Is Personal Development Content Healthy?
Exploring the Self-Help Industrial Complex
I have been an avid reader of personal development books for many years. If the topic has anything to do with “becoming my best self,” that book will find its way into my library. Some of my favourites include Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer, Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff, and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.
Podcasts are another area where personal development content has taken over. Current shows in my library include: Financial Feminist, The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast, and Solved with Mark Manson. More than once I’ve thought to myself, “maybe I should become a coach.” I’ve only gone so far as reviewing the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) certifications.
A voice in the back of my mind questioned the legitimacy of coaching, so I dropped it. At some point, it occurred to me that my preoccupation with self-development might deserve a closer look. Why do I consume so much of it? What about others? What does this say about me and the larger social moment?
If you are new to my Substack, I use critical reflective practice to examine the issue at hand—I am essentially writing to explore an issue that has been knocking ‘round my head and heart to make sense of it and figure out what can be done.
To understand why personal development is so attractive, it’s helpful to begin with a definition.
Personal Development Industry
The personal development industry is very big business. Precedence Research puts the global personal development market at 53.24 billion USD in 2025, with growth projected to reach 90.86 billion USD in 2035.
Precedence Research writes:
“The personal development market encompasses a wide range of products and services aimed at fostering individual growth, self-improvement, and overall well-being. This market includes offerings such as educational courses, coaching services, motivational content, mindfulness practices, and tools for skill enhancement. Individuals seek personal development to enhance their capabilities, mindset, and quality of life.”
Growth Market Reports outlines five main market segments: self-awareness, skill development, personal growth, motivation, and inspiration. They note that self-awareness is a rapidly growing segment “…as individuals seek to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and emotional triggers.” There have been enormous gains in personal coaching and training, which accounted for 36% of the market share in 2025, according to Precedence Research. Life coaching was worth a staggering 4.85 billion USD in 2023.
The largest consumers of personal development content are adults and, globally, North Americans. Women aged 25-54 account for 60% of self-help consumers, and 74% of self-help books in the U.S. are purchased by women. Interestingly, 92% of coaches identify as women, according to Gitnux.
Both Precedence Research and Growth Market Reports claim that the key driver of market growth is a cultural shift that increasingly recognises and values holistic well-being (physical, mental, and emotional). In Tom Anderson’s article, The Fascinating History of Self-Help, he explains that Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography ushered in the self-help genre and walks us through how the genre has changed over time in response to social and cultural phenomena. In other words, the topics that dominate the personal development shelves at your local library are a response to the specific anxieties and troubles of the cultural moment.
Oprah Daily lists 12 must-read self-help titles for 2025, which include The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (about relinquishing control of others and taking control of yourself), Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose by Martha Beck, and How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists by Ellen Hendriksen.
Forbes gives us The Top 25 Self-Help Books for Personal Growth, which includes How to Keep House While Drowing: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey.
Self-Help as Neoliberal Bootstrapping?
Three things stand out to me from a cursory review of the personal development market. One, self-help is highly profitable; two, it appears that women are far and away the largest consumers; and three, self-help and personal development are framed as individual pursuits.
Profit
Anytime big money is involved, it’s a good idea to ask whether those profiting from us have our best interests at heart. When I reflect on why I’ve consumed so much personal development content, I think it’s because I have always felt that who and how I am isn’t enough, and that if only I could find the right formula, I could diligently apply it and be fixed or optimised. Those who are selling me that fix profit from this feeling of being “not enough.”
I’m sure some authors genuinely want to help others, and that I’ve learned many valuable things from the self-help genre. Yet, there is this niggling sense that I’ve overconsumed and that it is not, on the whole, good for me. I have felt a sort of compulsion to consume content that tells me all the ways in which I’m wrong and what I need to do to be better. This is not dissimilar from the desire to purchase the newest skincare product, promising to smooth my ageing skin. Never mind if there is evidence to back that claim up.
I have felt a sort of compulsion to consume content that tells me all the ways in which I’m wrong and what I need to do to be better.
On the one hand, I appreciate that, as a society, we are paying attention to our well-being and normalising once-taboo topics like neurodiversity, perimenopause/menopause, mental health, and trauma. On the other hand, these topics are incredibly sensitive—those of us who experience these issues are primed for exploitation because we may be in pain and absolutely desperate for relief. The snakeoil salesman can be awfully attractive.
It occurs to me that this content is often a more affordable, accessible, and less intimidating option than a qualified therapist or other mental health practitioner. Capitalism is all too happy to fill the gap regardless of the quality of content.
Women: The Target Demographic
I would hazard to guess that you, like me, are not surprised in the slightest that women are the target audience. Women are perfectly positioned to seek external advice, rather than listen to their own internal wisdom, as they are socialised, under patriarchy, to lack self-trust. “Patriarchy causes women to doubt their judgments regarding their self-concerned desires by encouraging cognitive deference and selflessness” (Borgwald, 2012, p.70). Women internalise the disrespect emanating from patriarchy and learn to second-guess and doubt their own knowledge, feelings, and judgment.
Borgwald (2012, p.73) argues that women struggle to attain what she calls epistemic personhood, which she defines as “…the ability to think autonomously, reflect on and evaluate one’s emotions, beliefs, and desires, and to trust those judgments rather than deferring to others.” I wonder, then, whether overconsuming personal development content deepens our lack of self-trust rather than growing our epistemic personhood.
Personally, I find it eternally challenging to parse a genuine and healthy desire for growth and self-improvement from the feeling of “not-enoughness” that has permeated my life. The easy solution is to seek out so-called experts, people who I believe are smarter, more experienced, and more trustworthy than me. In this way, I outsource life decisions to strangers who know nothing about my internal world and lived experiences. What I end up with is a slew of contradicting bits of advice that I have to sift through, which invariably overwhelms and exhausts me.
Individualism
It took me far too long to realise that much of the self-development content I was consuming was rooted in neoliberal logic and values—specifically, hyper-individualism. The underlying message is that no one will help you, so you must help yourself. And doesn’t this feel true in an increasingly unstable world? As late-stage capitalism plays out, we may find “evidence” for this notion in the progressive unavailability of our friends, family, and communities and growing inequality and resource scarcity. It may feel risky to rely on others, who themselves may be bought into the self-reliance mythology. The choice to depend on oneself alone seems like watertight logic.
There are at least two problems I can think of with this individualistic logic. First, while self-reliance and agency are powerful drivers of well-being (Card & Hepburn, 2023), they are only part of how human beings build resilience and grow as people. We also require relationships and community. In fact, our deepest learning and strongest resilience are built with others. Just because it is harder, in the midst of civisilational collapse (Wilson, 2026), to create and sustain community, does not eliminate the essential role community plays in our health and well-being. In our current reality, it is more important than ever to invest in community and relational well-being.
The underlying message is that no one will help you, so you must help yourself.
Second, hyper-individualism ignores and exacerbates the socio-political conditions contributing to the issues that personal development content purports to solve. For instance, loneliness, anxiety, grotesque wealth inequality, authoritarianism, resource insecurity, and a lacking social safety net. We operate within multiple complex systems that constrain our personal agency, whether we choose to be aware of that fact or not. For instance, no matter how hard we try, we cannot solo “hack” our way out of wealth inequality, racism, supply chain issues, or a lack of affordable mental health care. These are systemic issues that we are forced to contend with. The best we can do is make choices in response to systemic constraints. However imperfect our human communities are, they are our best insurance against the encroaching nihilism, polarisation, and fear that throw fuel on the fire, hastening even greater inequality, authoritarianism, and the general enshitification of life.
Moving Forward
So, does this mean that I’m eliminating all personal development content from my life? No, but it does mean I will be much more intentional about the content I consume. Importantly, there is a difference between self-help and personal development content. Self-help content says, “You alone are responsible for making changes to achieve X.” Personal development says, “You have unlimited potential for learning about yourself, others, and the world.”
The key for me will be balancing personal development with relational and community development. There is a series of questions that I will ask myself before taking a book home from the library or clicking on that YouTube link:
Why do I want to consume this?
Who is delivering the information?
What are their credentials?
What is their motivation for sharing the content?
Who stands to profit from this content?
Does the content rest on a hyper-individualistic logic?
Does the content include a systemic lens?
Does the content help me build and sustain community?
Does the content help me to think critically and creatively?
Does the content inspire me to live out the values I already hold dear?
Does the content meaningfully support greater self-trust or does it encourage more external validation?
Do I have the capacity to act on new insights, or am I simply flooding my mind with information as a substitute for making difficult choices and sustained action?
The personal development industry is big business, targets women’s internalised lack of self-trust, and is rooted in the neoliberal value of hyper-individualism. For those of us who want to live creative lives that foster both personal growth and a strong sense of community, we need to think carefully about what content we allow into our headspace. Personally, I’m intentionally bringing in more fiction, academic articles, art, and poetry, reflecting through my journaling and writing practice to engage in sense-making for myself. I’m moving from passive receipt to active creation. I’m also choosing to invest in relationships and communities—getting outside my own head more frequently reminds me that there is a whole world out there that is endlessly more fascinating and beautiful than the bit of meat sitting inside my skull or the limited perspectives proffered by so-called self-help “experts.”
References
Anderson, T. (2020). Long-read: The fascinating history of self-help. Blinkist Magazine. https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/long-read-fascinating-history-self-help
Borgwald, K. (2012). Women’s anger, epistemic personhood, and self-respect: an application of Lehrer’s work on self-trust. Philosophical Studies, 161(1), 69–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9932-5
Card, K. G., & Hepburn, K. J. (2023). Is Neoliberalism Killing Us? A Cross Sectional Study of the Impact of Neoliberal Beliefs on Health and Social Wellbeing in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic. International journal of social determinants of health and health services, 53(3), 363–373. https://doi.org/10.1177/00207314221134040
Fitzgerald, T. (2024). The 25 top self-help books for personal growth. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertainment/article/best-self-help-books/
Gitnux. (2026). Self help industry statistics. https://gitnux.org/self-help-industry-statistics/
Oprah Daily. (2025). The best self-help books for personal growth in 2025. https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/g63231665/best-self-help-books-2025/
Wilson, S. (2026). I eat the stars. Penguin.