Just Because Your Working On Self Improvement Doesn’t Mean You’re Always Getting Better

Many people view the process of self improvement much like putting together a puzzle – it may be difficult, but eventually, you have a finished picture. Many self improvement efforts are permanent, in that you are changed for good; once a hurt is healed, it’s healed. Other efforts will need lifelong maintenance; efforts like weight loss or new habits.

But what this view of self improvement ignores is that even if you are constantly doing your best at a particular self improvement effort, you will not have a constant string of improvements. You will have setbacks. Of course sometimes we give up on a particular effort and this may undo any improvement we have made to that point. However, even if we don’t give up, we will still have what I like to call pockets of unrest that have a demoralizing effect on our progress. And, just like the true pain of self improvement, very few are willing to talk about these very real, low times, even though they happen to everyone.

Setbacks Can Be Hour To Hour

We’ve all had some days where we felt great and others where we felt bad. We have good days and bad days. We’ve even talked about how we were having a good day and it became a bad day. Sometimes it goes the other way, from bad to good. Other times it bounces up and down.

Have you ever stopped to think about how often this happens? The truth is, it happens all the time. For most of us, these shifts aren’t super dramatic, from really, really happy to really really sad, or any variation on that. (Dramatic mood swings are more serious and may require medication.) I’m referring instead to the shifts from good mood to blah mood. The kind of shift that happens when the rain stops and the sun comes out. No matter what the weather though, every day, throughout the day, our mood shifts back and forth. It happens to everyone and it’s perfectly normal.

So why doesn’t anyway talk about this in regards to self improvement? I’ve seen tips for how to deal with bad moods, and discussions of whole bad days, but no discussion of how these natural, hour by hour, shifts affect us. The truth is, they can and do affect us from time to time.

If we are working on establishing a new habit, a bad mood may make us forget to take the new action. If we are working on losing weight, a bad mood may make us reach for candy, removing our motivation to care in that moment. In the same way, an upswing in mood may make us overdo it and burn out. We may be too nice to someone and weird them out, or we may do too much exercise and injure ourselves. These shift in moods can hurt us either way.

I was once unfairly reprimanded by my boss and immediately took off the pedometer I was wearing, my bad mood triggering the thought: what difference does it make? On the flip side, I’ve had moments where I feel energetic and rush to get housework and errands done, ending up standing on my feet for hours and not stopping to eat or drink. Neither action was effective in the long run.

Self improvement isn’t always about day to day, sometimes it is about hour to hour. We need to be aware that these shifts will take place – we can’t stop them. Not only do we need to be aware of how normal they are, but we also need to remember that they will pass. When we are feeling good, we can make plans, set goals, and take action. We should remember though that we shouldn’t overdo it. In the same way, when we feel down, we need to remember that we shouldn’t blow off our efforts entirely. If we lack the motivation, we can work on something more quiet, less action oriented.

Conscious Changes Are Faster Than Unconscious Ones

Self Improvement is about little changes that add up to big changes. The reason these little changes work is because we do them over and over again. It is repetition that makes them a habit – and habit is where the subconscious takes over.

When we are learning to drive, or learning to touch type, we have to think about every movement, every reaction. Eventually, we don’t have to think about these movements and reactions anymore. We can let autopilot take over. In fact, if we try to think about these actions – if we pay attention to our feet on the petals or our fingers on the keys, we realize we can’t perform as well. In either case, we are fighting the unconscious that wants to make it easy for us.

Our body and mind like to be in homeostasis – a fancy word for a consistent state from moment to moment. Physically, or body does best when we don’t stress it out, or overexcite it. Mentally, or mind likes to have things happen the way they are supposed to. We want to know that our routine will be the same. Like driving, the mind doesn’t want to have to expend resources on figuring out new things. It will, obviously, but this is not the most efficient state. Our subconscious wants to take over as much as it can to make things easier for us. It wants us to put most of our life on autopilot, so we can use our conscious mind for those things we have to think about. The subconscious does this so well, we’ve all had experiences where we lost attention even when we didn’t want to!

Any self improvement process we undertake changes our state. Since our subconscious doesn’t like this, it does it’s best to return us to autopilot. So, we have to fight the subconscious until it realizes it will be easier to put the new state on autopilot than to force us to return to the old state. And this takes time. How much time? That varies based on what you are trying to accomplish and from person to person.

Since it is difficult to fight the subconscious, we will have setbacks. Even if we consciously maintain one view, our subconscious will still work to return us to the old state. This happened to me recently when I was talking with a recruiter. I was maintaining a positive attitude – after all, this was a new lead in my job search. I was open to new opportunities.

Unfortunately, the woman I was speaking with was patronizing and had an attitude of poor girl. She said, “I know it’s hard to sit at home with nothing to do. After awhile you start to feel bad about yourself -” Here is where I cut her off and responded, “Well, I haven’t been sitting at home for months; I’ve been working several temp jobs.” Later that day, she called me about a temp position. Again, she was patronizing, “It will get you out of the house and put a little money in your pocket.”

I deliberately kept a positive mindset and shrugged off her comments. Unfortunately, my subconscious had other ideas. When I woke up the next morning I was in a bad mood which lasted almost the whole day. Eventually, I realized I was really angry at being put down like that and for not speaking up more than I did. Really, who was she to talk to me like that? Once I identified my feeling as anger, I knew that she had triggered old messages in my subconscious that told me I wasn’t any good. Even though I brushed her off consciously, I didn’t really brush her off.

Not Everything Works All The Time

One of the reason I believe there are so many ideas on how to ease anxiety, or get better sleep, or be calmer in stressful situations is because not all of these techniques work all the time. They will all work sometimes, and we get used to it working – until it doesn’t. This is another setback situation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about 14 techniques to implant an affirmation. But what happens when we have those thoughts like: This is stupid, it’ll never work? The doubt may cause us to stop saying the affirmation, or to not say it with positive emotion. It then takes longer before the affirmation does work.

Or what about when something upsets you more than usual? Maybe deep breathing and taking a walk just aren’t calming you down? I’ve had instances where I was crying so hard I couldn’t take a deep breath. This made the bad mood worse and made it last longer. These kinds of moods stand in the way of self improvement – not permanently, but enough to slow us down.

One phenomena I’ve run into is my losing touch with myself – the core me inside; what Laurel Mellin calls our inner life. I’ve managed to heal many hurts over the past year and a half. Some of them were healed quickly. Others were healed only after many attempts. Some I’ve only partly healed and will need to revisit a few more times. This happens because my inner life rebelled against my efforts. The pain from the past was just too much to handle at that point and it shut my feelings down and I went numb. While this is a necessary part of healing past wounds, the truth is that when you are healing one hurt through multiple workings, you aren’t working on a different hurt. This isn’t bad in the long run, but it can set you back in the short run.

Setbacks Are An Integral Part Of Self Improvement

All self improvement efforts have downturns. They may be major, or they may be minor, but they will be there. They may be over the course of the day, or the course of several days, but they will be there. You will have to fight your subconscious to put the new way of being on autopilot, and setbacks will be there. You will find techniques don’t always work, and you have to do something else – and the setbacks will be there.

We can’t escape the setbacks. They are normal and everyone experiences them. From the other side of a self improvement process, these setbacks don’t always appear that significant. But, as we are going through it, they can be very significant – another dirty little reason self improvement sucks.

Photo Credits: Line Graph by psd; 15:35 Digital Clock by sergis blog; 18:28 Digital Clock by russelljsmith; BMW on Autopilot by LifeHouseDesign; Dog and Bone by ktylerconk; Upset In Car by Mitch2742; Downturn Road Sign by noraxx