Self Praise

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I've bought several over the years. None of them have claimed to be a magic bullet panacea cure-all in book form, exactly, so I suppose they shouldn't have to live up to that impossibly high standard. The reason I've read several is because I learned some valuable things from the previous ones and wanted to learn more from other sources about different things. Some of them I've read for the inspirational stories from others, for the self-made success stories from athletes and business people, for the mindfulness techniques that I can put to use for myself - building a bit of a "mental toolbox," and also for more career specific things with professional sales books and so forth.

Reading several of them allows for a cumulative compound effect. Each book & author builds on the previous ones you've read and bit by bit, slowly but surely, you learn and grow, change and improve. Adding more and more positive thinking stories, tools, techniques etc to your mind is good for you. I also have several positive thinking type facebook pages liked so inspirational quotes & images pop up in my facebook feed every day. They're good for me in comparison to just reading bad news headlines and people's whining & drama.

The opposite would be true of seeing some horrific video. Seeing one once might not drive you nuts or make you desensitized to violence, but filling your head with murder and mayhem on a daily basis would surely change you for the worse over a long period of time.

I don't like those self-help books either. I'm quite a good problem solver and a very practical person. I refuse to listen to other people and could probably write my own self-help books with practical tips. The only self-help books I've ever read were religious ones and they did seem to help. But going to church is like one self-help seminar after another. I tended to take each sermon to heart more than the other kids at my church too. It quite funny as a child if I was told to give up my possessions and follow God I would do it the next day. Not one Christian adult could do that.

Reading those positive Facebook messages everyday on my newsfeed does make me angry because it's like they don't take into account mental illness or disorder but I know my friend who told me she has depression really needs them, so I try my best to you know not go off on a rant about how unrealistic they are.

I've suffered from depression in the past, and changing my thinking did really help with it. It wasn't so much "positive thinking" and inspirational quotes, though, so much as it was things like not assuming the worst-case scenario, not catastrophising from one setback, and generally learning to put things into perspective instead of letting myself be pulled into despair.
Even that wasn't enough, though; I had to learn to make myself do something productive even when I felt bad, so I didn't fall into a cycle of doing nothing, then feeling bad for doing nothing, then giving up on life.