- As someone who focuses on happiness a lot
I often hear from people who really wanna push themselves:
"How can I be as happy as possible?"
Or "How can I like, you know,
perfect all the things that you talk about?"
And this is true not just in the domain of happiness:
We are a species that constantly wants to improve ourselves.
Natural selection didn't want us to achieve some level
and just stop and chill out and smell the roses.
We want to perfect ourselves
and our natural instincts to do more,
more, more might be being exacerbated
by the modern environment.
We have so many comparison points
and so many domains in which we could excel:
From how you look,
to how well you cook,
to whether or not you can like
solve a Rubik's cube really fast.
You know, you just look on the internet and you get lots
of information that you're not doing as well as you think.
As somebody who works
with Ivy League undergrads that are constantly
pushing themselves,
I see this strive to be perfect all the time.
I can't tell you how many times I talk
to these amazing students who are 19
and have gotten to one of the best schools in the world,
and they feel like they're not doing enough.
They feel like they're not achieving enough.
And so, I think this is something
that we can all fall prey to,
even when we're objectively doing great;
there can be this constant push
to do more, more, more.
And I think a lot of us,
especially when it comes to improving our well-being,
assume that that's the path to flourishing,
that's the path to feeling better.
But the research shows
that sometimes we might wanna do less.
We might wanna allow and engage
with more of our negative emotions.
We might wanna have more free time at the expense
of all the promotions that we're doing at work.
This push for more, more, more
and being better, better, better,
has two impacts:
One is, I think it collectively hurts
our societal well-being.
You know, being in this kind
of meritocracy where we could all be the best
of the best if we keep competing
with one another and fighting ourselves,
that doesn't lead to a great society.
It leads to a very individualist society where
we're all selfishly looking out for ourselves.
It doesn't lead for the kind
of collective harmony and the kind
of collective goodwill that we want as a society.
But it has a second bad impact,
which is that I think it negatively impacts
our own happiness.
The evidence really suggests
that our well-being seems to come from being other-oriented,
from extending compassion to other people
and to ourselves. Pushing ourselves endlessly,
like this sort of horrible drill instructor is
not a great recipe for our own improved happiness either.
One of the best ways to address this sort of push,
push, push culture internally
and how it's affecting our own happiness, is to engage
with a little bit of self-compassion.
There's lots of evidence from the researcher Kristin Neff
at UT Austin that engaging
in self-compassion can allow us to perform better,
but not to try to perform in ways where we're perfect,
perfect all the time.
Neff defines 'self-compassion' as engaging
in three different parts:
Having a sense of mindfulness.
You're noticing what this kind of constant striving is doing
to you is doing to your well-being.
There's a sense of what she calls 'common humanity'
which is recognizing you're only human-
you're not gonna be perfect all the time,
you're not gonna be great at everything.
But there's a final component
which she calls 'self-kindness,'
which is treating yourself like a friend.
And that doesn't mean letting yourself off the hook
having no ambition whatsoever,
but it means having realistic ambition that you
kind of push yourself, but you push yourself
in a kind and often curious way.
Recognizing your limits. Neff finds that the act
of engaging in more self-compassion,
perhaps ironically, causes us to perform better.
We're less likely to procrastinate
because we're not beating ourselves up all the time.
It's also a recipe for improving your resilience
so that if something bad does come up
you wind up being healthier over time.
She even finds that it's a way to reduce the kind
of post-traumatic stress disorder that can come
from really awful circumstances.
And so this act of treating ourselves
with some self-compassion,
ironically, is a path towards performing better,
not worse.
We need to embrace not this kind
of drill sergeant metaphor of motivating ourselves,
but motivating ourselves like we might motivate a friend
or someone we really care about.
Even if we're committed
to engaging with self-compassion ourselves,
it can be hard to be in a society
that's like hustle culture all the time.
And I think one of the first kind of ways
that you can deal with that is to recognize
that that's true.
Recognize that when you looked on LinkedIn,
when you look on social media,
you're gonna see people who are push,
push, pushing-
but that that doesn't necessarily lead to their happiness.
So I think one of the ways
to fight the hustle culture that we experience
across society is to remember that it's a myth, right?
Pushing ourselves endlessly trying to achieve perfection-
which is impossible-
it's not gonna make us feel as good
as I think the advertisements really suggest.
It's gonna wind up being a hindrance
to our well-being much more than we expect.
We all can get swept up
in this culture of wanting to do more.
And so if you're feeling like,
"Ah, I wanna be kind to myself,
but I really don't wanna let go of the ambition;"
one thing to recognize is that giving yourself the benefit
of the doubt, treating yourself
like a friend is the way to perform better.
Once you know that you can kind of engage
with self-kindness with a little bit more confidence.
Another thing to remember is
that this culture of hustle,
hustle, hustle often winds up
putting us in an individualist mindset.
And everything we know about happiness suggests
that happiness is really other-oriented.
So if you can get out of the mindset of doing
for me, me, me, and focus on other people,
it can be a way to achieve a little bit more happiness
to break that hustle culture mindset,
and happier people tend to perform better.
I think a final way of getting out
of that hustle culture mindset is to take steps back,
and to experience a little bit of gratitude.
Really take time to smell the roses.
Often our hustle culture is about sort of speeding
onto the next thing, right?
That next mountain or peak that we're trying to go over.
And so that moment of gratitude, that moment of awareness
can sometimes break you out of that mindset of doing more,
more, more-to notice how far you've come,
and what you've achieved so far.