Toxic Self-Improvement?

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay.

I'm a sucker for a YouTube video about self-improvement. Over the years I've consumed thousands of hours of content about decluttering and organizing and minimalism and cleaning and building better habits and maximizing my productivity. For a while I found this content really helpful. Thanks to the work of those creators, I developed meaningful skills and saw my quality of life improve.

But as I've been focusing on slowing down a little, not pushing myself to the max every day, and identifying rhythms that feel supportive to me, I've slowly realized that this content is now overwhelming. It pushes me into a place of nervous anxiety—sometimes when I think I'll get the encouragement and motivation I need to kick off a project or launch into a whole-house tidy, I instead get an unsettling pit in my stomach and a whispered voice in my head that says, you'll never be improved enough. Despite all your hard work, you still can't rest.

This disturbing turn revealed two vital things to me. First, I realized I've carried a belief with me for a long time that if I could just improve myself the right amount, people would like me more, connect with me more, care about me more. If you see yourself here, let me reassure you that it is absolutely vital and good to want to connect with people and have that returned. It's also not always down to you if someone doesn't connect with you: you could be the best, most "improved" person in the world and still some people will reject you. Usually because they're jerks. But sometimes no one is a the jerk and it just wasn't meant to be. That sucks. But it doesn't mean you need to fix anything about yourself.

For this one, I've been trying to shift from "improving myself so people will like me" to "learning hard and soft skills that will help me connect more authentically with myself and others." The next piece then is building those skills at the pace and quantity that feels right for me.

The second revelation was equally shocking: maybe I've improved enough. Maybe I've done enough macro skill-building for now. For a high achiever, that's a gut punch that can knock the wind out of us. If we're not trying to improve. what are we even doing with our lives? We need something to strive for! Hey, I don't disagree. But I find that presently I'm striving for more peace and calm rather than frantic overstuffed days. Trusting in the strong foundation and systems I've built and accepting that life pitches us curveballs when we least expect it, and we can roll with what happens—not always with poised grace, but hey, it'll be fine anyway.

Now instead of consuming self-improvement content mindlessly, I go in with a quick reminder to myself that I'm just being entertained; I don't have to change anything about myself unless it really feels right.

I've also found much more peace reducing the amount of self-improvement content I'm watching. I'm turning instead to deep breathing, dipping my toes ever more into the waters of relaxation, good-enough self-advocation, and practicing a few calming key phrases that help me counter perfectionism ("something is better than nothing" or "good enough is good enough" or awesome YouTuber @JGPunfilteredd's "unclench your jaw; you're not in trouble").

Maybe now it's time to rephrase it from self-improvement, which implies I need to be fixed, to self-development, which to me suggests a growth and maturation process. A semantic difference for some, perhaps, but for HSPs and high achievers, I think this phrasing can make all the difference. I think we could all stand to take a deep breath and turn away from toxic self-improvement.