The 12 Levers

The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life

By: Spencer Greenberg PhD, Jeremy Stevenson PhD

Narrated by: Evan Sibley

The world of self-help is overflowing with advice. Countless books, podcasts, therapies, and videos talk about how to build a better life.. For Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson, the most essential part of all this advice is the techniques. Techniques answer the million-dollar question: What do you actually do to fix your problem? What do you do to overcome anxiety, maximize productivity, and find inner peace?
After years of research—analyzing 106 self-help books and 23 therapies—they discovered that, from a bird’s-eye view, all self-help techniques collapse into just 12 broad strategies: The 12 Levers.
Knowing these Levers can prepare you for so many of the challenges that life will throw at you. You’ll learn how to…

• Clarify your intrinsic values to give your life direction
• Overcome fear by using the most scientifically validated anxiety approach in the world
• Alleviate insomnia and out-of-sync sleep routines with techniques largely known only to sleep therapists
• Enrich your downtime by doing more glad-you-did-it activities
• Get more done by understanding the three factors of The Productivity Equation
• Interrupt spirals of self-consciousness using the Attention Training Technique

…and much more.
Together, the 12 Levers form the complete psychological toolkit for improving your life.

Distilled Self-Help

A very impressive synthesis of hundreds of self-help books, finding the common patterns and cutting out the fluff. It's like making cocktails out of very expensive distillations, you really feel like you're getting the essence of each strategy without spending hundreds of hours on padding. The book was very readable and focused on practical, usable techniques rather than overly-long stories or made-up examples. Recommended!

Real techniques to improve yourself

I found this to be an excellent listen for self improvement. I don't suffer from any serious mental issues like depression, but I found myself wanting to apply many of these levers to my life. There's no fluff in this book - just real techniques and brieff stories of how they helped individuals. Some of the sections I appreciated most were:
How to overcome fear
How to have a good conversation
How to sleep better
How to set goals
How to maximize the good & enjoyable things in life and minimize the bad
I plan on listening to this again and potentially getting the physical book so that it's a little easier to pick things I want to work on.

Great Bird’s-Eye View of Self Help

Helpful overview of techniques, conveniently summarized into overarching strategies. It condensed probably a decade’s worth of the most effective self-help reading I’ve done into one book. I imagine this being my new go-to reference when I need to focus on a particular strategy I’ve been neglecting.