In-depth research into personal wellbeing and productivity
What we do.
Effective Self-Help is a non-profit organisation dedicated to finding and highlighting the most effective ways to improve your wellbeing and productivity.
Our aim is to become a comprehensive source of rigorous, practical advice on the best ways to get more done and feel happier while you do it. We believe that high-quality self-help research can be of huge benefit to us all. In helping to make people a little happier and more effective, we hope to make a valuable contribution to efforts to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
Intervention reports
Our current focus lies in producing topic-specific intervention reports. For each of these, we conduct a thorough review of the available evidence to determine the most effective interventions for a given wellbeing or productivity domain. Reports that we have published up to now are available below:
How we do it
At Effective Self-Help, our recommendations are always based on the best available evidence.
Our team conducts a thorough review of the scientific literature for each topic we assess, compiling meta-analyses and systematic reviews to gain the best possible understanding of how effective different practices are. We then supplement this evidence base with a detailed exploration of the best podcasts, books, articles, and other resources on the topic.
Once we’ve completed our research, we’ll publish our in-depth assessment of each intervention we reviewed in a topic-specific evidence table. From there we’ll publish an overview of the topic, making sure to present our key recommendations for action as simply and practically as possible. Each overview article discusses the strength and quality of evidence we found for each intervention, the cost-effectiveness and potential risks involved in implementing each suggestion, and suggestions for the best resources we came across for exploring the topic in more depth.
Each overview article will then be made available to download as a report and recorded for our podcast to make our research as easy to access and implement as possible.
What makes Effective Self-Help unique?
Self-help advice is a huge industry, with millions of books bought and sold each year on wellbeing and productivity. What makes Effective Self-Help different?
Our approach is based on seven key principles which we believe are essential to giving the best possible advice and that, in combination, make Effective Self-Help unique…
- Prioritisation: Highlighting the most effective interventions and how effective they are, rather than just listing interventions that may be effective.
- Research Quality: Providing more rigorous and well-rounded advice that combines the findings of scientific literature with more Bayesian forms of evidence.
- Presentation: Maximising engagement through curated recommendations and the use of digital media (video, audio, and interactive programmes).
- Breadth: Covering topics across the full breadth of wellbeing and productivity, rather than just specific domains of expertise.
- Practicality: A focus on enabling behaviour change by highlighting practical actions and tailoring content to maximise the success of habit adoption.
- Positive mental health: Looking at how to improve the wellbeing of people who are not struggling with mental health issues as well as those who are.
- Free Access: All of our work is free. We avoid any influence of paywalls, advertising, or affiliate marketing on the quality of advice provided and full access to advice.