Can self-improvement go too far?

The Shrink

What would be the desiderata on your self-improvement list? Improving your knowledge of opera? Making the effort to create a slot for daily meditation in your busy life? Taking your French to the next level? Or is self-improvement for you all about becoming more confident, more tolerant, more sociable, more go-with-the-flow?

The concept of self-improvement is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our times. Many people use counselling and psychotherapy as vehicles for it, others choose from a cornucopia of books and magazine articles. Not that the advice is always reliable. Interestingly, the exhortations we get are often contradictory: you discover in one issue that you should express your emotions more, only to be told in the next that it’s all about controlling them. Nor is such advice free from cultural or historical biases. Samuel Smiles, who published Self-Help in 1859, believed people should develop the high-minded qualities of application, perseverance and thrift. Now self-improvement can legitimately include wine appreciation.

An important limit to self-improvement is that it can never encompass all aspects of our lives. Therefore we had better choose carefully what we’re going to invest energy in. It’s good to try and boost our memory, but if we allocate a great deal of resources to it there will be a cost in lost opportunities or deterioration elsewhere.

But the most paradoxical feature of self-improvement is that it cannot survive without acceptance of imperfection and tolerance of failure. Devoid of this softening influence, a concern for betterment can easily turn into a narcissistic focus on oneself, or a self-critical perfectionism.

Of course none of this means we should enthusiastically embrace imperfection as an excuse not to make an effort. Being aware of our limitations can still help: only if we accept imperfection will we be able to treat ourselves and others kindly when success is elusive.

The Sage

In the 1920s, French psychologist Émile Coué argued that by reciting the mantra “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” we could, by the power of suggestion, make it come true. Whether or not such techniques do work, surely it would be wonderful if they did? How could it ever be worse to be better?

The thought of, say, someone practising air guitar 24/7 should be enough to challenge any assumption that too much improvement is a contradiction in terms. When it comes to being better people, some progressions matter more than others.

Consider the difference between what we might call the moral life and the flourishing life. To improve morally is to treat others better and have a more positive impact on the world. To flourish is for your life to go better for you: healthier, full of richer experiences and deeper relationships. In pursuit of this second kind of improvement we tend to focus on what provides the most gain for us: losing weight, learning a new language, controlling our tempers and so on.

What I find interesting is that people often justify these projects by pointing to their altruistic dimensions. When we become better, we become more interesting, more genial to be with, they say. Even with that most narcissistic of goals, personal happiness, people will cite evidence that happier people tend to be more generous, sympathetic and caring.

There is some truth to this: morality is usually food for flourishing. But to believe the two always go together is too optimistic. There are happy, fulfilled egotists and there are saints who make sacrifices for a higher good.

To focus too much on self-improvement is to risk directing our attention towards the merely self-serving sense of betterment and to relegate the moral dimension to second place. To regain a proper focus, we could drop the word “self” and simply strive for improvement, in all its varieties. And what might help us do this is an improvement on Coué’s improving mantra: Every day, in a significant way, I’ll try to do better and better.

If you would like to suggest a question, please e-mail shrinkandsage@ft.com. Stephen Grosz returns in two weeks