It's often claimed that you can learn a great deal about someone from scanning their bookshelves. This is probably true, though what is gleaned – depending on where the bookshelves are, and the sleight of the subject in question – may say more about the image a person wishes to project than the cold reality facing them in the mirror.

There is one infallible shortcut that goes straight to the crux of the matter: a shelf so hideously revealing that many people daren't take the chance and instead secrete the books that would appear there at the back of a cupboard or under the bed. Or they shred as they read, one page at a time, rather than risk being discovered. I'm referring to the genre of self help.

I have a suspicion the internet may have done for self-help books what Shakespeare did for the play.

If my own experience is anything to go by, the very best thing about shopping online is not the convenience, or cheaper prices, or next-day delivery direct to your door. It's the privacy of it, the freedom to choose safe in the knowledge you'll not have to hand your purchase over at the till.

I don't doubt that deep in the labyrinth of some windowless Amazon warehouse, a teenager has been known to snigger as he packs up my selection for shipping, but I don't much care so long as I don't have to watch him.

I have become, thanks to ease of access, something of a self-help junkie. I'm out, if not quite proud about this – at least in so far as I have a shelf, or two or three, reserved for my collection. I have books professing to offer solutions to pretty much every conceivable problem, except an addiction to books professing to offer solutions to every problem.

I have books teaching me assertiveness and self-esteem, and how to beat stress and fatigue. I have books informing me how to diet and how not to diet and whether to diet and why a diet isn't really a diet at all. I have a book which instructs me how to flirt (a present, that one, ta very much) and how to dress and how to Look Gorgeous Always.

I've got books on how to stop spending money and declutter my life and detox my life and start living my life and a handbook for when I do. I have self-help books about depression and manic depression and paranoia and personality disorders, just to make sure I'm covered. I have a number of books telling me how to sleep.

Do they work? I don't know. I haven't read them. I may have dipped into one or two, but by and large I've rarely got beyond the back cover. Do they help? Why certainly they do. Amid all the chaos and confusion of life, three rows of gaily coloured spines offer their simple solutions. And it's comforting to know that if and when I ever get round to it, I can change myself for £6.99.

• Clare Allan writes a monthly column for SocietyGuardian.co.uk