britney lawrence's List: Self-Help Research

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• According to a recent analysis of the self-improvement market by Marketdata Enterprises, a Tampa market research company, some $549 million a year is spent on self-help books in America, with diet books pulling in the most money. And “a significant portion of the buyers are repeat buyers.” says John LaRosa of Marketdata.
• Self-help culture seems built for Americans; we did, after all, declare our right to the pursuit of happiness when we broke with Britain.
• Self-reliance, social mobility, individualism, the search for success and pleasure — our national ideologies parallel the goals of everything from Michael J. Losier’s “Law of Attraction” to Anthony Robbins’s “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!”
• A particularly fierce American hunger for self-actualization grew out of the 1960s and flourished in the ’70s, promising to help us realize our human potential.
• Salerno says that self-help books offer an illusion of change that diverts people from making real change
• You could do a history of America by looking at what self-help books were popular at what time

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• • Great to evaluate a self-help book

• an American stew of shame and pride and citizenship that kept these impulses walled off, sublimating private anxiety to the demands of an optimistic meritocracy
• old shameful stigma
• the smartest writers and publishers shun the obvious terminology. And the savviest readers enjoy the masquerade, knowing full well what’s behind the costume: self-help with none of the baggage

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• “TED,” says Sutton, “is sort of like the new Oprah.”
• Positive Psychology. Like so many movements of the past, it began as the province of professionals pursuing greater knowledge or maybe better policy—until it was brought down to Earth by an enterprising hand-holder. Her name is Gretchen Rubin, and she’s also on Amazon’s self-help best-seller list, with her 2009 book, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. It’s full of data, but chummily narrated within the framework of a memoir. It bears all the hallmarks of contemporary self-help, including its shyness about the label. (Rubin’s first book was actually a parody of self-help.) But for all its modern pretensions, it focuses, like all the enduring best sellers, on a chronic and incurable ­American flaw: unhappiness

• Y being labeled America's "Most Stressed Generation."
• young people report significantly higher stress levels than their older counterparts.
• "U-curve" of happiness based on age. By this model, happiness levels are fairly high during youth, dip during the 40s , and increase again in the mid-50s, peaking late in life
• Stress levels also peak in the early 20s (when happiness levels are declining) and then sharply decrease
• with only 67 percent of respondents saying that they were optimistic about the future, as compared to 75 percent in 2011. Optimism levels in the U.S. are significantly below the global average -- 89 percent of citizens internationally feel that the future will be as good or better than their present situation
• But on the bright side, other research has found that Americans are less likely than ever before to view wealth as a necessary ingredient to a happy life. Only around one in four Americans still believes that wealth determines succes

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