Why self-compassion gives high achieving personalities the creeps.

If the following sentences strike fear into your very core, you may be a bit of an over-achiever:

“Give yourself a break, you deserve it”

“As long as you tried your best, the outcome doesn’t really matter”

“Take it easy on yourself, exercise some self-compassion”

Or, (bonus points for this one) “83% is actually a really good mark!” (More bonus points if you got even a little excited when I said bonus points).

If you have some fairly high personal standards, I’m going to bet that although you probably use these phrases fairly liberally with other people, you react to them similarly to the way you might react to a piece of soggy food touching your hand in the sink when they’re directed at you.

Whilst many of us have readily embraced the “treat yourself, don’t beat yourself” mentality, the concept of self-compassion can be unsettling or even frightening for some people. When you preach self-compassion to a high-achieving friend, although they respond politely externally, internally they are potentially either rolling their eyes or mentally blocking your (potentially morally corrosive) self-love propaganda.

Why do people with high personal standards often struggle with self-compassion?

It sounds like excuse-making

We are probably all familiar with the human brain’s ability to justify just about anything in order to get what it wants. The logical part of me absolutely knows that no good can come from a lactose intolerant individual eating an entire platter of soft cheeses after consuming a family-sized pizza alone, however the emotional part of me feels it’s OK because well, they were expensive and they’re already open now and they’ll just go to waste, and wouldn’t that even make me a bad person?

This is obviously my brain making excuses to make me feel better about something already I’m going to do anyway. For high achievers, it can be difficult to tell the difference between this kind of excuse-making and a genuinely needed exercise in self-compassion. When you say “83 percent is a great mark and you tried your best” or, “so of course you haven’t been to the gym in a while, you’ve been really busy”, they might be hearing “it’s easier to tell yourself failure is OK than to put in the work to do better”.

The high personal standards high achievers hold themselves to have often helped them to perform at a higher level; being stricter with themselves than many of us often are, leads to more sustained effort and persistence. Over time, as one achieves more, these standards gradually become even higher, and their tolerance for ‘excuse-making’ becomes even lower. Eventually the concepts of ‘self-compassion’ and ‘self-justification’ become conflated.

Excuses are scary!

High achievers often feel they owe a lot to these high internal standards (and they’re probably right!). However these standards are not easy to maintain, so the idea of being compassionate with oneself can feel threatening. Self-compassion can smell like a slippery slope to laziness and mediocrity; if I let myself feel OK about this ‘failure’ or breach in my personal standards, how can I be sure I won’t let more and more slide until I’m a complete failure?

They often have black and white ways of viewing success and failure

High achieving personalities often subconsciously think of their behaviours or achievements in terms of distinct categories: something is either a success or a failure, a win or a loss, genius or completely stupid, etc. Although our achievements and behaviours usually lie somewhere along a continuum from complete failure to complete success, for high achievers, looking at the world this way can sometimes feel threating.

When we only have two black and white mental baskets for everything we do, it puts us in a position where we’re forced to place everything we do into the failure, or success box. So if we place anything less than perfect in the ‘success’ box, we might worry that we’ll allow actions progressively lower and lower on the continuum into our success box (83%, a success? Next time we’ll be settling for a measly 81% Then we may as well just start shouting “Ps are degrees!!” from the rooftops. No thank you). *I’ll wait while you hyperventilate a little*

As much as we can joke about this, it’s actually a genuinely difficult landscape to navigate. (If you’re interested in how to start teasing apart self-compassion from excuse-making, and self-accountability from beating yourself up, you can click here).

Self-compassion can actually help me achieve more? OK, I’ll humour you.

Self-compassion prevents performance decline due to stress overload

The Yerkes Dodson curve illustrates the way in which performance increases along with stress and arousal, but only up to a point. That is, a bit of stress motivates us toward action, more stress gives us drive, even more stress leads to mental implosion and decreased performance.

The ability to be gentle with ourselves sometimes is a really adaptive trait. Those low in neuroticism are able to use self-compassion to mitigate stress and mental suffering, so they can keep going even in the face of failure and frustration. People who aren’t able to utilise this self-serving bias are often hit harder in the face of failure, and have far higher levels of stress and neuroticism. To a point, this is useful (they’re studying through the night when our happy-go-lucky neurons packed it in hours ago), but it also makes them more susceptible to the risk of mental overload.

When our stress levels exceed our own optimum levels, our brains can become overwhelmed and execute ‘freeze’ or ‘avoidant’ responses. At best, we can’t think clearly, problem-solving becomes difficult, and we might begin to avoid tasks. At worst, we might succumb to serious mental distress and become really unwell.

Self-compassion encourages higher sense of self-efficacy

When we don’t permit ourselves to celebrate anything less than perfection, we spend much more time fretting over things we do wrong, and have much fewer opportunities to enjoy things we did well. When we refuse to allow ourselves to recognise and enjoy partial successes (an 83/100, or getting to the gym when tired even though we didn’t lift as much as we planned), we can damage our self-efficacy (our belief in our capacity to act in the ways necessary to achieve our goals).

Self-efficacy requires the brain to repeatedly be exposed to situations in which our behaviours successfully produced the outcomes we were hoping for. When we don’t see this happening, we lose our sense of control over the world around us; it can feel as though no matter what we do or how hard we try, nothing works. We become demotivated and begin to exhibit freeze and avoidance responses which lead to diminished engagement and performance (not to mention poor mental health outcomes). In serious instances we may even develop learned helplessness (a complete lack of motivation because we feel all action is futile and success is impossible).

Self-compassion allows our brain more opportunities to enjoy a little taste of success and learn that effort is indeed rewarded. Contrary to our fears this will make us mediocre, these bursts of dopamine actually increase motivation toward disciplined action.

Some methods of self-compassion that may be more comfortable for high achievers

• Instead of looking at your behaviours and achievements in terms of black and white, all or nothing categories, view them along a continuum, and think about whether any other categories might exist (is there a difference between good and excellent? Between good and total failure?)
• Engage in some self-dialogue about whether it’s OK to take some enjoyment from your less illustrious achievements, whilst still maintaining a line between good and excellent (and your personal standards)
• See if it’s possible to find cases where there is a difference between self-compassion and excuse making, and be clear on what the difference is for you
• Engage in self-accountability only to the point where it is useful, (are you actually identifying ways you can improve, or just indulging in self-loathing?)

Whether you find self-compassion difficult, or know someone else in this boat, I hope you were able to find something of use here.

Until next time, stay successful (but make sure you actually enjoy it!)

Amy Bourke

Counsellor, behavioural therapist, lecturer, grazing board enthusiast

Shameless Behaviour.