My Self-Help Journey

Single, broke and feeling hopeless, Marianne Power embarked on an experiment: she lived by the rules of a different self-help book every month for a year. It changed her life. But not in the way she expected.

Every bit of me had to change. That much I knew.

I was done with being hungover, depressed, single, overweight, in debt and lost. I was done with being put at the kids’ tables at weddings, of toasting other people’s engagements, houses and babies before going back to my crappy rented flat, alone, feeling invisible and irrelevant. I was done with thinking there was something wrong with me, of heading towards 40, stuck in the same life I’d had in my twenties while all my friends were moving on.

So I made a plan: I was going to fix everything that was wrong with me by following the rules of a different self-help book every month for a year. I would not just read these books, I would live them, implementing every bit of advice they gave me about how to get rich, skinny, find love… and by the end of the year I would have achieved perfection, feel calm and contented.

When I told friends and family my idea, there was a collective raising of eyebrows. Mum worried it would make me ‘all American’. My sisters said I’d become even more self-obsessed, and my friends didn’t understand why I even read these books. ‘Don’t they all say the same thing?’ one scoffed. ‘Get out of your comfort zone? Seize the day? I don’t know why you need to read a whole book when the message can be summed up in a couple of paragraphs on the back.’

For years the British have had a cynical attitude to self help but that’s changing, thanks to alternative takes on the traditional genre by names such as Russell Brand, Fearne Cotton, Ruby Wax and Matt Haig, which are topping the bestseller lists. From hygge to KonMari, we are also looking to other cultures – be it Denmark or Japan – in our quest for contentment, while Instagram is awash with positive quotes and content designed to motivate and inspire.