When I’m having an unproductive day, I hear the most annoying and unhelpful voices rattling around in my head. It’s usually a variation of taunts about how I should have gotten up earlier or shortened my morning routine. Then it turns into how I better be “on it” for the rest of the day, and tonight I must get an early night’s sleep, because I’m way behind and the only way to get everything done is to be diligent about sticking to my calendar at all costs.
I hear how stupid it sounds, and I know it’s not helpful. But for as long as I can remember, a bad day at work always triggers a variation of shame-filled voices. And while I know what I need to do to combat it, I resent how much energy that takes. I’d rather use that energy to get my work done!
Last month, I worked on an article where I interviewed women who pursued “cozy entrepreneurship.” For one of the women, that meant following a set of rules and boundaries that optimized her business around her life, rather than the other way around. The first rule was to eliminate shame. That meant not letting harsh voices dictate what she should and shouldn’t do.
It seemed an overly simplistic way to tackle a problem that had been bugging me for most of my working life, but I was determined to try it.
First week—varying degrees of success
The first week I tried it, I experienced varying degrees of success. When I got what I needed in terms of sleep, movement, nutrition, and social interaction, I didn’t find it too difficult. Naturally and unsurprisingly, I was also usually more productive when all of these elements of my life were present, so it wasn’t like there was a lot to shame me for.
It became a lot harder when life’s inconveniences showed up. Maybe it was a bad night’s sleep, an illness, an appointment that took longer than I expected, or a public transport delay that ended up putting me an hour behind schedule. While my logical brain knows that this is exactly when I should be practicing self-compassion, that’s when I’d hear voices in my head telling me to stop making excuses.
The problem with eliminating shame (or any emotions)
One of the things that has always baffled me is that shame isn’t as much of a factor in other areas of my life, like my health and relationships. It hasn’t always been that way, but I’ve worked hard to get to a point where self-compassion takes over shame.
And I’ve seen the positive impact that it’s had on both. My relationships are richer and deeper, and I’ve maintained a consistent routine around sleep, nutrition, and exercise for many years now. But unlike work, I don’t beat myself up when life happens and I fall short of those standards, because I know it’s temporary.
I asked Lydia Woodyatt, a psychology professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, about why I seem to have a problem with eliminating shame when it comes to work. The first thing she told me is that my goal shouldn’t be to eliminate it.
“I don’t think that’s a healthy way to think about emotions,” she says, “because our emotions are a natural thing that our body does.” Instead of trying to make shame go away, she suggests treating our feelings like a signal. “With shame, what we can do is challenge our natural emotions towards shame.
“Shame is fundamentally our body giving us an alert that we’re at risk of social devaluation or exclusion,” she says, so we often feel shame “in context where we’re violating shared group norms or a sense of what it means to be a good group member.” High achievers or high-productivity people at work, she adds, “are often part of social groups that care about those things, and that might come from their childhood, their parents, their friends, the groups that they’re part of at work. And that drives the set of social norms and standards that [they] internalize.”
Why shame persists in some areas of life but not others
With my specific situation, Woodyatt noted that working in a freelance and highly autonomous environment means I am the sole driver and producer, and this can create added pressure. The nature of my work also makes it feel more high-stakes, since I’m constantly exposing it to public and social evaluation.
Then there’s the identity part. When your identity is so highly centralized around a specific part of your life, it can feel like your whole world is crumbling when that part isn’t going as well as you hoped. She gives the example of elite athletes who struggle in retirement or when something derails their performance.
A healthier way to deal with shame
Rather than eliminating shame, Woodyatt recommends reframing the situation to move away from the “all-or-nothing” approach.
For example, say you’ve had a misunderstanding with someone and they’ve cut contact, and you notice shame creeping in because you realized you’d violated your values of respecting others. Shame would make you feel bad about the situation, but a more helpful approach is actually to ask yourself: How can I repair that? How can I live according to that value now? What can I do to reinforce that value?
“We can’t always immediately fix the exact thing that caused the shame,” Woodyatt says, but “we can try and address the value threat that’s kind of undermining that experience.”
What I’m trying instead
What all of this tells me is that instead of getting rid of shame, I need to have a conversation with it.
The thing is, shame has absolutely no response when I tell it: No, I’m in danger of social exclusion if I don’t meet my own arbitrary standards of productivity. I also try to think about what my high-achieving and productive friends would say to me. They would probably tell me that one not-as-productive day doesn’t define me, and also that beating myself up about it isn’t doing anything to improve the situation.
“The research is pretty consistent that if you hold perfectionistic standards, that’s actually not helping your performance,” Woodyatt says. “And if you start to let those go, your performance doesn’t actually drop; you’re still actually good at what you’re doing, you still have internal standards towards quality,” she continues.
The difference is, “you don’t have to beat yourself up in order to maintain those standards.”
