Millions of self-help resources exist, including books, therapies, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more. But is there a hidden, unified framework that lies beneath all of them?

This is the question that sparked a five-year project culminating in our new book, The 12 Levers. What motivated us was a simple recognition: Yes, some self-help is garbage. But some of it is truly life-changing. We know this first hand.

Jeremy’s life changed when, after finishing college, he stumbled upon an article that explained why approval seeking erodes self-worth. The insight seems painfully obvious now, but at the time, it struck him so hard that he felt like he was coming out of The Matrix. It led him to cultivate an attitude of self-acceptance, which has rescued him from a lot of unhappiness.

One of Spencer’s life-changing self-improvement experiences occurred when he read a book called Feeling Good by psychiatrist David Burns. It made Spencer realise that, when he’s experiencing intense negative emotions, his thoughts almost always contain some exaggerations or cognitive distortions, like jumping to conclusions or catastrophising. The book also taught him a method—cognitive restructuring—to challenge these thoughts and feel better.

Jeremy’s experiences with high quality self-help would lead him to become a clinical psychologist. He’s now seen hundreds of clients across thousands of sessions. Spencer's experiences would lead him to found ClearerThinking.org, a psychology education and research organization that conducts novel psychology studies and offers more than eighty interactive educational tools to the public. These tools, like their Ultimate Personality Test, have helped hundreds of thousands of people understand themselves better. Both of us, on our respective journeys, began to realize some important things about self-help.

First, even though self-improvement resources contain various ingredients—like theory, stories, and motivation—the most important ingredient is the techniques. Techniques matter most because you control them directly. And effective techniques can create the outcomes you want, like less anxiety and more happiness. Techniques are basically the answer to the million dollar question: What do you actually do about your problem? What do you do to reduce your procrastination or depression? What do you do to increase your fulfilment?

The second thing we began to realize is that, despite the abundance of self-improvement resources, there is a lot of overlap in self-help techniques. Namely, once you get past the other common ingredients (like theory and stories), you often arrive at the techniques and notice an unmistakable familiarity. So is there a hidden, unified framework of self-help?

To answer this question, we embarked on a massive research project. We began studying self-help books and therapies, and every time we came across a technique, we extracted it to a database.

That database grew and grew until, after studying more than 100 self-help books and 20 therapies, we had nearly 500 techniques. Then, when we synthesized these techniques, we made the core discovery: all of those hundreds of techniques boiled down to just 12 broad psychological strategies for improving your life. We called them “levers” because they are tools to create change.

Each lever has multiple techniques. So the next step was to review the evidence to discern which are the most effective techniques to include. That’s what our book covers. We describe each lever and the best techniques to put them into action. The research is woven throughout the book, but we also include a dedicated research summary for each lever in the appendices.

So to answer the original question we posed: Yes, there is a framework that ties together all of the self-help resources. It comes down to 12 approaches to improving your life.

For instance, when Jeremy discovered that approval seeking was destroying his self- esteem, he was implementing lever 1: Unravel the Causes. This lever is about the set of tools that help you understand what's really going on at a deeper level. People often get stuck at a surface level understanding of their challenges. But better understanding leads to better solutions.

When Spencer began reframing his unhelpful thoughts, he was implementing lever 7: Steward Your Thoughts. This lever is about taking charge of your thinking, for example, by learning to rewrite your thoughts in more helpful ways.

We wanted to simplify the world of self-help so that we could summarize the full range of effective techniques. This is because different techniques will work for different people and different situations. Some people benefit from reframing their thoughts like Spencer, whereas others benefit from applying physical techniques like progressive muscle relaxation (part of lever 6) to calm themselves.

Some people benefit from clarifying their values (found in lever 2), whereas others already know their values and need to put them into action (part of lever 3).

We wanted to simplify the world of self-help because some self-help really works. But it works better when you have a complete psychological toolkit so you can choose the best tool for the job.