Lately, the options for what to consume in the culture are simply overwhelming, and the algorithm is making it impossible to figure out what’s actually good. Enter Cult Following: CULTURED’s monthly advice column where Delia Cai offers a cultural diet expertly designed to respond to each letter-writers’ needs, whether they’re seeking recommendations for what to watch, eat, read, listen to, or any combination thereof. Cult Following exists to help narrow down your choices but also to help all of us confront our inner anxieties about navigating the wild, beautiful world of art and culture.
This week, Delia offers expert advice on five self-help books that actually help.
Dear Cult Following,
Like everyone else, I want to use the new year as an opportunity to make big changes in my life. But there are way too many self-help books out there! Which ones are actually worth the hype?
Signed,
Help me help myself!
As someone whose mother saddled her with, oh yes, the teen version of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People back in middle school, I can attest to having a complicated relationship with self-help books. There absolutely are too many of them, so I’ve almost always gotten my recommendations from trusted friends who tend to have similar sets of baggage to mine.
Depending on your situation, dear reader, these five books may not be your exact cup of tea. But I can safely say that each one has changed the way I look at myself and my relationship with the world (especially with the help of a therapist, who added additional context and guidance along the way). I hope they can offer you some sage wisdom as well.
1. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller
You’ve likely heard about this one or at least seen its fingerprints all over TikTok, Hinge bios, and the New York Times. If you’re unfamiliar with attachment theory—a psychological framework that sorts our relationship styles into four categories, like Harry Potter houses for the heart—this 2010 book is a solid place to start. At the very least, it will demystify why so much of dating discourse is boiling down to descriptions of “avoidant behavior” or being “anxiously attached.”
Attached is pretty blatantly geared toward those with an anxious attachment style. (Who else would seek out an entire book about relationships?) But I enjoyed it as a primer on the basic psychological tenets and as a jumping-off point in both therapy and conversations with friends. It definitely helped me reevaluate relationships from my past and identify patterns that I always seemed to bring to the romantic arena. People often treat this book as a dating bible, which I think can be a little misguided and reductive. But the worksheet exercises are actually illuminating, and once I understood my own anxious-avoidant behaviors better, I felt like I at least had a map for navigating the dating realm.
2. Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
Sex educator Emily Nagoski wrote this best-seller back in 2015, and while it seems pointedly intended for satisfaction of the bedroom variety, I actually found it to be the best explainer of stress and its impact on the body that I’ve ever read. Nagoski’s chapter on the stress response cycle and one’s “emotional context” helped me understand why I always felt too keyed up or frazzled to enjoy much of anything, let alone physical intimacy.
Her ideas about the mental “accelerators” and “brakes” that keep our inhibitions in check (for better and for worse) have changed the way I think about my general default state of anxiety—which has certainly been made worse by my first year as a freelance writer—and it’s helped me understand how important it is to actually manage those stress levels. I used to be the kind of person who thought “managing stress” was a nice, utopian idea, but this book has been pivotal in helping me understand the very real consequences, both physical and social, that all this white-knuckling has wrought on my life. Plus, I found this profile of Nagoski, published last year, to be utterly charming and relatable.
3. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
No list of self-help books is complete without this iconic 1992 title, which has a cult following amongst creative professionals and regular-degular creative types (which Cameron would argue is all of us). It’s basically a self-guided 12-week “course” that, if you commit fully, requires you to do a lot of journaling exercises and even dedicate a whole week to not reading.
I mostly flipped through the book and cherry-picked what was helpful; there is a general aura of religiosity throughout (i.e., lots of references to a Creator/God), but what I really loved was Cameron’s ethos about treating creativity as play and not some inner, hard-to-reach resource you have to torture yourself into eliciting. I can also attest that Cameron’s notorious dicta to take yourself on weekly “artist dates” (which could be a movie, an exhibit, or simply an interesting walk) and commit to your “morning pages” (writing three pages in your journal first thing every morning) are life-changing. Both elements are still a big part of my day to day.
4. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Adults: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson
I mean, this one’s obviously for a rather specific audience (and also not exactly optimal for reading in public). Of all the books listed here, I found Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Adults the toughest read—not because the prose is flowery or the principles are too high-concept, but because the blunt advice given here is so simple yet so hard to swallow. When I first picked this up in 2023, I could only get through a few pages at a time, and my therapist kept a very close eye on me as I worked my way through it. (Especially for this book and the following one, I highly recommend having someone like a therapist to talk through the readings with—it’s a lot to handle on your own.)
Without going on for 10,000 words about my childhood, I’ll just say that this book provided me with the startling revelation that many, many other people struggle with less-than-ideal parental relationships and upbringings, to the point where Dr. Gibson, the author, was able to write a book about a pain that felt so personal and yet was clearly so widespread. I got mad that this book had existed since 2015 without my knowledge. (As in so many things, I am not alone: it was only recently the subject of a New York Times trend piece.) Part of me wishes I had read it sooner, but I’m also not sure I could have handled it any earlier.
5. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
It’s overwhelmingly dense, but Phoebe Bridgers and your most annoyingly therapized friend (me?) are right: It’s worth the read. Approach this book, which basically kickstarted our cultural obsession with trauma, with multiple grains of salt (and, again, ideally some licensed support). This New York mag feature on Dr. van der Kolk from 2023 is helpful to put things in perspective. I thought a lot of van der Kolk’s conclusions were a bit of a stretch, but this is the book that helped me understand how my internal wiring around my greatest fears worked, and how I could manually begin to “override” my most baked-in circuits. It’s like Come As You Are on steroids with respect to explaining the stress response cycle, and it’s given me a lot to think about in terms of holistic well-being and even the behaviors of people around me. As with all of these books, I encourage you to take what you need from these pages, ignore the rest, and pace yourself as you go.
Do you have a question about how to enrich your cultural diet? Email cultfollowing@culturedmag.com.
