Self-Improvement is the Hammer – You are the Nail

By: Camden Baucke MS LLP

Self-improvement is sold as if it can solve any issue you might have, even if that problem is you.

It’s not sold as habit-improvement or cognitive-improvement, it’s a solution to yourself.

If you believe you’re a problem in need of a solution, this quickly becomes problematic.

Modern American society is leaning pretty hard on self-improvement as an affordable panacea.

Unfortunately, self-improvement often only creates temporary changes or even makes people feel worse.

There’s a psychological explanation, which is centered on several factors that surround one’s motivation for improving, and why the target is themselves.

In this article, I’ll break down how self-improvement can be a destructive agent, if not utilized properly.

Why Self-Improvement Isn’t The Answer

1 – Self-Help Has Been Researched to Have a Minimal Effect

Buying a book or listening to a self-improvement podcast can feel infinitely more affordable, and less stressful, than therapy.

While I understand the urge, there is research that says you get what you pay (or don’t pay) for.

Even in 2008, researchers had identified that most major self-help books at the time didn’t cut it, and it wasn’t because the “science” had not advanced.

From the top 50 self-help books at the time, less than 50% had evidence based-suggestions, less than a quarter of them provided effective ways to measure their progress, and only a third of the books offered long-term solutions rather than an emotional Band-Aid.

Although that study came out in 2008, it was only one year after Amazon started their self-publishing program. Ever since, the amount of self-published self-improvement books have skyrocketed. I’m not assuming the quality has dropped since, but the regulation of this literature has nearly disappeared.

It’s not a bad thing to crack open a self-help book, but only as long as you know what you’re trying to “fix”.

2 – Self-Improvement Conflates Sense of Self with Behavior

Self-Improvement is quite clear in its aim to make yourself a better person, but what does that include?

This can include health behaviors, thinking habits, and emotion management. While it sounds nice, these usually are not the targets for self-improvements.

Self-improvement encourages you to identify with your habits. As much as you might “work as a doctor” you might strive to describe yourself as a “disciplined person”.

All of a sudden, it’s not for the end-goal of changing habits. Self-improvement is about changing behaviors to change who you are. To shift the image of yourself.

When you need to change who you are through what you do, you might be reinforcing a deeper issue.

3 – Negative Core Beliefs Can Be Reinforced

In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) there are mental constructs known as “core beliefs”.

These beliefs form in early adolescence when discovering your individuality, and set an unconscious precedent moving forward.

In other words, core beliefs are like gravity. It’s a rarely thought of rule that influences everything you will ever do.

When they turn sour, the unconscious framework for life is unstable, but it might just feel “normal”.

Negative core beliefs, such as being “unlovable” or “defective” are common in individuals who seek to self-improve.

Because you might think if you can improve yourself, maybe you can be worth loving. If you can mask or fix your “defectiveness” with discipline and healthy behavior, maybe you can stave off abandonment or rejection. Self-improvement then becomes just another attempt to not be the “terrible” person you think you are.

It makes sense that when you believe, deep down, you are potentially worthless that habit trackers and gym discipline don’t cut it.

Even if you are just looking to shift some behaviors, there’s much better ways of going about it than focusing on the concept of self and just “being better”.

4 – Behaviors are Better Understood By Motivation, Barriers, & Individual Narratives

Behaviors always exist in context. The context for most habits include internal motivation, external motivation, internal barriers, external barriers, and how they have manifested throughout your personal story.

Even when you want to “improve” or “strengthen” a behavior, what you are truly aiming for is an increased or stable “frequency” of behavior. Essentially, you want your actions to happen a certain amount of times (i.e. go on a walk at least four days a week).

Motivation and barriers are central to increasing the frequency of a behavior. It’s what starts or stops a habit.

Motivations are often built over time and are embedded in your personal story.

Value often drives motivation. If you value your health, it’s much easier to be motivated to engage in healthy behavior.

So if you truly want to improve your behaviors, then aim to address the motivations and barriers in your story. Seek what gets you in the door, and what you fear might happen once you go in.

Regardless, this is all an effort to seek value in what you do, not seek worth in who you are.

5 – Self-Improvement Undermines Unconditional Worth

How can we hope to reshape a hateful world if we don’t recognize the inalienable value of a human life?

Self-improvement not only addresses “you” as the problem, it becomes a necessity to avoid losing your worth to others.

You might think you’re not worth loving if you aren’t growing. You might think you’re not interesting, fun, or attractive if you don’t do anything interesting or fun.

If your worth determines your life, and your worth depends on the outcomes of your behavior, and outcomes depend on a wide variety of controllable and uncontrollable factors, then you’re a ship on the waves.

I’m not saying that you can’t lose value in a role that you play. If you don’t show up to work, then you lose your value to your employer. If you constantly berate and batter a loved one, you can lose your value to your partner. However, underneath these roles is a value for just being alive.

If you conflate your alienable worth with the value you have in a role or relationship, then it makes sense why self-improvement would be almost a necessity. However, whatever you “improve” will just be a lacquer over an issue that will not be solved by behavior.

In the words of John Candy in the movie Cool Runnings:

“If you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it”

If you might not be enough, then you might be afraid of who also thinks that about you.

6 – Self-Improvement Can Contribute to Loneliness

If you don’t think you’re enough, you will probably be tempted to hide that belief.

You can easily hide a perceived worthlessness by never doing anything new, challenging, or simply for the passion of it. That way you can never fail or “waste” time, reinforcing low self-esteem.

You can easily stay to yourself, masking your fear with acceptable labels such as “introvert” or “home body”.

You can hide yourself away until you improve yourself or do something worth presenting to others, something that would make you seem more valuable.

The only problem is that besides maturation and brain injuries, YOU won’t actually change. Thus, even the concept of the term “self-improvement” is a battle you are destined to lose.

An unavoidable worthlessness, even with good habits, can lead to loneliness.

Final Thoughts

Self-improvement, we keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what we think it means.

If you want to better manage your schedule, emotions, thoughts, and actions, be my guest. However, if your motivation is to NOT be a worthless person, I encourage you to look deeper than superficial habits.

Self-improvement is a hammer. It’s a pop-culture cure-all that often makes an original issue even worse.

You are not a problem to be solved, you are not a nail.

I think if we all understood this, it would create more change than all self-help books combined.

Thank You For Reading!