Hazel Kudera, president of NYC Healthcare Staffing, has extensive experience in business with specialties in strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, and healthcare staffing. Outside of her profession, Hazel Kudera reads self-help books.
Self-help books run the gamut ranging from how to address stress and organization to more serious issues related to depression and anxiety. Today’s readers can maximize self-help books in a few ways by making sure they are grounded in research, they focus on one topic, or they are used as a supplement to therapy.
The self-help books have been around for more than 80 years with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). They then became more popular in the fifties and sixties when Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), and then much later, Thomas Harris’s I’m Ok, You’re Ok (1969) was published.
The popularity of these books would ebb and flow over the years, but many of the books reflected the attitudes of the time. Since the 1980s, the subjects for many of these books have centered around behavioral and psychological issues. Moreover, with technological advances, readers have been able to access self-help books through any number of apps.
However, the best self-help books embody any of the following qualities. As stated above, readers might find books that are an interesting read (anecdotal or personal) but not backed by research. Great self-help books are usually supported by research. Good self-help books are focused on one topic (i.e. depression, bipolar disorder, or anxiety). Finally, while the verdict is out on whether these books should be used alone, research suggests that self-help books are useful supplements to therapy, in many ways reinforcing skills addressed with the therapists.
Self-help books run the gamut ranging from how to address stress and organization to more serious issues related to depression and anxiety. Today’s readers can maximize self-help books in a few ways by making sure they are grounded in research, they focus on one topic, or they are used as a supplement to therapy.
The self-help books have been around for more than 80 years with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). They then became more popular in the fifties and sixties when Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), and then much later, Thomas Harris’s I’m Ok, You’re Ok (1969) was published.
The popularity of these books would ebb and flow over the years, but many of the books reflected the attitudes of the time. Since the 1980s, the subjects for many of these books have centered around behavioral and psychological issues. Moreover, with technological advances, readers have been able to access self-help books through any number of apps.
However, the best self-help books embody any of the following qualities. As stated above, readers might find books that are an interesting read (anecdotal or personal) but not backed by research. Great self-help books are usually supported by research. Good self-help books are focused on one topic (i.e. depression, bipolar disorder, or anxiety). Finally, while the verdict is out on whether these books should be used alone, research suggests that self-help books are useful supplements to therapy, in many ways reinforcing skills addressed with the therapists.
