“Dude, relax. You’re okay.”
I find myself wanting to write this at least five times a day in reply to reader emails.
I rarely do — or if I do, I’m sure to add some explanation or a few useful ideas.
But the point remains: what a lot of people now identify as “major life problems” are really the natural ebbs and flows of life. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down, and for some reason we seemed to have forgotten that that’s OK.
To improve external aspects of your life, strong desire and external validation help you. To improve internal aspects of your life, strong desire and external validation hurt you.
If you want to lose 12 pounds, then having a strong desire to look great in a swimsuit, to buy clothes a size smaller, to get compliments from friends and family, these are normal and healthy motivation.
If you want a raise at work, then pushing yourself to work extra hours or bring tasks home with you helps you.
If you want to learn a new language, the process of successfully communicating new words and ideas is a great motivator to keep you going. The pleasure comes from the results, not the process.
But if you want to be happier or more confident or have higher self-esteem, then external motivators suck. Actually, they more than suck. They hurt you.
If you want to be more confident and you’re constantly looking for others to affirm that you’re confident, it will actually make you less confident.
If you are depressed and wish you were happy, then constantly wishing to be happy will actually make you more depressed.
If you have a lot of anxiety, then actively wanting to be less anxious will actually increase that anxiety.
I’m sure you have experienced something like this at some point.
Our culture puts a particular emphasis on external measurement and approval. After all, it’s so useful in business and finance, why wouldn’t it work with our emotions and personal lives?
But it doesn’t. In fact, a number of psychological studies have found that external rewards can actually interfere with internal motivation.
These studies found that when it comes to rote or mechanical tasks (such as assembling chairs) external motivators improve results. But when it comes to creative or purpose-driven tasks (such as inventing a new type of software) external motivators can actually make results worse.
The Conundrum
The problem is that the desire to change these internal emotional realities creates the unwanted emotion itself.
For example, you want to be really confident and liked by people and you’re particularly insecure about it. This desire to be liked will cause you to behave awkwardly and over-compensate around others (i.e., be “try-hard”). This will then make you less liked by others and therefore more insecure. Next time you’ll try even harder and get even worse results and the cycle continues.
Or let’s say you have low self-esteem and a general self loathing about yourself. You believe everything you do sucks and that you’re more or less screwed in life. Wanting to stop believing such things only serves as more evidence of how screwed up you are. After all, if you weren’t such a fuck up, you wouldn’t have to spend all day wishing you didn’t feel like a fuck up, would you?
It’s a Catch 22. In external aspects of one’s identity, desire is useful. Want to run faster? Set a goal, then go out and achieve it. Want to start a business? There are measurable benchmarks you can reach; you just have to want it enough.
But want to stop being anxious and stop procrastinating those goals? Well, then wanting to stop being anxious about them is likely to just make you more anxious.
The Challenge of Self-Acceptance
The way out of the conundrum is counter-intuitive. It’s self-acceptance. Paradoxically, accepting that you’re just not a confident person and you’re always going to feel a little off around other people will begin to make you feel more comfortable and less anxious around others. You won’t judge yourself and you’ll then feel less judged by them as well.
Accepting that you have a tendency to get depressed and that some people are just happier than you and that’s fine will ironically make you a happier and more accepting person. After all, some of the most important people in history were depressives.
Our generation is inundated with so much information at all hours of the day, it’s easy to get a skewed vision of society. Everyone else is fit. Everyone else is happy. Everyone else is successful. Everyone else is getting dates and having sex. But for some reason, you’re not.
What sells TV time and what gets passed around the internet are the exceptional situations, the easy solutions, the magic pills for perfection. It’s human nature to always look for perfection or for something greater and better than ourselves. But when you’re presented with something greater and better than yourself over and over and over again, all hours of the day, all days of the week, it’s easy to internalize that there’s something wrong with you. Ironically, the self help industry is a culprit here as well: you can eliminate all sadness and fear; you can be popular and loved by everyone; anyone can get rich and be successful and retire to a beach at age 35!
It’s just not true.
We’re all flawed creatures. And that’s OK.
I’ve come to accept that meeting new people is always going to take conscious effort for me. I’ve improved drastically in conquering my social anxiety over the years, but I’m just never going to be that natural gregarious type who can talk to everyone in a room without thinking about it. That’s just not me.
I’ve accepted that even though my relationship with my family has improved a lot in the past 10 years, it’s never going to be great. And that’s fine.
I’ve learned that commitment — romantic or otherwise — will always make me a little bit uncomfortable. I’ve worked hard and overcome a lot of my irrational fears surrounding it, but I’m just never going to feel completely at ease with it. And that’s OK too.
I’m OK.
I get a lot of emails from readers, probably 10-20 a day. And a lot of them, particularly from the younger guys, lament problems that are so completely normal and healthy I sometimes don’t even know what to say to them.
It’s totally normal to get intimidated around an attractive person and say something dumb. We all do it.
Everybody feel uneasy in new social situations. And no, that won’t go away.
Most people get depressed at some point in their lives. Most people get dumped at some point and struggle getting over their ex. Most people feel insecure about their sexuality at some point. Everyone has family problems. Many people grow up in abusive situations. Tons of people have low self-esteem and dependency issues. Almost everybody wishes they were more successful and more motivated.
These things suck but they’re not new. And they’re definitely not unique.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not an excuse to do nothing about your problems. It just means that you should stop trying to be perfect. You never will be. Emotional issues never completely go away. Anxiety never completely goes away. Negative emotions exist for a reason (they kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years).
There’s an old Buddhist adage: “You are already perfect as you are, yet you can always be better.”
The idea is that perfection is not some end point you achieve, but rather the process of improvement itself. No matter how much you improve yourself and your life, there will always be room for more growth and less suffering. There’s no final endpoint to achieve. There’s no final goal. The perfect self we all envision does not actually exist. As Gertrude Stein said, “There’s no there there.” You can always be more confident. You can always be happier. You can always be more successful. It never ends. What changes is your acceptance of your place in the process.
“I suck at this, but that’s OK. As long as I’m working on it, it’s OK.”
Perfection is the process of improvement itself. Perfection is the innate drive for endless expansion, growth and completion. We’re already there and we’ve always been there. We’re okay. We can be better. But we’re okay.
That´s true. Just few days ago, I accepted that I have to live with depression, and I decided to live as fully as I can, even with it, and not wait for a time when I´m cured. Since then, I feel much lighter, like a big burden fell from me. I still continue my therapy, but it isn´t a matter of life and death anymore, but just something I want to do. And thanks to that, it´s not that difficult to do it.
Sage advice.When I’m afraid of doing something, I’ve found it’s best to accept that I’m scared, and then do it anyway. Talking about what I want to do and asking for outside opinions are often just forms of procrastination. They can be useful, but at a certain point I have to buckle down and say, “I’m doing this.” And when I do, I usually discover my fears were way overblown.
I think I could have stated this better. “Anxiety” is probably a better word for what I’m describing than “fear.” For example, I really don’t like calling people I don’t know well. When I need to make a call, I’ll play “sample conversations” in my head, trying to figure out how the dialogue will play out. I do this, even though I consciously realize that it’s a terrible strategy, that only *increases* my anxiety. Having a plan is good; spending twenty minutes with the phone in my hand, overthinking the call, is not.
Knowing this, these days when I need to make a call, I try to do it as soon as possible, so I don’t give myself a chance to agonize over it. I’ve found the pre-call anxiety is *always* worse than the call itself.
Really important message and written with perfect pitch and tone for the postmasculine reader. When I think about all the guys who will feel bad about their (in)abilities with women and seek a PUA-like message I read this and think, “but this is what you really need to hear and internalize.”
I also think about he difference between happiness and meaning. They overlap, for sure, but they are different. Happiness is the ego being rewarded by receiving something, by having needs met. Meaning is the soul being rewarded by giving something. Suffering may preclude happiness, but it can deepen meaning.
Being “OK” seems to me to know the difference and pursue a life that balances the two.
Great article! I just read a quote recently, that fits as I believe very well here: “You were born to be real, not to be perfekt.” This really spoke to me and this article just confirms it. I also want to mention, that a lot of the articles of this website in general and also the book Models made me realize three very key points that helpted me to accept myself. Moreover, find my values again or realize that for some aspects in my life I haven’t developed them yet and that I should pay more attention and start develop values that are truely mine! Here are the three key insights that helped me:1) “The best way to self acceptance is to show vulnerability.” Nothing says more “I accept myself and I’m OK” than to honestly share your own thoughts, feelings and opinions, even if people might not like it or disagree with your peception of the world. This was and still is the hardest part for me, but once you can do that over and over again, you just feel great after some time and give your own opinions more weight
3) “When in doubt, check your intentions!” This was so important, I can’t emphesize this enough. For the first time in life I found some sort of guidance for the decisions I had to make and the guides were my intention and my own values and I didn’t have to ask someone else, if this or that is right. The tough part is just to act on your intentions. I still munddle around at some situations, but the point is, I see my mistakes now more easily and can forgive myself, when I screw up sometimes. The very moment I can admit my mistakes to myself or share them with others it becomes OK again. It’s kind of amazing how fast the stress and self doubt goes away, when you can do that 
Thanks for your insights Mark! The honesty in your articles and the very fact that you actually show vulnerabilty yourself everytime you talk about your personal stories, just helps me to see things more relaxed and motivates me to act and try to vercome my own fears! Thank you!
2) “Your anxieties will never go away entirely!” This was so important for me, because I truely believed I can only start something or even better have only the right to do something, when I’m free from all my doubts and fears. So I tried to hide my fears or developed some deep-rooted defense mechanisms and simply wished they weren’t mine. This of course didn’t work and made them stronger and I was stuck in “paralyses analyses”. Until I wasn’t able to share my fears, I couldn’t feel free. And when I did, I found that most people have similar toughts and that they are quite normal. And I tought I was so special all the time
Sorry for the bad paragraphing! This editor didn’t take the enters I put in the text.
@Ilgar I had the same problem!
@Henry Olsen @Ilgar me too! Not a fan of Livefyre or whatever it’s called…
Thanks Mark. This is a much needed read for me. I’ve been depressed for a couple of months now…. and it’s OK.
There’s an old Buddhist adage: “You are already perfect as you are, yet you can always be better.”
This reminds of something I read once that made a big impact on me. I can’t remember where (might have been here actually) but the idea was to reframe “I’m already awesome but there’s room for improvement” to “I’m already awesome and there’s room for improvement.” Made a huge difference in how I thought about my ambitions.
>There’s an old Buddhist adage: “You are already perfect as you are, yet you can always be better.”That’s a great thought of the day, month even. Sums up so much. Y’know I just realised while reading this article that PostMasculine is the only self-development blog I read these days (and you may remember, it used to be a lot more, lol). I just got so tired and fed up with the other sites, and began to see them as part of the problem, playing on people’s fears and vulnerabilities rather than saying simply “you’re ok.”
This is exactly where I am right now. 2012 was a rough year but I recently typed out a letter to myself saying “There is nothing wrong with you” over and over again as well as “It’s ok to feel sad and bad and broken.” A traumatic event happened to me and I felt so ashamed of myself, as if I was a broken person. But in my letter I repeatedly wrote out “It’s ok to feel broken. There’s nothing wrong with you.” A few days after writing that letter I’ve noticed huge gains in my recovery process.
On a lighter note, I’ve always been an introverted person not interested in meeting new people. I was ok with it and had little self-esteem issues related to social prowess. But these past couple years living in another country and learning a new language made me hyper-aware of my limited social skills and how I “had” to improve. It’s all well and good to want to improve social skills, but I became much more socially anxious thinking how I “had to” become a social butterfly that everyone wanted to be with. My self’esteem sanked, basing it on social external factors. Only recently have I realized that I went too far in the other extreme. In that same compassion letter I wrote “You can’t control others, you can only control yourself. You can make the effort to reach out to people and if they don’t reciprocate, that’s on them, not on you.” Not everyones responds positively to me, and that’s ok. I know that some people do.
Funny how I forgot that just saying “It’s ok to be/feel…” is so freeing. Back in 2009 I was having a hard time getting over a break-up. It had been 6 months and I was so torn up about it. Then one day in the computer back typing up a paper and holding back tears I said to myself “…it’s ok to not be over the relationship. it’s ok to still be sad.” I felt so much better after that point. yes, of course I was still deeply hurt by the breakup but it wasn’t crippling me anymore and I didn’t feel like such a fucking loser for not being over it because I knew I WAS OK. If only I applied this tool sooner to the other problems I encountered in later years haha!
i tried to add an external motivator to my practice of overcoming approach anxiety. I gave a friend 50 bucks (which for a student is a decent amount) and made the deal that he would only give them back to me once i talked to 5 women on the street within one afternoon on a busy shopping street. The experiment failed horribly. All the 50 euro bet achieved was that i felt much more pressured, performed worse than i would have normally and at some point just got straight-out depressed because my ”failure” suddenly felt very real and measurable.
This is definitely one of my favorite posts, it has really changed my mood lately and I know it’s going to stick for a while, but it also made me quit the “approach women program”, since forcing myself to go out and talk to 10 women is only going to make me even more anxious, so I decided I’ll still try to force myself to be a bit more social in normal everyday situations, but I think these extremes measures (like the program) hurt more than help.
@leommarques7 i haven’t tried the program offered here on the website, but a month ago i started intensifying what for myself i call my OAA (overcoming approach anxiety, haha) program, and as i’ve said below, trying to force myself to talk to women with the use of external motivators has completely failed. i’m not in such a bad place at the moment, but due to a huge university-related workload during the last months my success with women has been very meager, which makes the whole approach thing even harder now.
what i feel is working is setting as a clear goal to work on my AA, to go out there at least every few days and look for situations which allow me to talk to women without having to do an extreme (for me at least) approach on a busy shopping street. Lately i have found that the university campus is the ideal place for that, since there are a lot of girls hanging out on there own, and a lot of people aren’t too busy to have a conversation. also, i am more likely to see a girl sitting somewhere reading maybe reading a book, in which case i can at least wait for a few seconds, collect my thoughts, summon my balls and actually go over there. on the street i’m just not able to do that yet, because i feel way too pressured to act fast. apart from that, putting yourself in situations that require heavy socializing is a good basis, since you get used to having a lot of small talk.
so my humble advice is to stop looking at the numbers and just look for a place where you feel comfortable and not stressed, and look for women who also seem to be relaxed. Then, the goal shouldn’t be to get a number or to be the most charming guy ever, but merely to have a conversation with a person that might be interesting. Also, before setting out for practice, I feel that it helps to sit down and lean back with closed eyes and imagine a realistic situation of me talking to a cute girl over and over again (that includes also how to start the conversation, what would be the first thing to say to her, because that’s what i am most afraid of), until the thought feels natural. Than i head out with this one goal: I will get over my fears and come one step closer to being free! thats it. At that point, nothing else matters.
ps: a few days ago, i took a break from studying and walked around outside the library, when i looked through the glass wall of a nearby lecture hall and saw a gorgeous girl sitting there alone, reading notes. I immediately felt the shitty kind of adrenaline hitting the upper part of my stomach, but i entered the building, went to the coffee machine, got some coffee, all the while i was thinking: This is perfect. whatever happens, if you do this, your day is already a success. i imagined the great feeling i would have afterwards, turned around, walked towards her, sat down right next to her and started talking to her (i think i asked how her day was (i’m not at the point to say ”i think you’re cute’ or something like that straight out yet, but i will get there soon)). After ten minutes of very pleasant conversation i asked her if she wanted to go out for a drink together sometime, to which she answered No, because she had a boyfriend. But it didn’t matter. We split in good spirits, and it wasn’t awkward at all. When i stepped outside again, i felt happy and alive. I felt free and closer to my real self because i had overcome this suppressing fear.
“The Gift of Imperfection” is a book I will be reading along with this post. Perfectionism can hurt us more than help us get better on areas we are failing. Thanks for the reassurance in this post that I am okay. I have saved the article to read again. I like the part where you said the media and TV publishes the best and if we think only in that line, we may just ridicule ourself and think we are the worst and we are not any better. Thanks for sharing.
Amazing post, thanks man!