Balancing Self-Love with the Desire for Self-Improvement in 2021

New Year, New Lockdown

The beginning of a new year brings with it the promise of a fresh start. A chance to reflect on our shortcomings, diagnose any weaknesses in our character, and set up new goals and habits for the year ahead. Of course there is no real reason why January is a better moment to try and do this than any other time of the year. But the turning over of a new calendar seems to bring with it the expectation that things can and will change.

Corporations know this and prey on our personal insecurities to full effect at the start of the year. Our smartphones beam us adverts for exercise apps, healthy eating meal-kits, new furniture and self-help bestsellers. The NHS e-mailed me on New Year’s Day to remind me that it’s not too late to try and achieve my only goal of 2020 – to quit smoking – in 2021, even if the data from my Stoptober app signals an eminent failure in my will to abstain.

But most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by mid-February. Perhaps the overwhelming pressure of creating a New You for the New Year takes approximately 6 weeks to reach its boiling point. Or maybe this is the point at which the year stops feeling ‘new’ and the need for a refreshed version of ourselves no longer feels so urgent, so we feel permitted to leave our goals for another 10 months to be fully addressed.

The more realistic truth is probably that it is incredibly difficult to change ourselves and our habits. Far more difficult than our modern self-help culture would have us believe. Habits are ingrained within us neurologically, carved out as neural pathways in our brains that are cemented like train tracks. To dig up these old railroads and re-route them to more positive destinations can take anywhere between 3 and 6 months to achieve, and an average of 10,000 repetitions of the new practice are needed to strengthen the connections between brain cells that transmit automatic habits. That’s 10,000 times of looking at the cigarette pack and saying ‘no’, or 10,000 days of overriding the impulse to reach for the snooze button in the morning.

There is also the more immediate problem of attempting to reinvent yourself during a global pandemic. Self-improvement is ultimately an attempt to assert control over yourself and your monkey mind. But lockdowns deprive us of any material sense of control over our lives, as we sit around waiting to be told where we can go, what we can do, who we can see at what times and under what restrictions.

Lockdowns do however give us potentially more free time to commit to new things, as well as the pressure to feel like we should be spending our time productively. When lockdown first happened in March, social media was full of productivity gurus telling us that this was finally our chance to do all those things we had given up on years ago. Ever wanted to write a novel? What better time than now, during a global pandemic! Learning a language is good for your mental agility – Duolingo now free! And my favorite of all; your future employer will ask you how you spent your time during lockdown in job interviews, so you better have something spectacular to tell them…

I personally fell into the trap of believing that more free time could lead to the resurrection of my old hobbies. I can finally read all of those psychology books that have been gathering dust on my shelves since I bought them, and paint those canvasses that have been sitting blank in my wardrobe for seven years since I did my Art GCSE. But after the initial three months of lockdown, and seven more of restrictions of some kind or another, the high expectations we all had for pandemic-inspired self-improvements have almost certainly dropped off a cliff. This third national lockdown appears to be the metaphorical mid-Feb drop-off for New Year’s resolutions. This is the point at which the novelty of the affair has worn off, and the reality of our lack of discipline and will-power has come sharply into focus.

The bonus is that my social media timelines now look far more compassionate and realistic. Rather than those ‘reach for the stars’ posts, they are now filled with messages reminding us to be kind to ourselves, to not set unrealistic expectations, and to admit that it’s fine to simply survive this time of global disruption. Fearne Cotton and Elizabeth Day have been great people to follow on Instagram, reminding me that it is enough to just get through each day without going totally crazy, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to emerge from this lockdown (whenever that may be) without being a completely transformed person.

Acceptance without complacency, judgement without condemnation

It is one of the deeply frustrating facets of the human condition that we will never be satisfied with our lot, even if that lot is far greater than those of others. We will always want to see more, do more, feel more and be more than we currently are, especially in such a restricted version of life as lockdown. But always striving for things to be better can stop us from fully appreciating things as they are right now. Dedicating yourself fully to a life of self-growth and self-improvement seems like an admirable thing to do, but it can also be the psychological equivalent of walking around with blinkers on.

Focussing idealistically on the possibilities of the future can prevent us from stopping to smell the roses in the present. What’s more, setting endless lists of goals and improvement habits can bring about huge amounts of shame if we fail to achieve them as perfectly or as quickly as we’d originally imagined. Not becoming the thinner, healthier, clearer-skinned, multi-lingual, well-read athletes or painters that we had hoped we could become can be disheartening and feel like a failure, even if those goals were unfitting or short-sighted in the first place.

So is it a more sensible idea to give up on self-growth and continue along the same old paths without ever re-routing or checking the map for errors? Is it better to abandon any improved visions of ourselves and learn to love our insufficiencies? The problem I have with the self-love movement and ‘you are enough’ rhetoric is that it can all too easily fall into a kind of self-deception. Would a good sibling tell their struggling alcoholic brother that they’re fine just the way they are? Does my GP tell me that my smoking habit is just an imperfection that I should honour and respect? Hearing that you are doing fine just the way you are can be enabling and belittling at times of real struggle, and self-love messaging can deprive us of the agency we must find to help others help ourselves out of those situations. But on the other hand, the online productivity echo-chamber can be equally as toxic and one-dimensional in how it approaches living a meaningful life. What is the use in finding a way to study consistently for ten hours a day, if we are unhappy and unfulfilled at the end of it? Where is the joy in a strict morning routine, if the performance of it feels like a military-style obligation?

Luckily these issues are not new, and we can turn to the thoughts of Carl Jung on how to balance the desire for self-improvement with the kindness and self-love we need to achieve those goals. Jung saw the idealised, improved images we have of ourselves as a sort of internal judge. We all possess a vision of who we could be that speaks to us when we are falling short of our ideals and reminds us to get back on track. But that judge can easily become a tyrant in our minds, chastising us for every wrong step or day off and shaming us into believing that we are not capable of change in the first place. For Jung, this judgement was necessary in helping us improve our own lives and the lives of others, but it must never tip over into self-condemnation which would only discourage and deflate us on the journey towards our better selves.

Jung said that ‘We cannot change anything unless we accept it,’ a pithy aphorism that is much easier said than done. Before attempting to improve any area of our lives, we must first learn to accept the flaws, imperfections and insufficiencies of that area as it currently stands. But just as healthy judgement can be stretched to the levels of toxic condemnation, Jung understood that blind acceptance of our faults without the attendant action needed to resolve them was a kind of complacent ignorance. Self-acceptance, or as we might now call it, self-love, was to Jung the first step on the path towards self-improvement, not an end in and of itself.

Jung’s ideas resonate with me because they allow for a balance between the extreme options that seem available to us today. In transcending the opposition between blind self-love and blind self-improvement, Jung presents a vision of personal growth that allows us to recognise where we are falling short of our ideals with kindness and leniency. Working on ourselves becomes more enjoyable and more motivating when we can accept the insufficiencies we want to eradicate first.

Jung said that we ‘must grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil’ within ourselves in order to foster the existence of that which is reasonable, sensible, and just. Self-love dogma promotes an ignorance of the darker side of our psyches whilst the self-improvement mafia says that we will never be good enough until we can conquer and purge it. Jung’s psychology allows for an acceptance of current imperfection that is married with a desire for change, that means whilst we recognise the unreasonable, senseless and evil aspects of ourselves, we do not have to settle for them.