Okay, so I've been a "self-programmer" since, oh, say 1996, when I first read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Recently, the question has been posed to me, "has all this self-programming stuff worked for you?"

So, well, it's time to be honest and get full disclosure out there.

How much have I improved over the past five years? Below are areas that I've been interested in improving with self-programming. For each area, I describe how things were in the summer of 2004. And in the bullet points, I describe what were the primary contributing factors to the change (whether or not they came from self-programming or other sources):

Work: I was three times as confused about what to do workwise. I had between 2-3 times as much fear about my prospects. I had one-fourth of the stability that I have now.

• Good old-fashioned "experience." i.e. getting burned by a lot of crappy jobs and learning why I hated them.
• Books like Pathfinder and What Color Is Your Parachute.

Social: A third as many meaningful and fulfilling social encounters per week. Five times as much social anxiety as I have now. I don't want to get into too many details, but socializing for me back then was not necessarily a chore, and I wasn't averse to it, but small social activities and encounters caused many many more problems for me, which limited how much I could socialize.

• Giving up on trying too hard to improve my social skills, including giving up on social self-improvement programs.
• Creating principles about "being natural" and some on the mechanics of socialization, like pinning down how to apply empathy.

Mental: Four times the number of obsessive, neurotic, over-thinking episodes. About a third as much peace-of-mind as I have now.

• Learning about OCD and how that relates to negative feedback loop thought patterns
• Creating principles about peace-of-mind and over-thinking.

Happiness: About two-thirds as much happiness as I have now. About one-and-a-half as much really negative or dysphoric thoughts as I have now.

• Improvements from these other domains of my life.

Personal: Sick more than three times as often as now. However, I was also about as physically fit as I am now. At the same time, back then, I enjoyed exercise about half as much as I do now (since now I play tennis and do other enjoyable, physically engaging activities).

• Improvements from these other domains of my life have reduced stress and improved my immune system.

Change itself: Only about 5% of my self-improvement attempts fulfilled their promise back then, while as about 25% of my attempts now have lasting sustainable impact. Also, back then, self-improvement caused a lot of problems in my life, like over-thinking and addiction to self-improvement. I'd say the negative consequences of self-improvement have been reduced by 80%.

• Principle-centered thinking
• Understanding OCD thought patterns

Principle-centered thinking figures a lot in the above, which I got into about 15 months ago. This practice is generally associated with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but if you saw my version, you may not even recognize it. For me, principle-centered thinking manifests in a series of one-line slogans that have meaning for me. I have generally posted these on my twitter account. For example, here's one, "how can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important desires, values, interests?" That principle really got me to think about having goals and looking at where I was spending my attention. Otherwise, I'd hear about at least one time a year from various self-help sources on the "importance of goals" and I'd maybe play with that for a while, but never really stick to the practice. Likewise, principle-centered thinking helps me lay down concepts that will still retain meaning 5 years from now, and therefore become the building blocks of sustainable self-improvement. Next time you read a self-help book, try to codify it into a few meaningful principles.

Understanding OCD thought patterns figures prominently as well. Here is how an OCD works in general: there's a trigger that makes you anxious (e.g. dirty hands). Then there is a compulsive activity that provides relief for that anxiety (e.g. washing hands). In neurotypical people, washing their hands relieves their anxiety and they move on. In OCD people, the relief is temporary and their anxiety about dirty hands comes back even stronger, which requires more hand-washing, and so on, in a feedback spiral. In my case, I don't have a hand-washing problem, but my thinking was very often an addiction to anxiety-relief. I'd have an anxious thought, like, "what am I going to do about work?" and then my anxiety-relief mechanism would be to introspect. This would lead me to some sort of epiphany which could drive relief for a day. But then when the epiphany ceased to have any hold over me, the anxious thoughts would return back, and I'd then double-down on another some temporary relief thought pattern. These patterns are the reason that most self-help seems farcical. Most programs will temporarily relieve your anxiety by giving you hope that you've "got it all figured out now." Steve Pavalina has more things to say about self-help junkies.