript it, is because it's going to change how that memory affects you in the present, so it still has a present focus.

SPENCER: For me, I also read a bunch of self-help books, and I found many of them not very useful. But where I really had an aha moment and a life change around self-improvement was when I went to a therapist because I had been experiencing social anxiety. I think my social anxiety actually traced back to childhood. I didn't think of it as that at the time, but if I look back and think about what I was feeling and what was happening, I really think I always had social anxiety from being a little kid, wherever it came from. When I was maybe in my early 20s, I thought, "Okay, I should really do something about this," and I went to a therapist. Much to my great surprise, he said, "Okay, well, I can help you. Here's what you're going to do: every weekend, you're going to pick a bar, and you're going to go there alone, and you're going to start talking to strangers. You just strike up conversations." I found this to be one of the most terrifying things I could imagine. Obviously, there's nothing objectively frightening about it, but to my social anxiety brain, it felt like my heart was going to explode at the idea of doing this because it tapped into the kind of interactions with strangers that made me afraid. He had me build up to it somewhat. I would start with really simple things, like I would literally just go up to people and say, "Oh, do you know what time it is?" It was hard at first, but it got easier. He had me do things that were a little bit harder, like, "Oh, hey, what's that drink you're drinking? It looks good. Tell me what it's called," or whatever. Then I built up to just saying, "Hi, I'm Spencer." Eventually, I started taking matters into my own hands and giving myself even harder challenges, culminating with one of the hardest challenges, which was to go up to men at bars and say, "Hey, would you mind giving me a hug?" My brain predicted that they were going to punch me in the face or something, but the reality was that I think every single time I did this, they were just friendly about it and perfectly nice. They thought it was funny or whatever. The gap between what my brain predicted was going to happen and what actually happened was so enormous that it really changed my brain in a dramatic way. I'm definitely not going to say I have zero social anxiety today, but my social anxiety dropped so much that I would say in some of these situations I have less anxiety than the average person, which is crazy. That was dramatic to me. It started with therapy, but then I learned how to take it into my own hands and start doing my own experiments with this. This goes under the general name of exposure or exposure therapy, and I think it's an incredibly powerful technique.

JEREMY: Yeah, can you remember how long it took to dramatically reduce anxiety?

SPENCER: I think it was a couple of months. It wasn't that long. I imagine you use exposure with some of your clinical patients. Do you want to talk about how you use it?

JEREMY: Yeah, it's so good. As we know, it's the most scientifically validated anxiety treatment in the world, and I like it because it works really well and gives a clear pathway forward. If I have a client who's afraid of public speaking, the idea of doing public speaking is terrifying, and they don't want to do it. But if you can reassure them that gradual exposure is the way we do this, just building an exposure hierarchy and gradually ticking off each task, it becomes way more manageable. We don't need people to be in the panic zone, and we don't want them to be in their comfort zone either, but if they can find this sweet spot of being in the stretch zone, then it works really well. It can work for many problems. We call it transdiagnostic; sometimes it can work for OCD, social anxiety, specific phobias, PTSD, and a range of different things.

SPENCER: I think this also speaks to the power of techniques, because one thing that's really different about our book, The 12 Levers, compared to a lot of books, is it's very technique-focused. Do you want to talk about why it is important to you that we focus on techniques?

JEREMY: Well, a lot of that comes from my own frustration. I wanted, when I was younger and suffering a lot more than I do now, thankfully. Even though I still suffer now, when I would go into these resources, there would be so much other content, so much theory. I was studying my honours degree when I was younger, and I was studying in an interesting area, in positive psychology, and getting into all the literature of meaning in life. I was really grateful to be in that area, but after a while I started to get this frustration of, "How do I do this thing? How do I increase my meaning in life?" I think that made me appreciate it more when there's something more concrete. I want to actually know what to do in this situation that's going to lead to the outcome. Early on, we were distinguishing between these different levels: there's the process variables like the techniques, and then there's the outcome of feeling less anxiety or feeling happier, but the controllable piece is the process.

SPENCER: It's a little bit how we were talking about before. Sometimes understanding your history can help you change the causal structures today, but if it doesn't help you change the causal structures today, it's not especially useful. Maybe it's interesting, but not usually useful. Similarly, sometimes learning about the theory, or hearing a story about someone using the method, could do something for you. Maybe it can motivate you, maybe it can give you insight, but if at the end of the day you don't know the step-by-step things to do to cause a change, then you're kind of screwed. That's where the technique comes in. The technique is where the rubber meets the road. It's like, "Okay, first I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C, and then I'm going to be different." If you just have the theory, you just have the stories, you have this giant gap of what the hell do I do? It's kind of crazy, but quite a number of self-help resources give you things to do that people don't know how to do. It would be like, "Okay, now just turn invisible, and then go through the wall," and you're like, "What?" They'll say things like, "Okay, you need to engage in positive thinking." Well, okay, most people can't even if that would be a good idea. Most people just don't know how to start changing the way they think, right?

JEREMY: Yeah.

SPENCER: Or, "Okay, you really need to learn to love yourself." "Okay. Well, how the hell do I do that," right?

JEREMY: Yeah, viewers might have seen this. It's really common when you're getting into psychology, especially clinical psychology. The lecturer will often show you a video, this parody video. I think it's someone famous; I can't remember his name, but he's a psychologist. His client goes in to see him, and she's complaining about some phobia, and he's listening patiently. It all seems normal, and then once she finishes talking, he's like, "Well, have you ever just thought about stopping that?" And he's berating her, like, "Stop." Then she presents another problem: "Stop doing that." Of course, self-help resources are not that extreme, but some of them can border on that kind of advice of "stop comparing yourself to others," even "believe in yourself." I think some people might interpret that in a helpful way, but we don't have direct control over what we believe in this moment, right now. There are definitely techniques we can use, like cognitive restructuring, to influence beliefs, but that can be a flaw in self-help resources.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's like you're writing a set of assembly instructions for something. You need to make sure that every instruction makes sense to the person using the instructions, right? It can't be some step that's like, "Okay, now defabulate the conformulator," like, "Okay, what do I do?" It's like every step has to be, "Okay, pick up your screwdriver. Okay? Now find this screw. Okay? Use it." I think a lot of the most useful self-help resources are trying to get it to that level of granularity, where every step feels totally manageable, like something you know how to do. It doesn't mean that it's not going to take effort, and I think that's something. Sometimes people are told by self-improvement resources that it's effortless or something like that, and I think that's rarely the case. I think usually you do have to put in effort, but you should at least know what steps you're applying that effort to.

JEREMY: Totally agreed. Yeah.

SPENCER: Another thing I think is pretty unusual about our book is the extent to which it's really providing a toolbox. Why do you think it's important to provide a toolbox rather than focus on one really good tool?

JEREMY: One reason is we know from the research that different tools work for different people. Yes, we know that exposure is on average the best treatment for anxiety, but it doesn't mean that it works for every person on every occasion. There's the Dodo Bird Effect in clinical psychology as well, where when they pit the main therapies against each other in head-to-head randomized controlled trials, they tend to perform pretty similarly. I think people, even in different stages of life, can relate to this. In my early 20s, challenging my thinking was so helpful. I thought it was the be-all and end-all; that's all you needed to regulate your emotions. Then I moved into a different phase where it didn't resonate as much. The same goes for parts work. Talking to different parts of myself helped a lot in certain stages, and mindfulness, I think, has been more helpful for me recently. Different tools will work for different people, but even within the same person, during different stages of life, and even in the course of a single day, you could have different needs. I don't know about you, Spencer, but for me, in the course of a day, sometimes I find it helpful when a worry comes up to challenge it and reframe it, but other times there's no point engaging with it. It's just better to leave it alone and postpone it until later.

SPENCER: Yeah, I agree with all of that, and I would say that one of the biggest common lies in the self-improvement world that I see is not even an intentional lie, but I think it's a lie nonetheless. It's the lie that this one big technique that worked for me, the author, is the solution to your problems. I see this outside the self-improvement world a lot. I think it's one of the most prevalent biases among even really smart people: Oh, I went on this diet, and it was life-changing for me. Therefore, all my friends should try it, and everyone should try it. I become an advocate. I don't know why it's so hard for us as humans to accept the fact that different things work for different people, but when something works for us, we get so excited about it and want to share it. We become convinced it's going to solve everyone's problems, and a lot of self-improvement is basically predicated on that idea. It's just not true; it's a falsehood and very misleading. What works for one person won't necessarily work for another. What works for one problem in your life won't necessarily work for another, but that doesn't mean all techniques are valid, because I think that's the opposite mistake to make. It's not that everything is equally good; you can't just pick anything. In fact, I think there can be dramatic differences between how good techniques are on average, even though there's no silver bullet that will work for every problem for every person.

JEREMY: Yeah, totally agreed. I can relate to that bias. When I discovered the book A New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis, it had such a huge benefit for me personally. I saw that I could challenge my thinking really vigorously in that style. It's a bit more Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), where they're a bit more...

SPENCER: They sometimes tell you you're just being irrational, which is pretty funny. I've actually seen live demonstrations of it, because they still do them in New York. At least, a few years ago. It's just very funny, because in classic cognitive behavioral therapy training, they're telling you things like, "Oh yeah, never disagree with the patient," you always want to get them to come to the conclusion. Albert is just like, "You're being totally irrational."

JEREMY: Yeah, I remember this moment when I was an undergrad. I had just been exposed to this stuff, I was really excited, and I waited for my lecturer. He was a clinician, after he finished, and we walked along. I was this young aspiring psychologist, foaming at the mouth about REBT, and I was asking him why doesn't everyone do this? It just seems to work so well. To his credit, he very patiently explained how firstly, not every client is going to be receptive to that. I think some clients are just going to be turned off and even offended by how direct it requires the therapist to be, and also the therapist isn't going to be wired that way. Albert Ellis, if you've read or seen him, he was a unique character. He was a disagreeable person, and I'm definitely not like that.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think realizing that you need different tools also respects the fact that human minds are just wildly different. As someone who's now run many studies in human psychology, one of my most dramatic takeaways from having done that is just realizing that the difference between different human minds is so much more vast than I realize, than almost anyone realizes. I think a reason that we often don't recognize this is that when we socially interact, we're squishing our behavior through social norms. Imagine you go to a birthday party. It's like, "Well, people are all having drinks, they're all having conversation, nobody's tearing their clothes off, nobody's jumping out the window, nobody's getting in a fist fight." Social norms dictate to a large extent how we act in that scenario, and maybe someone's a little quieter and off in the corner, and someone's a little louder and more gregarious, but the range of variation is very little. But if you could actually track what's going on in people's minds, if you could experience it, I think you would be absolutely shocked at how different the experiences people are having are. One person with social anxiety might be feeling like they're going to die, and another person with narcissistic personality disorder might be having their ego collapse because they're not getting enough attention at that moment. A person with antisocial personality disorder might be having just a completely different experience. We don't usually acknowledge that, and I think when it comes to things like self-improvement, we need a wide set of tools to deal with the very wide set of minds that are out there.

JEREMY: Yeah, and that's why it was really nice to write a book with you, because you've got that more bird's-eye view of running these large studies of people, and I've got the experience sitting on the couch opposite from clients one-on-one. That has been my experience exactly, of being humbled over the last few years working as a psychologist. I can't predict what technique is going to work for this person. I may have some idea, a reasonable amount of the time, like if they've just got pure social anxiety, then exposure is probably going to work quite well, but we don't even know that for sure. They might just not respond; they might want to do something cognitive to begin. So that's how I've matured over the last few years working as a clinical psychologist, more humility in my assumptions about what is going to work for different clients.

SPENCER: Switching topics a little bit. For this book, we did so much research over a period of years. What's one of the realizations you had doing all this research that you hadn't had before? Finally, digging into so many different resources, something that either surprised you or fascinated you.

JEREMY: Maybe the most central thing is I feel like there's this paradox: there is so much self-improvement out there. There are so many resources, there are books, there are therapies you can read about, there are videos online, there are podcasts, and so on. But most people still don't know the full range of effective techniques, and that seems quite crazy, considering how much is out there. That's been one of the rationales for writing this book: we wanted to lay out what we see as the 12 broad strategies.

SPENCER: But you might think the reason that people don't know it is because there are a thousand different things. There are so many different things, nobody could ever know it all, right?

JEREMY: Yeah, that's true. I think people can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume, and I guess that's where we're trying to make a dent here, which is trying to organize the material in an easier way to consume it. That would be one thing, and then I think another is just from our thinking of going through all the resources — this wasn't necessarily pointed out. It's pointed to a bit in cognitive behavioral therapy — what we found after pondering is that when you think about it, there are really only four things that we fundamentally control. We control our attention, where that goes. We control our thoughts. Obviously, there's a category of thought that we can't perfectly control, that's always humming along in the background, but there's another category of thought where I can think in images and sounds, and we control our bodies. I can breathe in a certain way, and then speech as well. This means that any self-help technique must operate through at least one of those channels, and I found that really clarifying to realize. We didn't actually end up using it in the book because it muddied the waters a bit, but it's woven into the different levers, and some of the levers are very focused on one of those building blocks we called them, so I thought that was a cool thing to realize.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's funny how when you state it like that, it's almost obvious, but it's one of those things where you never normally think about it. Then once you do think about it, you realize, "Okay, that's actually surprisingly little stuff that you control." If you add on the idea that I think both you and I would agree is one of the most important principles of all self-improvement, which is to try to control only the things you can control. Don't try to control the things you can't control, because if you try to control the things you can't control, that's just a recipe for wasted time and misery. Well, then you're like, "I can only control these four things." That's actually very little, and that means anything that I'm going to try to control, I've got to think about it through this very narrow lens of, "How can I control it through my communication, through my body, through my thoughts, and through my attention," and that's about it.

JEREMY: Yeah, and it was a good reminder for us when we were writing the book, when we were writing the techniques, that we want each step of the technique we're describing to be concrete and to map onto these four things in some way.

SPENCER: To me, one of the most high-level synthesizing ideas that I realized during the process of writing the book that I've never thought about before. It sort of has the same flavor, where it feels obvious once you hear it, but I think most people have never thought the thought, and it's clarifying when you actually have that thought, which is that we could live in a world where there are all these horrendous smells around, and a lot of our suffering comes from smell. Maybe there are some people in that world, but very few, I think, and we could live in this world where everything around us is so ugly that the ugliness of the things we see causes a lot of suffering, or the loudness of the sounds, but for very few people are those the case. For almost everyone, the sources of their suffering are very limited. It's just your body, like if you have chronic back pain or you're feeling hungry or that kind of thing, and then your thoughts, and if you're in good health and you have enough to eat and all this kind of stuff, you may have very little pain in your physical body day to day, and it really is just mainly your thoughts. And I think that's a wild idea to think about, that almost the entirety of suffering for many people in the world is coming from their thoughts, and it shows this kind of centrality of thoughts, and shows that if you want to be substantially happier, it's important to understand what kind of thoughts you're having and to be mindful about those thoughts.

JEREMY: Yeah, I love that, and I think that's what the meditation geeks — and I include myself in this — and what people like Shinzen Young understand really well, is when you really boil down suffering to moment-to-moment experience, it's physical sensations that feel bad and thoughts that mean something bad as well, and your attention is bouncing between these two things. So yeah, it's easy, of course. Things in the external world can trigger that, but again, it's very clarifying and simplifying to see that this is the true mechanics of suffering: body sensations and thoughts.

SPENCER: I think something misleading that certain types of self-help books do, especially those around manifestation or the law of attraction, is that they try to link the two things together. They kind of say, "It's correct to say that a lot of our suffering comes from our thoughts," but then they kind of tie it to the physical and say, "Ah, but your thoughts also dictate all the physical things that happen to you," which is false, just not the way the universe works, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, depending on your viewpoint. And so it's almost like they take this close to having this true insight, but then it sort of corrupts it and makes it into something false. And I think it actually can make people feel good initially. I think it tends to be very destructive in the long term because they have this false belief about the way things happen in the world.

JEREMY: Yeah, agreed. The other thing I notice in certain gurus is they'll do a big spiel about the power of something like thinking and how it can totally transform your world, and they'll go round and round explaining this thing with all its potential, and as long as they don't go off the deep end about how it's going to affect reality independent of affecting your behavior, it's often true. It's a useful thing, but it's dressed up in all this language where it could be communicated a lot more simply, like they would in CBT, of well, the way you think affects how you feel, the way you think affects how you behave, and I understand that we do want to frame things in a motivating way, but I think some insights can be confusing when it gets padded in that way.

SPENCER: Right now, we're criticizing the self-improvement world a bit, but I would say our book is actually really not a critical book; it's a book about the best stuff. Would you agree with that?

JEREMY: Totally. Yeah.

SPENCER: Because from my point of view, it's interesting to criticize things, but I really want to help people. I want people who buy our book to be helped by it, to benefit, and to me the way to do that is to say, "Let's take all the best stuff we can find. Let's try to package it in the clearest, most concrete way we can give it to them. Let's help them understand it, so they know when to do what." Criticizing stuff is just a distraction from giving you the best things that are out there.

JEREMY: Totally agreed. Yeah, it's easy to sit on the sidelines, and I've got that part of me where I do get a bit of a thrill from sitting on the sidelines and criticizing unhelpful and irrational approaches. I think that can make for good reading in other contexts, but I think in a book where we're just trying to get to the point of what you can actually do to improve your life, it's best left out of that.

SPENCER: When you work on a book like this, inevitably you end up cutting a bunch of stuff, even sometimes stuff that you kind of want to include, but you realize it's just not the right fit for this book. It might be really interesting, but it's not doing the thing we want to do. What's something that comes to mind that we cut that you're like, "Oh, that actually is really interesting?"

JEREMY: Well, firstly, just to echo that thought, so the viewers understand, when we were writing each chapter, we had a single Google doc, and then we had a section down the bottom for things we cut, and that section for every chapter grew so much. There were so many things we cut, and we just had to cut to keep it to a reasonable length. As we mentioned before, the section on the building blocks of attention, thought, body, and speech, we think that is true and interesting, but I think it just muddied the waters a bit. Everything boils down to four building blocks, but it also boils down to 12 broad strategies for improving your life. That's all true, but I think it could just make things a bit muddy for readers.

SPENCER: Too many different systems with numbers.

JEREMY: Too many levels. Yeah, and then you've got outcomes as well.

SPENCER: We all tried to put it all in one diagram at one point.

JEREMY: Yeah. This will never be shared in the book, but in the core, we had the building blocks, then the second concentric circle, we had the 12 strategies, and then in the third concentric circle, we had all the outcomes, like less anxiety, and so on. I think after a while, we looked at that and made the decision that it was too much to include. I just remember there were certain techniques that we would cut. For example, when we were talking about savoring, there was some really interesting new research on savoring-related techniques that have some pretty exciting findings for treating depression, but there was only one study, and it was going down too much of a detailed rabbit hole. There were certain things that had some really fancy names, like I think it was called Future Episodic Memory Training or something like that. It seems promising, but we just had to make a judgment call. If it's too granular, let's leave it out. Maybe we will write about it at some point in the future, and we were already capturing the essence of that technique. We've got future savoring in there. Let's leave it at that and move on. What about you?

SPENCER: One thing that's really dear to my heart are rationality and critical thinking techniques, and I think there's some part of me that would have wanted to include them in this book, but I think it would just be too much. I think it's actually out of scope because it's really a book about how to be happier, how to be less anxious, how to get more out of what you want in life. While critical thinking and rationality are really important for truth-seeking and for trying to solve difficult problems in the world, where you really have to see things clearly and be able to look at really complex plans and find their faults, for most people, it's just a bit out of scope. It's not the most direct path to feeling good and getting the things you value. That would be another book, maybe one day to write.

JEREMY: Sure. Would you include decision-making in that? Does it fall within the rationality framework?

SPENCER: We do talk about decision-making in the book, but I think there's a difference between day-to-day decision-making and decision-making around super complex things, where you have to do complicated research and evaluate the evidence. You might have to think in a Bayesian way, think in terms of priors, and think in terms of how to combine these different models. That could be important in some types of work, and I've talked about it on the Clearer Thinking podcast before, but it's probably out of scope for the book.

JEREMY: Yeah, it makes sense.

SPENCER: Who do you think should read our book?

JEREMY: Good question. I think, well, there's a phrase that came to mind when I got introduced to you, actually, Spencer. Before we knew each other, I think someone gave me some of your blog articles, and you were writing about self-improvement, as well as all these other things, and rationality. A phrase that came to mind was rational self-help, or more crassly, non-bullshit self-help. I think that people who value that and who value concrete, practical things will enjoy this book. It's not to say that we definitely include stories, but both of us just arrived at this point where you have to have stories; it's just going to be too dry if you don't have them in there. The stories have other benefits that I appreciate more from writing a book; they make techniques more memorable, concrete, understandable, and motivating. So we still have those in there, but overall, I think it's people who value concrete tools and rational evidence-based approaches as well, because there's evidence interspersed in the book, and then right at the end of the book, in the appendices, we go through in more detail the evidence of each lever.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting. I have a kind of different way of answering the question of who the book is for, although I think it's compatible. One type of person I think the book is for are people who think that self-help is too bullshitty. They're like, "I don't like self-help; it's not for me," but they're interested in improving their life. It's just that maybe they've tried a couple of self-help books, and they think, "I don't like this." They kind of bounce off of it. They think it's too full of shit, it's not real, whatever. I think our book could be for those people because it really tries to just get to the core of what's useful, and I think it tries to minimize the BS, as you put it. But another group, I think, are people who really enjoy self-help, but they want the meta patterns. They're like, "Okay, I've read a bunch of books, but I don't know how to put it all together. I don't know how to situate the different stuff I've tried. I don't know how to understand what I haven't tried. I've tried these things, but what am I missing?" I think the book gives a bird's-eye view that lets you kind of situate the whole genre and see how everything fits together.

JEREMY: I totally agree. I think if I boil it down, what's the main benefit of the book? It gives you this unified framework between self-help resources and therapy that can be applied as self-help. At least to my eyes, that's what I think is missing. You get books that are based on therapy, like The Happiness Trap, and then you get books that are more from the self-help world, like Atomic Habits. A lot of books are very focused on one lever or technique, or they're very focused on a problem like depression or anxiety, whereas ours is more technique-focused. I think there's a good rationale for that. There's a line in the book we use: there's a handful of levers for a bucket load of problems, or something like that. You find in a lot of resources in therapy that you go through the theory of what causes problems, you get to the other end of it, and the techniques look pretty similar. They might not have exactly the same name, but they have a lot of overlap with other techniques out there.

SPENCER: My hope is that it provides a toolbox people can come back to again and again throughout their life, that you've got these powerful levers that can be applied to a really wide range of challenges, and then, okay, maybe in a year you'll have a different challenge, and you can go to that set of tools and be like, "Oh, okay, this one, and then you have a different challenge, five years from now," and you go to the set of tools, you're like, "Okay, and use this one," and so that it's this resource that you can come back to, and yes, you could read the book all the way through, but it's also a toolkit at the same time.

JEREMY: Yeah, what's the word? Evergreen, is that the word evergreen? That's what we're hoping for.

SPENCER: Yeah. I think it's a goal. It's a goal to make things evergreen, to make it so it's just as useful 20 years from now as it would be 20 years in the past if it could have existed then.

JEREMY: I could be wrong. I can't run this experiment, but I'm quite confident that if I could have just presented this to the neurotic 19-year-old version of myself, I think it could have helped them quite a lot to see all the tools laid out, and they could just pick whichever one resonates. That's something else we have in the book. In line with not trying to be critical, we're trying to complement existing resources. When we go through a lever in the appendices, we give other reading recommendations people can go into if they want to go even deeper into something.

SPENCER: Yeah, so just about any idea from the book, you can find further reading resources at the end of the book. If you deep dive into that, if you're like, "Oh, I love that one thing," just go to the back of the book, and you can find that. We also have this cool diagram that helps you figure out which lever to apply to which problem at the back of the book as well. So, listener, if you found this interesting, I would really love it if you check out the book. If you preorder, we've got some great bonuses for you. If you preorder, you get five free bonuses that we're excited to give you. One of them is actually a tool that helps you apply the techniques from the book, so we hope you'll consider preordering. Preordering also really helps us out because it helps the book get noticed. When it launches, all the preorders count, and then people say, "Oh, that book got a bunch of preorders," and it can show up on lists and get people excited, so it also helps the book succeed. If you found this conversation interesting, it might be the right book for you. And Jeremy, thanks so much for this discussion, and thanks for being such an amazing co-author.

JEREMY: You are awesome to work with, and thanks for having me on.