Why It's So Hard to Give Yourself a Break

You’ve finished a difficult project, and despite your best efforts, it appears that you made a tiny mistake. As much as you’d like to correct the error, it’s going to be impossible to do so unless you completely start over. Even though you know objectively that no one but you will ever pick out this little glitch, your anxiety levels skyrocket every time you think about it. Needless to say, you can’t feel what should be well-deserved pride in your work.

This episode may be only the latest in your long history of trying to achieve perfection in everything you do. No matter how insignificant the situation might be, you can only focus on your flaws rather than your accomplishments. According to the University of Trier’s Niyati Thakur and Nicola Baumann (2022), this behavior reflects the “self-critical personality style,” that’s associated with “negative internal thoughts about one’s self-attributes and behaviors.”

As the German authors note, this high level of self-criticism can not only get in the way of your ability to take pride in your work, but it can also increase your chances of experiencing such negative outcomes as lower relationship satisfaction, less success at work, and even less intense feelings of enjoyment associated with parenthood. If this personality style seems to apply to you, what are some ways you can break the pattern?

Self-Critical Personality Style as a Motivational Problem

Although it's dubbed a “personality style,” Thakur and Baumann believe that these high levels of self-criticism reflect a pattern of motivation that’s gone awry. Referring to the well-known motivational approach known as self-determination theory, the ideal type of motivation occurs when you feel that you’re in charge of your behavior, not someone else. The highly self-critical person operates by a less adaptive motivational principle, looking at what they do in terms of whether it will please others, not themselves.

Thinking again of that example with the ever so slightly flawed project, why do you focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s right about your work? Self-determination theory would suggest it’s because you are thinking about some hypothetical other person to whom the error screams out in neon lights.

In the words of the authors, “self-critical personalities may enact their motives in a less autonomous but rather anxious way.” If so, what might be a way to substitute the anxious motive that brings you down with the autonomous motive that allows you to turn down the self-critical voice?

An important point to note in this overall model is that it’s not only motivational problems that lead to the self-critical person’s misery. Additionally, there’s the factor of sensitivity to negative feelings that makes people high in self-criticism so likely to experience depression and anxiety. Indeed, the individual doesn’t even have to experience criticism of any sort in reality, self-imposed or otherwise, in order for a negative mood to set in: “this means that self-critical personalities have the tendency to easily enter states of high negative affect.”

The final piece of the puzzle, Thakur and Baumann suggest, involves what they call a “failure-related action orientation.” This means that highly self-critical people tend to “get stuck in persisting thoughts about unpleasant experiences.” Their less distressed counterparts can move on from failure, but with this tendency to become preoccupied with worst-case scenarios about their performance, the highly self-critical continue to let those negative thoughts circulate endlessly.

Testing Self-Criticism’s Effect on Negative Emotional States

Proposing that motivation based on anxiety would intercede between scores on measures of the self-critical personality style and the psychological symptoms of depression and anxiety, the German researchers recruited a sample of 479 adults (average age 50, 55% male) to take part in an online assessment.

Tapping into self-criticism, the authors asked participants to rate themselves on straightforward items such as “I am more quickly injured by criticism than others are.”

Failure-related action orientation was measured with items such as “When I’ve worked for weeks on one project and then everything goes completely wrong: (a) It takes me a long time to get over it, or (b) It bothers me for a while but then I don’t think about it anymore.” The response of (a) would indicate a failure-related orientation but (b) would indicate instead the ability to learn and move on, or what the authors call a “state” orientation.

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Looking specifically at the anxious motive component of their model, the research team administered items such as “I feel paralyzed when faced with rejection” and “No matter how good my performance is, I still see critical aspects.”

Finally, participants rated their experience of psychological symptoms using a standard checklist of experiences like anxiety, depression, phobic anxiety, and sleeping problems.

Using these comprehensive tools, the authors then fed the scores of their participants into a statistical model in which they could test both the influence of the failure action orientation combined with anxious motivation on the pathway leading from self-critical personality style to psychological symptoms. In line with their prediction, the authors reported that the highly self-critical were far higher on failure-related action orientation compared to their non-self-critical peers and were also, in turn, higher on self-criticism as a result.

How to Exit the Self-Critical Cycle

As helpful as the findings are in demonstrating why things are so rough for the highly self-critical, you might wonder how to use this in your own life. How can you stop focusing on your minor missteps and instead pull out and feel better about yourself and your accomplishments?

The key to stopping the process is clearly illustrated by flipping the results over to see what kept those low in self-criticism from allowing failure to get in their way. Returning to the model in which anxious motive attachment forms part of the pathway between personality and psychological symptoms, it would seem that your best bet is to stop the whole cycle from beginning at all. To do this, you need to engage the non-failure-related action orientation from the outset.

This non-failure-related orientation, the authors propose, allows you to move on when things start to go south. Look at choice (b) above, in which you see failure not as a perpetual situation but instead as a state that you can move out of. Indeed, the findings showed that even the highly self-critical could avoid both an anxious motive orientation and high scores on the psychological symptom index if they could adopt this situational outlook.

The second piece of the puzzle involves your ability to leave negative affect behind. Not only is it important to stop thinking about failure, but you also need to relax and let it go. So what if you’ve made a mistake on that project, one so small that no one but you knows about it? There’s no need to let it continue to preoccupy you.

As the authors note, there’s good news in their findings in that moving from a failure-action to a state orientation is something you can learn how to do. Given the sensitivity that the self-critical have toward other people’s opinions, they can even imagine that “other person” in their mind as someone who is supportive and encouraging.

To sum up, constantly finding fault with yourself is painful over the long term, but it is also potentially fixable. Eventually, you’ll be able to take pride in your accomplishments, flaws and all.

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