Don’t Push it Too Far
We want to believe that the more good behaviors we do, the more rewards we’ll receive.
I used to think that as long as I was always doing objectively good things, then I’d always succeed. And although I do believe in trying to do my best in good things, I’ve had to learn the hard way that, as my coach says, good advice, given in the wrong context, is bad advice.
This is why, even though I’m proud of all the individual things I did during my mom’s cancer journey and I’m proud of how I was able to close my business with grace, the sheer volume of good things I was doing still pushed me into a devastating level of burnout.
It wasn’t until I was in the final week of my Stress, Coping, and Resilience class at Harvard that I finally found the science that explains what was happening – and it has changed everything about how I approach high achievement.
So, buckle up. It’s story time.
In 1998, Martin Seligman was named the president of the American Psychological Association. Lucky for him, he had just had his own life changing mind shift, and he was ready to promote a new way of thinking for mental health researchers and practitioners.
He realized that up to this point, psychologists had been working on fixing people – or in other words “managing sadness.”
This means, the goal of mental health professionals was to get rid of the problems… or in other words get you to a neutral place. This means that once the sadness is gone, then you’ve fixed the problem and the work of the professional is done.
But the absence of sadness does not mean that we’re happy.
Seligman realized what the field of psychology was missing at the time was ways to “add to happiness” or improve life beyond being just neutral.
So, he put together a monumental inauguration speech, during which he said,
“Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best!”
The crowd went wild, and the positive psychology movement was born. And it took the world by storm.
Suddenly there was focus and funding on well-being research. People were now promoting scientifically sound ways to feel good and the momentum was intense.
And this went on for at least 10 years.
The momentum behind this movement was a big part of why I always thought that as long as I was doing good things, it would be consistently adding to my well-being.
But in 2011 Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz noticed that something was missing in the science of this big social movement. You see, the positive psychology movement got so big so fast that the scientific evidence that was being used to promote these genuinely good behaviors was mostly based on very short studies. So, they are technically scientifically sound, but the other studies that came later and go more in depth on these behaviors weren’t being talked about.
So, Grant & Schwartz got to work and built their own study. They wanted to know if these positive behaviors always increase your wellbeing or-- is something more to them?
They looked through a list of strengths and virtues, leaning on insights from both Seligman and Aristotle. They picked strengths such as happiness, justice, choice, self-control and more. Because we know that if you under-do these strengths, it hurts your mental health. These are objectively good things. But what happens if you overdo them?
They combed through decades of research, and they found out things like:
Overly high levels of confidence and/or persistence can lead to sticking with bad things for too long
Extreme happiness fails to produce the “slight dissatisfaction” that’s needed to motivate people to set high goals and work to create change.
Overly high empathy can cloud judgement and lead to self-sacrificing behaviors that benefit others at the expense of achieving one’s own goals – and sometimes it even fails in helping that other person!
And self-control, which we all know is crucial to any form of achievement, can become so extreme that it comes at the cost of never experiencing pleasure and pursuing meaning at the expense of happiness.
These are only some of their findings! (Honestly, I highlighted the ones above because they hit home the hardest for me and were definite factors in my burnout journey).
As the study continued, they discovered that every single one of their chosen virtues either reached a point where they give you diminishing returns or, as you just read, these good things can become harmful to you and start sending you backwards into the hurting side of mental health.
So, in summary, not doing these things will hurt your mental health… and also over doing these things will hurt your mental health. There is a dark side to coping and you can have too much of a good thing.
It was learning about this dark side of coping that helped me I finally realize that I had been overdoing my good things – and it had sent me into a hurting side of mental health with my burnout. This is what spurred me to find a more “even” way to pursue achievement and was the first piece of science to inspire Even-Achieving.
Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you find ways to evenly pursue the good things in your life so you can get maximum benefit.
Notes:
Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5.
Grant, Adam M., and Barry Schwartz. “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/174569161039
