#76: This is what positive change feels like
Are you a sucker for self-improvement advice that offers to overhaul your life for the better overnight, even though you know that (unfortunately) it's not that simple? Yeah, same. There's a reason you're attracted to advice like that, and there's a way to get the life you want. It's not instant or magic or even wall-to-wall rewarding, but it is possible, and it is worth doing. Pull up a virtual chair, and let The Academic Imperfectionist explain all.
Episode transcript:
What does it feel like to change your life for the better?
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.
Hello there, friends. How are you doing? I’ve been reading about Stoicism. I’m not any sort of expert on Ancient philosophy, let alone Stoicism, but it hasn’t escaped my notice that Stoicism is quite popular these days. Not necessarily among professional philosophers - although there are some of those around too, of course - but among members of the public, people who are interested in how insights from philosophy can help them live better. Which is why you’re here, isn’t it? Anyway. In my local bookshop, most of the philosophy books are books about stoicism. There are podcasts about stoicism. Online groups. Events aimed at introducing people to what stoicism is with the promise that it can help improve their lives, like Modern Stoicism’s Stoic Week. My colleague, John Sellars, is an expert on Stoicism. He wrote an article in The Conversation entitled ‘Want to be happy? Then live like a Stoic for a week’, a link to which enjoys pride of place at the top of the Stoic Week website. (If you’re interested, I’m afraid you’ve just missed this year’s Stoic week. It was last month.) There’s even - according to the philosopher Matthew Duncombe, also writing in The Conversation - a corner of TikTok crawling with Stoics, although Duncombe tells us that Stoic TikTok doesn’t get it quite right, because, he says (quote) ‘it implies that you can get knowledge by simply reading quotations of famous Stoics or practising certain mental exercises’ (end of quote).
My original plan for this episode was to talk about how people are using and applying Stoicism, and whether they’re doing that helpfully or not, and whether Stoicism itself is a helpful lens through which to view the world and our place in it - but it turns out that there are already people far more knowledgable about Stoicism than me who are doing just that. So, instead, I want to zoom out a bit and think about what draws people to things like Stoic Week and Stoic TikTok (I’m not sure I can get used to the word ‘Stoic’ next to the word ‘TikTok’ - it’s weird and anachronistic and makes me think of, I dunno, Marcus Aurelius lip synching to Taylor Swift or Seneca screen recording his Pokemon battles). Come to think of it, what draws people to any practices that promise to change life for the better? I’ve answered my own question there, I know - people are drawn to promises to change their lives for the better because people want to change their lives for the better. It’s not just Stoicism, of course. If Stoicism isn’t your bag, maybe you’re a fan of Andrew Huberman and his protocols (I am). A helpful person on Reddit wrote a post summarising all of Huberman’s protocols, and there are ones relating to - in alphabetical order - alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, cold exposure, diet, fitness, flexibility, focus, goals, gut microbiome … I won’t go on, partly because I’m noticing that the list is already outdated because it doesn’t include the breathing protocol. Clearly I’m a superfan. Anyway, what I find myself wondering is: what do people expect when they consume this stuff? I mean, when they sign up for Stoic Week or implement Huberman’s protocols. What specific expectations do they - do we - have? What changes are we expecting, and over what timescale? What are we expecting to have to do to get there? What are we expecting it to feel like, from the inside? Whatever our expectations might be, are we being realistic?
It’s tempting to laugh, isn’t it, at what Matthew Duncombe says about Stoic TikTok - that it’s full of people expecting to find answers just by reading famous quotes. I’m sure there’s some truth in that - why else would people buy posters and fridge magnets and mugs with motivational quotes on them? Just in case you’re thinking that I’m claiming to be above all that, I’m really not. A few months ago I was chatting to a friend about our shared love of the sort of life advice offered by Andrew Huberman, Rangan Chatterjee, and other wise sciencey people, and I said something along the lines of, ‘Sometimes I think that the reason I listen to these podcasts is because I’m hoping that they are going to magically transform me overnight into a super motivated, efficient, sensible person’. My friend sympathised and admitted that she, too, held out exactly the same sort of hope. This dream of a quick-fix life-overhaul was captured in a tweet - yes, I’m still bloody calling them tweets - by someone called Indie a few years ago, and it’s developed into a meme. The tweet reads: ‘Me whispering into my green tea after taking one sip: you better fix my entire life you gross bitch … please I beg’. We all want a magical quick fix, but at the same time, deep down we all know it’s not going to happen.
I think that when we find ourselves drawn to the sort of advice and insights that we convince ourselves are going to transform our lives for the better, that promise of positive change is only part of what we see. Of course we want positive change. Everyone benefits from positive change - the clue is in the words ‘positive’ and ‘change’. That part is completely unmysterious. But another part of why people like fridge magnets with quotations about Stoicism written on them and instructions from Andrew Huberman about things like how to breathe and how high up your computer monitor should be (eye level, if I remember correctly), and perhaps also why you like listening to this podcast, is because a lot of people are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their lives but lack insight into what exactly needs to change and why and how to go about fixing it. I see this in coaching sessions. Coaching is about helping people achieve their goals. But, interestingly and somewhat surprisingly, relatively few of the people who come to me for coaching know exactly what their goals are. And even when they do know, it’s usually because they have goals that have come pre-packaged. Finish a thesis. Finish writing a book. Get a job. The vast majority of coaching clients I’ve seen have arrived with a sense of dissatisfaction that they’re unable to define. They don’t know exactly what they want, or what’s wrong with the way things are, but something needs to change. And then coaching them - at least in the early stages - is less about helping them reach their goals and more about helping them work out what goals they want to work towards. Being in this state of ‘everything’s wrong but also I don’t know what’s wrong’ is really dispiriting. It’s a great way to feel powerless and inadequate. Of course you’re powerless if you don’t know what you’d change even if you could. And of course you feel inadequate when you know that if someone were to say to you, ‘I can wave a magic wand and give you whatever you want - what’s it to be?’ you wouldn’t know how to answer. It’s almost humiliating, isn’t it? And so, when someone comes along with their pithy Stoic quote or when Andrew Huberman comes along and tells you that you’re not viewing the right wavelength of light at the right time, it’s quite seductive, especially if you feel powerless to get from where you are now to a place where you feel happy and fulfilled, because you have someone telling you what your problem is and offering an easy-to-understand way to fix it all in one go. You know, ‘it’s no wonder you’re dissatisfied, you’re not implementing these 7 insights from Stoicism, here they are in a bullet point list that will take you 15 seconds to read while you’re waiting to be let into this zoom meeting’. That sort of thing. The message there is, effectively, ‘you’re one simple step away from having a much better life’. It’s the spiritual equivalent of a multivitamin pill. Even reading or listening to these insights can feel constructive. Knowledge is power, after all - and when you’re struggling to work out exactly why you don’t feel as fulfilled about your life as you wish you did, knowledge feels like the thing that’s missing. So … isn’t it?
Well, yes and no. If your life isn’t going the way you want it to go, and you don’t know why or what to do about it, then knowing what’s wrong and how to fix it is important, of course. But while some of that knowledge can come pre-packaged from online articles and podcasts, some of it has to come from you. The sort you can get pre-packaged is the stuff that’s quite basic and general. You know, get more sleep, exercise more, eat better, stop scrolling your phone at midnight, be compassionate towards yourself, and so on. All that stuff is going to make a positive difference if it’s targeting areas of your life that you’re neglecting. But if you feel directionless or jaded or like you don’t fit or like you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere in life but you’re not sure where or what the right turn would have looked like or whether it’s possible now to go back and try again, things like getting more sleep and cutting out processed food aren’t going to be all of the solution. So, what is? What does self-improvement look like, when it’s the right sort of self improvement, the sort that makes a significant difference, rather than the sort that leaves you just as frustrated with life as you were before, only less tired and with a lower resting heart rate?
Well, I’m sort of joking about the boring/sensible advice like getting more sleep and exercising and eating reasonably healthily - because, while it’s not the whole solution, it’s not something to neglect either. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Right at the base of the hierarchy are the needs that relate to physiology - food, water, shelter, and so on. Of course you need to take care of those. Layered on top are needs relating to safety - which is not just about avoiding injury but also about financial security and employment. Then come love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. If you’re watching Stoic TikTok but not getting enough sleep, you’re probably not going to manage to build the life you want. You need to address the boring, basic things.
In fact, if you are neglecting the boring things, your problems are not limited to feeling tired and not being as fit as you could be. Ask yourself why you’re neglecting those things. Is it because nurturing and investing in yourself is a low priority for you? Is it that you feel powerless to make positive changes in your life? Is it that there’s so much to change that you feel overwhlemed even thinking of taking a step in the right direction, because even a step in the right direction feels like a setback if it makes painfully salient just how long the road is going to be? Be interested and curious about this. It could be a way in, a little window into why everything feels so unsatisfactory.
If you really want to pinpoint what needs to change in your life, there are a few practical, constructive things you can do. Try the Wheel of Life and Core Values exercises, which you’ll find on the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website. The Wheel of Life exercise will reveal to you which areas are in most need of improvement. And the Core Values exercise will allow you to work out whether you’re currently living in a way that promotes the values you care most about. For example, suppose you find out that the value you care about most is curiosity. You can then ask, what opportunities do you currently have to exercise your curiosity? Do you feel that there are enough opportunities for that? If not, how is that making you feel? What changes could you make that would enable you to indulge your curiosity more? These exercises offer you a framework you can use to reflect on how things currently are, and for many people that can turn their feeling of ‘Things at the moment are just meh’ into something more tractable - it allows them to pinpoint where the problems are, and that gives them the starting point for finding solutions.
As well as looking inward to work out what changes you need to make, though, you can also look outward. Whose life do you envy? Who are the people you know - whether personally or not - who you look to and think, ‘I wish I had what they had’. What is it about their life that you wish you had? Sometimes the answer is something obvious - perhaps they have more money or an interesting career or a supportive and loving relationship. But sometimes it takes a bit of work to understand why you envy another person’s life. Sometimes, it’s someone’s decisiveness that makes their life look so attractive - their ability to set their sights on a goal and single mindedly make progress towards it. Sometimes it’s their courage or their self confidence. Sometimes it’s something completely projected, an assumption you make about them that might not reflect what they’re actually like - for example, perhaps they strike you as the sort of person who is immune to other people’s criticism, when in fact they might be as vulnerable to what others think of them as the rest of us mere mortals. What I’m giving you here is a sort of distilled version of some of the discussions I’ve had in coaching sessions. Your attitudes to other people, if you’re willing to reflect on those attitudes, can tell you a lot about what’s important to you - perhaps even things that you never realised mattered so much.
What I’m urging you to do here is to get to know yourself. If you’re someone who is dissatisfied but doesn’t understand why, then you’re someone who needs to get to know themselves a bit more. The exercises I’ve suggested here can help with that - but equally, so can taking an accepting and compassionate attitude to the things you discover about yourself. Anything you discover about yourself is fine. If something matters to you, then it matters. I’m saying this because it often happens that people’s harsh judgments about themselves hold them back from knowing themselves better. So, someone might realise that travel and seeing the world is super important to them, but no sooner do they make this insight than they say to themselves, ‘Well, you’ve missed your chance there - you should have done your travelling when you were young and single, not left it till now, when you have children and a job and a mortgage’. Respond to what you learn about yourself in the same way you’d respond to your best friend telling you about themself: with acceptance, interest, and encouragement. And bear in mind that getting to know yourself isn’t always a happy experience. It can be upsetting and even traumatising. Realising you’ve been neglecting your needs can lead to mourning for time and energy that you feel you’ve wasted doing things other than what makes you happy. It can be scary, too: perhaps you’ve been kidding yourself that a relationship or a career path you’ve been investing in is going to work out, but then when you’re brutally honest with yourself you realise that some big and painful upheavals are needed. This is all normal, I’m afraid. Self-knowledge doesn’t come easily, and change is hard. We’ve all taken wrong turns and poured ourselves into projects that turn out to be dead ends. I definitely have, many times. So, don’t punish yourself for the mistakes you’ve made; instead, recognise that realising where you’ve been going wrong is itself huge and important progress that places you leagues ahead of all the people who aren’t being so honest with themselves and who as a result are continuing down the wrong road.
Okay, all that stuff is about building a picture of what life is like for you right now, and getting a sense of what sort of gap exists between that and what you’d like life to look like. That can be overwhelming, I know. Sometimes we’re so far from where we want to be that it’s painful even to think about it. But, contrary to how it might seem, that pain is not simply a result of the realisation that you’re not where you want to be, even if where you are now is pretty distant from where you want to be. It’s also often about a feeling of powerlessness - a sense that you’ll never get to where you want to be, and that you may as well give up, except that if you give up things will stay the way they are, which isn’t a happy prospect either. How do I know this? Well, because time and again I’ve seen this pattern emerge when people talk in coaching sessions about what life is like now and how they’d like it to be. This is stressful - but the stress doesn’t kick in simply as a result of the realisation that there’s a lot of work to do. It kicks in with remarks like ‘I’ll never get there’, ‘Where will I find the energy’, ‘I’m kidding myself’ - in other words, what’s stressful is not the prospect of working towards goals, but the hopelessness about whether those goals are even attainable. And there, I have good news for you, friend. That sense of despair and hopelessness goes away as soon as you start working towards where you want to be. Seriously. I spoke to someone whose first small step towards where they wanted to be involved filling in a form. An unexciting, minor, 20-minute task. But it was enough to soothe that sense of powerlessness. This person felt more hopeful afterwards, and ready to continue. Taking the first step - even if that step is really small - can make you feel better, and give you the energy and momentum you need to carry on and take the next step, and then the next. The more you do, the more you’ll feel like doing, even if you don’t feel you have it in you before you start. I talked about this in episode #74: When taking on more can energise you. Sometimes energy comes not from rest, but from activity - the sort of activity that excites and engages us. That’s not to deny that there may well be moments of despair and hopelessness along the way. There probably will be. But the most despairing time is before you make the decision to start. What’s your first step? Is it something you think you can accomplish? If it seems frighteningly big, make it smaller, and keep making it smaller until it’s doable. It could start with sending an email or creating a new folder on your computer. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the movement - the change from doing nothing and feeling bad about it to doing something.
There. That’s what positive change feels like. Insight followed by action - very very small action. I’m not sure that would make a compelling motivational poster or fridge magnet message. Sorry about that. Until next time.
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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