DNF at 50%.

I'm not into self-help books. I find them to be mostly stating the obvious and/or acting like they can help people deal with complicated aspects of their lives by oversimplifying them, which ends being at best a lie, at worst very dangerous.

What got me into reading that book is that the author said he did not like self-help books, mostly for the same reasons I did not. He presented this book as kind of easy/fast fixes in our day to day lives inspired by real psychology. He also seemed to say that for more deep stuff people should not look for easy/fast fixes, so I was all for it.

And yeah, the author did talk about psychology studies, and it was interesting. And his tips on how to increase happiness and such, the first couple chapters, seemed okay. I mean, he basically was saying we should write a journal and spoke a little about grattitude. They are not things people with mental illness can do as easily as the author was saying it was, but for neurotypical people, or people with mental illness that have already done 95% of the work to understand their illnesses, it seemed okay.

But the issue is, when Wiseman tried to do the same thing about other areas in life, it felt more and more like other self-help books. I personnaly stopped reading when he touched on dating advices. I mean, no. Just no. His advice of lightly touching someone on the arm while giving a compliment has NOTHING to do with psychology, it's basically what every self-help books already tell us to do. The other "tips" on dating are just as bad. Also, they are very hetero-centered... And seem to be adressed to men (which is weird, I'm pretty sure there are more women reading that kind of books than men, right ?). He grossly generelized women and what they are supposed to love and... Yeah, no, that was as bad as any book he was destroying in his introduction. I felt cheated to be honest. I stopped reading.

I found this book really refreshing and intersting a must read for self help critics and people interested in psychology- real, practical, scientifically proven advice.

Great. Fun to read and interesting and never boring and funny but also filled with psychological and scientific studies and facts. Perfect.

Quick and interesting. He has a website with excerpts from the book, too (www.59seconds.wordpress.com).

Want a book that's full of tested ways to help yourself? Well, here you go!

So what happens if a psychologist is challenged to see if there really are small changes you can make in your approach to life, which will achieve the sort of gains which are claimed by the bilge-spouting self-help gurus?

Well, as it happens, with the benefit of meticulous research (his, and making use of many others) Wiseman is able to identify 10 thinks which can be done in under a minute, and which are able to positively influence your life and the lives of others around you.

It will probably come as no surprise to find that precious little of this accords with the common advice from the gurus, and a lot of popular myths are deconstructed or debunked along the way, including some quite surprising ones: the power of visualisation, the efficacy of brainstorming, and active listening - while other unlikely ones are shown to have real benefit: doublethink and methods of enhancing creativity, for example, though there are many others.

Against which - while it's full of great information, it's a bit dry and at times it was a chore to keep reading.

It was strange to think of how naturally I do some of the things that were mentioned, and I had never thought of some of it as being a way to change how I think. There was also a bunch of things that seemed completely against common sense. In general, I feel like maybe I should start taking notes when I read books like this. (I'm going to have a bunch of kindle highlights that won't make sense in a year.)