Self-help has been around for quite some time, but with the Internet it is more prevalent than ever. Across social media, there are countless guides on how to level up, glow up, live your best life, or be the best version of you that you can be. On the surface level, it’s hard to find fault with it. After all, shouldn’t we all be striving to improve ourselves and grow as people? Self-improvement can be compelling because it promises to fix all the things we don’t like about ourselves. However, there are a number of reasons why it often isn’t effective. Here is why self-improvement isn’t the answer.
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Unrealistic Ideals
Self-improvement often has lofty expectations. The secret to life is: get up at 5AM, make a healthy smoothie, go to the gym. If you follow a certain set of steps, you can become a millionaire. While the end goal is often highly desirable, the path to getting there is often oversimplified. There is quite a bit of pressure to maximize productivity every moment of every day, which is a mentality that can lead to stress and burnout. It treats accomplishment as the only thing that matters, but there’s much more to life — sometimes the uneventful, unproductive moments can be the best ones.
Destination Orientation
Another reason why self-improvement isn’t the answer is its destination orientation. The idea of self-help is based on the premise that once you achieve a certain goal, your life will become better. It’s true that certain habits can help improve your mood, self-esteem or well-being. However, to posit that “once I get fit, I’ll be happy” is a false assumption. After all, happiness is an emotional state that ebbs and flows, not something that can be attained permanently. By focusing too much on the destination, we can sometimes overlook the things that can help us right now.
You Are A Person, Not A Project
Another assumption that self-help makes is that we are the source of our own problems. This is true in many cases, but there are also external factors that can contribute to our well-being or lack thereof, such as the environment we’re in. Even in the cases of problems that are self-imposed, what works for one person might not work for another. We are all individual beings, and adopting someone else’s habit might not give you the same outcome.
Overall, self-improvement targets insecurities that many people have, and it can be hard to face the fact that we can’t always just vanish those insecurities through willpower. However, working on accepting yourself as you are rather than accepting a potential future version of yourself can be a great starting point. After all, we’re all just human beings — sometimes we’re productive and focused, and sometimes we laze the day away on the couch, and that’s okay.
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