What "working on yourself" means, and what it doesn't

“I’m working on myself.” There are few phrases we hear as often today — and that at the same time mean so little. Anything can hide behind it: from serious, patient inner work to a marathon of podcasts you listen to while washing up, five-step morning routines, the third self-help manual this month and a social media account you follow “because it posts good things about boundaries”.

None of that is bad. But I notice something odd: we have never “worked on ourselves” this much — and rarely have there been so many exhausted, anxious people with shelves full of knowledge that changes nothing. The phrase has lost its meaning because it has come unstuck from what it was supposed to describe.

In this post I try to bring it back down to earth: what working on yourself really is (and why it is less glamorous than it sounds), what it is not (the self-help trap, optimisation, the spiritual detour), where it is genuinely measured — and when you can manage it alone, and when it is wise to look for a companion.

What working on yourself really is: five unglamorous ingredients

First: observing your own patterns. Not reading about patterns — observing yours. When do I withdraw? Who makes me feel small? Which sentence from my partner throws me off course, and what happens inside me the second before? This is slow, often uncomfortable work, because patterns by definition run automatically — you see them only once you are willing to catch them in the act. But without that step everything else is theory.

Second: taking responsibility — not blame. This distinction may be the most important sentence in this post. Blame looks back and asks: “Whose fault is it that I’m like this?” Responsibility looks forward and asks: “What am I going to do with it now?” For the most part your patterns are not your fault — they formed as the best possible adaptation to circumstances you did not choose. But you are the only one who can change them. Working on yourself begins exactly at this uncomfortable intersection: it is not my fault and it is my responsibility. (I wrote about how blame likes to usurp the space that belongs to responsibility in a post on guilt and false control.)

Third: tolerating discomfort. Every real change passes through a phase in which the new is still foreign and the old is still tempting. Saying no where you have always said yes means enduring a wave of anxiety and someone else’s disappointment. In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, Hayes and colleagues), avoidance of discomfort is regarded as one of the central mechanisms that sustain distress — and willingness to feel the unpleasant as one of the central mechanisms of change. Working on yourself, then, is not a path to always feeling comfortable; it is an expansion of what you can bear without betraying yourself.

Fourth: new experiences, not just new insights. Insight is a beginning, not a goal. The brain does not reshape itself by reading about courage but through the experience of courage — small, concrete, repeated. Saying what you think in a meeting. Asking for help. Staying in a conversation you would once have fled. That is why real work on yourself sooner or later moves out of your head and into your life.

And fifth — rest too. Yes, really. The nervous system does not change under constant effort; the consolidation of the new happens in periods of safety and calm. Someone who “works on themselves” without a break is often just repeating the old pattern of grinding away in a new disguise. Sometimes the most advanced thing you can do for yourself is a free afternoon with no plan for growth.

The self-help trap: consuming without change

Now to what working on yourself is not — and the first stop is the most widespread. I call it consuming growth: podcasts, books, videos, workshops, quotes … in an endless stream that gives a sense of progress without anything shifting in your life.

The mechanism is insidious, because from the outside and from the inside it looks excellent: you are learning! But learning about yourself can become a substitute for meeting yourself. Every new book brings a small dose of hope and a sense of productivity — and postpones the moment when the knowledge would have to be tested where it hurts: in the conversation you are avoiding, in the boundary you do not set, in the apology you owe. A simple test: if you could lecture on everything you know about boundaries but cannot set a single one — you do not need another book on boundaries. You need one experience. (I described what that step looks like in practice in posts on setting boundaries and on how to say what you think.)

Do not misunderstand me: good content is valuable — I recommend it and I write it. The only question is whether it is a doorway into experience or a comfortable waiting room you can inhabit for years. A simple rule I like to suggest: for every hour of input, one concrete, small experience in the real world. Listened to an episode about boundaries? Set one boundary today. Read a chapter on self-compassion? Tonight, stop yourself once before you start telling yourself off. A one-to-one ratio turns consumption into training.

When growth becomes escape: self-improvement as avoiding yourself

The second trap is subtler. Some people work on themselves not because they love themselves — but because they do not. Every growth project is quietly driven by the same premise: as I am, I am not all right; once I fix myself, I will be.

This is how optimisation becomes perfectionism in a new disguise: the morning routine is no longer support but an exam, meditation is not contact with yourself but one more item you can fail at, and the gratitude journal becomes a source of guilt whenever you skip it. The researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill have shown that perfectionism is steadily rising among younger generations — and the culture of endless self-improvement is one of its breeding grounds. If you recognise yourself in this, I wrote about the mechanism in more detail in a post on perfectionism and overthinking.

The antidote is not to give up growth, but to change the fuel: from “I have to fix myself because I’m not enough” to “I look after myself because I’m worth looking after”. Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion shows that people who approach themselves kindly stick with changes better in the long run than those who drive themselves with criticism — compassion is not softness, it is a more durable engine. When growth is powered by shame it never ends: every goal reached simply moves the line. Working on yourself out of self-hatred is a treadmill you power yourself.

The spiritual detour: when a “higher perspective” skips the pain

The third trap was named back in the 1980s by the psychotherapist John Welwood: spiritual bypassing. It means using spiritual or psychological concepts to avoid pain rather than to go through it.

You recognise it by its characteristic sentences: “Everything happens for a reason” (instead of grieving). “Stay positive!” (instead of admitting that it is hard). “Anger is a low vibration” (instead of honest conflict). “I’ve forgiven them” (said through gritted teeth, three days after the wound). From the outside it looks like maturity; in reality it is emotional avoidance in formal dress. Feelings you detour around do not disappear — they wait. Sadness that was not allowed to be sadness comes back as numbness; anger that was not allowed to be anger, as physical tension or barbed sarcasm. (I wrote about why anger, too, is information and energy rather than an enemy in a post on anger.)

Real inner work goes the other way: first feel and acknowledge, and only then make meaning. A perspective grown out of pain that has been worked through will hold you. A perspective that skipped the pain is a façade — and façades are expensive to maintain.

Where working on yourself is really measured

Here is the touchstone you cannot fool: relationships. You can “work” on yourself in complete solitude — in a journal, on a meditation cushion, in an app — and it all works until the phone rings and it is your mother.

So I suggest you measure progress relationally. Not “how many books have I read”, but: Can I bear someone being disappointed in me without collapsing or submitting? Can I say no without three paragraphs of apology? Can I hear criticism without hearing it as annihilation? Do I say what I need before I explode? Do I stay myself even around people I have always lost myself around? That last one is the heart of what family therapy calls differentiation — I wrote about it in a post on staying yourself in relationships.

The measure is mercilessly honest, because you cannot curate relationships. That is exactly what makes it so valuable: progress that survives a family lunch is real progress.

One more caution from the therapy room applies here: progress in relationships rarely looks like peace and harmony — at least not at the start. When you begin setting boundaries where there were none, those around you will resist at first; a system used to your accommodating will try to restore the old state. More conflict in the first period is therefore not a sign that you are doing it wrong — it is often a sign that something has genuinely shifted. The right direction shows over the longer term: less silent resentment, more said straight out, relationships in which there is less fear and more of you.

And the other side of the same coin: if after years of “working on yourself” nothing has changed in your relationships — the same dynamic with your partner, the same silence around your mother, the same swallowing in meetings — that is useful feedback. It does not mean you did too little; it often means you worked in the wrong place — in your head, where it is safe, instead of in contact, where it is alive.

When alone — and when with a therapist

You can manage a good deal of the above on your own, and many people with a healthy dose of curiosity, honesty and support around them cover a good stretch of the road without a therapist: they observe themselves, read thoughtfully, try out the new, learn from their relationships.

But there are circumstances in which solo work hits a ceiling. The first is the blind spot: by definition you cannot see your deepest patterns, because to you they are “normality” — you need an outside pair of eyes to notice what you overlook. The second is a safe space for experience: some things cannot be learned from a book because they are relational by nature — trusting, being seen, staying in conflict; therapy is a place where you practise this live, with a response. The third is deeper wounds: traumatic experiences, long-standing anxiety or depression, painful patterns that keep repeating in relationships — there self-help often only skims the surface, and sometimes even makes things worse, because “more effort” is no answer to a wound that needs a relationship. I summed up what therapy is and how it actually goes in the post What psychotherapy is.

In my own work — I am a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy under supervision — I often meet people who have worked on themselves for years, and done it well. For them therapy was not an admission of defeat but a logical continuation: the point at which solo work had given what it could, and one more person was needed for the next step. If you sense you are at that point, you can look at the ways of working or simply write to me.

Smaller, slower, truer

To finish, a word about pace, because that is where self-help culture misleads most. Change that lasts happens in small, repeated steps — as the classic model of change by Prochaska and DiClemente also confirms: we do not change in a single leap, but circle through the stages of contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance, relapses included. A slip is therefore not proof that “you can’t do it” — it is an expected part of the road. Someone who knows this does not start again from zero after a slip, but continues from where they are.

If I had to sum up working on yourself in a single instruction, it would be: less input, more experience. One pattern you genuinely observe this month is worth more than five books. One difficult conversation you see through, more than a hundred quotes about boundaries. One evening of rest without guilt, more than another technique.

And perhaps the loveliest thing of all: when work on yourself becomes real, it also becomes kinder. It is no longer a project of repairing a broken person, but a slow getting to know someone who was doing the best they knew how all along — and who is now, with more understanding, learning something new. This is never a finished project. But unlike endless optimisation, it is a road you can also live on.