Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, Hogarth Press, 1929) knew the necessity of solitude, for anyone thinking and working creatively (although it obviously didn't help her in the end).
In a Self-Help Room of One's Own, one helps oneself to private, quiet solitude. You help yourself to the right lighting, by intuitively opening and closing blinds or, at night, turning on a lamp: simple things, on which simple sanity rests. You access personal agency.
You help yourself to a supply of books, music, pictures on the wall that take you away, suggesting other lands, times and dimensions. Special stones, pottery, shells, driftwood adorn surfaces, arranged for pleasure. There's no need to stress about things, in a private Self-Help zone. The light changes, the atmosphere is elastic. Mother Earth herself is changing her atmosphere and climate, and no doubt has her reasons. Finding balance, is one guess.
One changes the climate in a Self Help Room as if it was a personal planet. It is a personal planet: Planet Helped, where one helps oneself to freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom from "influencers". This kingdom is governed as a Nostrocracy, meaning its laws are nostrums, nostrums being "our own remedies": private helps for self, self-selected.
Seems an over-simplified view? Sometimes simplicity helps.
