#62: Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!
Whatever it is that you're doing and however it is that you're doing it, you're telling yourself that you're doing it wrong and anyway you ought to be doing something else instead. Right? You feel guilty even when you know you're doing the right thing. You feel guilty even before you've decided what you have to feel guilty about. Your entire mind is an immersive, surround-sound, interactive theatre of turbo-charged guilt. Take a break from your hectic schedule of self-flagellation and let your Imperfectionist friend rein that shit in for you.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi there, friends! Now, what are you feeling guilty about today? Bit of an odd greeting, admittedly. But, come on. We both know there’s something you’re feeling guilty about. You’re positively racked with it. I’m going to guess that you have more guilt in your body than blood. You share 99% of your DNA with guilt. You’re a direct descendent, on both sides, of the Platonic form of guilt. Guilt is your default state, right? You don’t even need something to feel guilty about. You start on the guilt first, and then work out later what it’s about. There’s bound to be something, isn’t there? Perhaps it’s listening to this podcast. You should be writing instead, right? Not chilling with a whole 20 minutes of decadent listening. I mean, it’s the audio equivalent of getting a manicure, isn’t it? Or a massage. Or running away from your responsibilities to lie on a beach somewhere. I’ll stop now, because I might want to use all this in a future marketing campaign - but I’m sure you get my point. You might struggle to get words on the page when you sit down and try to write, but you have no problem dreaming up creative ways to impose guilt on yourself. So, let’s talk about that, shall we?
Let me tell you a story. My friend Emily and I had our sons at roughly the same time, back in 2011. I was diligently following the guidelines to breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 months. But Emily, while also breastfeeding, was participating in a scientific study that involved introducing small amounts of peanut in the first 6 months. The study was investigating whether doing this would protect babies from developing allergies. At some point, I mentioned to Emily that I was feeling guilty about not also being part of this study, because what if my son ended up with a peanut allergy? And in response, Emily told me that she was feeling guilty for being in the study, because - again - what if her son ended up with a peanut allergy? So there we both were, each trying to do the best for our babies, and both feeling guilty about the choices we were making. Of course, making different choices wouldn’t have helped, because we’d have managed to feel guilty about that too. I remember thinking at the time that maybe guilt is just fucked up. But I didn’t ponder it in any greater depth, what with the sleep deprivation and the need to memorise the names of the Teletubbies.
My non-peanut-allergic son is now at secondary school (along with his sister, who does have some sort of peanut issue, in case you were wondering) - and here I am at my desk, musing at my leisure about guilt. I mean, what’s your guilt doing? I’m talking here, of course, about that low-level chronic guilt that is constantly lurking in the shadows of your consciousness, telling you that whatever it is you’re doing and however you’re doing it, you’re doing it wrong. I’m not concerned here with the more straightforward sense of guilt that you feel appropriately if you’ve done something unambiguously morally awful, like murdering someone or downloading academic articles from sci-hub. You feel guilty when you’re not working, of course. But you also feel guilty when you’re working, don’t you, because you’re telling yourself that you’re not going fast enough or slow enough or you’re focusing on the wrong thing or maybe you should have done this other thing first. If it weren’t for your enthusiastic and unquestioning willingness to feel guilty, you’d notice that there’s something fishy going on here. Because maybe if you’re feeling guilty whatever you do, your guilt sensor is a bit over-sensitive, like one of those smoke alarms that keeps going off every time you boil the kettle. (Sorry, American listeners, I know you don’t really do kettles in your homes, but you have basements instead, and I think that’s fair compensation.)
But it’s not simply that your guilt sensor is over-sensitive and gets triggered by the wrong things. The problem is bigger than this. A sense of guilt is supposed to tell us that we’re doing something wrong - and anticipating feeling guilty, which of course is unpleasant, is a useful incentive not to do things that are wrong. But very often, we feel guilty about doing what is positively the right thing - and that really stands in our way. Let me give you an example of how that works with - you guessed it - a running analogy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing rest days with my lovely running coach, Carrie. It started after I did a marathon in January. I knew I needed to take it easy for a while afterwards - in fact, I knew that taking it easy was definitely, indisputably, unambiguously the best and most sensible thing to do - and yet I still felt guilty about it. It’s not that I thought I should be out training as hard as ever instead - that would be to ascribe too much sense to my bonkers inner critic. It was more that, although I knew that I ought to be easing off a bit, I couldn’t help but note how very convenient this was for that part of me that only ever wants to laze around on the sofa watching Netflix and eating Doritos. Like you, I have a secret fear that that lazy part of me is actually my true self, the very essence of Rebecca, who despite occasionally managing to convince people otherwise, is actually a horrid selfish lazy slob who is destined to live out her life taking and never giving, consuming and never producing, just existing, taking up space, like a houseplant, except less ornamental. The idea that I ought to be resting was kind of scary. It felt like if I did that, I’d be feeding slobby plant Rebecca, giving her the strength she needs to take up more and more space in my life, and eventually triumph over all the other less slobby aspects of myself. The idea that I ought to be resting felt like a ruse concocted by slobby plant Rebecca to trick the other, more presentable and respectable aspects of myself - which, let’s face it, are mere charades - into giving in to the sort of slobby plant behaviour that slobby plant Rebecca enjoys. Surely the thing to do is to resist at all costs any sort of behaviour that has the hallmark of slobby plant Rebecca? And that means always working, and never resting. Always being useful. Always producing, never just being. This only applies to me, of course. My true nature is slobby plant Rebecca, but nobody else is secretly a slobby plant - everyone else is a worthwhile human who is deserving of rest and recreation.
Perhaps you harbour a similar narrative about yourself, which leads you to both want and not want to do things like have a rest or let other people share your burden or do something nice for yourself once in a while. You know you should do these things, and secretly you’d love nothing better than to do these things, but since you’re afraid of that part of yourself that wants to do those things, you think you need to resist. Logic doesn’t matter here. I can point out to you - as I frequently do - that you’re not judging yourself by the standards by which you judge others, and that you’re less compassionate to yourself than you are to others. I can point to that story I told you at the start about how Emily and I both felt bad about the decisions we were making for our babies, and get you to agree that since we were doing opposite things, we couldn’t both be right in our sense that we were doing the wrong thing. It’s no problem to be able to grasp, rationally, that our guilt sensor is misfiring, and is sounding the alarm at the wrong things, like a faulty fire alarm. It’s easy to get all this to stack up rationally. It’s our emotions that cause us problems, because they change more slowly. Perhaps you can see, even while you’re still listening to this episode, that you’ve been feeling guilty about things that you shouldn’t be feeling guilty about - but that doesn’t automatically cancel out the feeling of guilt, does it? So, what can you do?
I want to suggest a couple of things to help here. The first is this: don’t give up on reflecting on your sense of guilt and noticing when it doesn’t make sense. It’s true that, as I just said, it doesn’t cancel out your guilt, but that doesn’t mean it does nothing. Your emotions take a while to catch up with your rational side, but they do catch up eventually. Or at least, they move in the right direction. So, carry on reminding yourself that your sense of guilt about taking a rest or doing something nice is unfounded and unjustified. It probably won’t make you feel less guilty this time, but you might start to see some positive changes a few months from now. If you want someone to walk you through the arguments for why you shouldn’t be giving yourself such a hard time, you could check out … well, pretty much any episode of this podcast, but a couple of especially relevant ones that spring to mind are episode #2: But I haven’t earned a rest! and episode #23: The way you’re trying to motivate yourself is all wrong.
And here’s another suggestion. You know - at least, with your rational hat on - that you should be doing the scary nice thing, like taking a nap or letting someone else help you out or saying something kind to yourself or rewarding yourself for something you’ve done. But even so, it’s scary to do the nice thing anyway. You feel guilt - unfounded guilt, yes, but guilt nevertheless. You feel a sense of ‘if this then what?’ about the idea of unleashing and empowering your slobby plant side. Maybe you feel other forms of discomfort too. Think of all this stuff as a pile of uncomfortable emotions. Like a big pile of dirty laundry. You can’t snap your fingers and, Mary Poppins-style, turn it all into a nice clean fresh neatly-folded pile of laundry that magically puts itself away in the cupboard out of your sight. But you don’t have to let it stand in your way either. So, do what you’d do with a big pile of dirty laundry: bundle it up and shove it into a bag or a box, and get on with your life. It hasn’t gone away, and it would be nicer if it wasn’t there, but you don’t have to sit there staring at it. Maybe the knowledge that it’s there will be an unpleasant little niggle at the back of your mind for the entire day, while you’re trying to do other stuff, but whatever. That’s life. Nobody promised you were going to be able to walk around in a serene little bubble. And anyway, carrying uncomfortable feelings with you while you’re doing the stuff you know you need to do is pretty common, isn’t it? Like when you have to go to a meeting on a nice sunny afternoon when you’d much rather be sitting outside. Or when you get out of bed and go to the gym even though you’d much rather go back to sleep instead. Or when you sit down and get to work on that writing deadline despite all the usual perfectionist anxiety. Sometimes doing what we need to do is uncomfortable, and we have to get on with it anyway. The same goes for when you feel guilt about taking a rest or doing something nice. You know you’re allowed to do it. Perhaps you even know that you ought to do it. But you feel uncomfortable about it anyway. Just suck it up and do it, the way that you’d suck it up and do it the evening before an important deadline that you don’t want to miss even though you’d really rather not do whatever you need to do to get the work done. Remind yourself that you don’t have to like it in order to do it.
But what about your slobby plant side? Won’t she end up taking over your whole life? What if you sit down on the sofa to read a novel for 20 minutes, and then 5 years later you’re still there, empty pizza boxes piled up around you, a mountain of unopened overdue bills next to the letterbox, and your life crumbling around you? Yeah, sorry, but your slobby plant persona doesn’t exist. This is your inner critic propaganda machine at work. The part that tells you that you’re either working your fingers to the bone, or you’re pathologically lazy and awful, and that there’s nothing in between. Of course there’s an in between. There’s nothing pathological about rest and doing nice things. There’s nothing remotely unhealthy about work/life balance. And if you find yourself struggling to work out what a healthy balance between work and rest looks like, it’s because you haven’t spent enough time exploring that space. So, go and do that, starting right now. I’ll hold your big heavy bag of guilt while you get the kettle on (or make your way down to the basement, whatever). Next time, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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