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Imagine that you are feeling down and inadequate. Someone who loves you wants to help by saying something really affirming. How about: “You’re perfect just the way you are”? That sounds nice!
In fact, this is perhaps the most insidious thing that people tell us—or that we tell ourselves—when we feel sad or insecure. It provokes enormous cognitive dissonance: “This is perfect?” you think (after the brief glow of the compliment wears off). And that suggests one of two logical conclusions: Either you face a bleak status quo with no hope of self-improvement, or the outside world must be to blame for your unhappiness. The first conclusion leads to utter darkness; the second to angry rebellion against a malevolent universe.
The truth is that you are not perfect, and neither is anyone else. And this is incredibly good news: If you can accept this reality, you will have hope of improving yourself and your life. Then you will be happier.
We humans have a natural tendency to exaggerate our positive qualities, and compare ourselves favorably with others. This is called “self-enhancement bias,” and it gives rise to all sorts of distortions in perception. Famously, back in the 1980s, researchers showed that up to 80 percent of motorists considered themselves to have above-average driving skills. If you’re a regular driver, you have to know that this cannot be true—even if you persist in believing it about yourself.
People also tend to rate themselves more highly on positive moral traits: They are likely, for example, to see themselves as hard-working, honest, and warm. And they tend to rate other people higher on negative traits such as being lazy, cold, and insincere. This is especially true for young and middle-aged adults, who rank themselves as better-than-average on multiple measures.
One reason for this tendency is that it acts as protection against the mental pain that comes from negative comparisons with others. Neuroscientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 used fMRI and PET scans to show that feeling superior to others stimulates dopamine release, which in turn suppresses activity in parts of the brain such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region associated with mental anguish.
Not surprisingly, people who don’t exercise self-enhancement appear to suffer more than those who do. Although the direction of causality is not clear, some scholars have argued that people who assess themselves accurately tend to be those with mood disorders such as depression, a phenomenon known as “depressive realism.”
Being told that you’re wonderful, even perfect, plays into your need to enact self-enhancement. That is why your well-meaning loved one does it. You might do it to yourself; entire psychological techniques have been built upon our self-enhancement bias, such as self-talk to inflate one’s esteem through positive affirmations. Al Franken performed a famous parody of this technique with his Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smalley, whose catchphrase was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”
Although self-enhancement feels good in the short term, it is not a long-term solution to life’s problems. Sooner or later, you’re bound to be confronted with a painful adjustment to the truth. For instance, researchers writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that when college students held an inflated view of their own academic ability, it enhanced their mood and positive affect—that is, they enjoyed happier feelings. But the illusion of superiority did not translate into better academic performance. In fact, the students tended to fail at their academic expectations, and that in part led to lower self-esteem over the long term.
All of this suggests a plausible pathway from our constantly praising others (especially kids) to boost their self-esteem in the short run to skyrocketing mood disorders among young adults in the long run. It also can explain why so many young people today wind up seeing the world as hostile: “If I’m wonderful, other people must be creating my problems.” You can see how some would be set up to see their situation as bitter and unjust when confronted with a reality about their performance in school or at work that doesn’t match their self-enhancement propaganda.
So we face a dilemma in life: We want to feel better and make others feel better, but people’s tendency to do so through self-enhancement is a short-lived solution with possibly enduring ultimate costs. Here are four things to tell ourselves and others that are healthier and more accurate.
1. You’re not perfect, but you’re normal.
Rather than trying to extinguish negative emotions, start by emphasizing to yourself and others that you and they are normal in imperfection. Pain, whether physical or mental, is a sign that things are amiss. We typically interpret that as evidence that something about us is broken or abnormal. This is reinforced by a culture that tends to diagnose mental discomfort as a pathology necessitating treatment, rather than as a routine part of life. Of course, mental pain in the form of depression or anxiety can be a maladaptation or a condition that requires a therapeutic response. But mental and emotional pain per se are just about the most normal thing in life. If you never felt sad or inadequate, that would be pretty good evidence that something is wrong with you.
2. Accept yourself.
Accepting your imperfections is healthier than trying to convince yourself that they don’t exist. In fact, treating yourself with this kind of compassion—instead of condemnation or dishonesty—makes you more compassionate toward others. Researchers in 2020 found that when people accepted their own flaws, they became more tolerant of the flaws they perceived in their romantic partners and acquaintances. Accepting their own imperfections involved acknowledgment without judgment, recognition that making mistakes is only human, and mindful observation of pain.
3. Work to improve.
To acknowledge that “I am flawed in this way right now” is not to say “I will always have this flaw.” On the contrary, self-acceptance can and should facilitate improvement. If you have learned a second language as an adult, you know that accepting your early incompetence with good humor is extremely important—so that you have an incentive to improve and can practice the new language, making mistakes, without feeling embarrassed. But you should also resist self-enhancement: You won’t make progress if you pretend you can already speak fluently. This applies to any inadequacy.
4. Resist blaming others.
As we saw, the big problem with self-enhancement is being confronted with the painful reality of your imperfections in the long run. That is the moment when we note cognitive dissonance, in which two beliefs—I am excellent; I am not excellent—are in incompatible tension. This tension can stimulate an external explanation: that I am naturally excellent, for instance, but being thwarted in my efforts by outside forces or people. This can be true, but it tends to be simply another form of self-deception, one that leads to a lot of misery. Scholars have shown that people with a weak capacity for emotional self-regulation tend to blame others for their poor choices. This form of delusion can dispel bad feelings about oneself in the short term, but scholars recommend that owning one’s decisions is a better long-term strategy to manage negative emotions.
One last suggestion: Reframe your imperfections, and others’, not as failings but as interesting puzzles to solve. If you like puzzles, you may have noticed that you initially enjoy the ones that are simple to crack, but quickly get bored and look for trickier alternatives. But if they’re too hard, you simply grow frustrated.
The same principle applies when you play a sport or learn an instrument. At every skill level, a golden mean exists between too easy and too hard. The zone of enjoyment moves up as you increase in skill and can tackle more difficulty. Life’s challenges are like puzzles. My hunch is that a good deal of the present-day increases in unhappiness that researchers have identified derives from the fact that when we use self-enhancement to avoid the discomfort of struggle, we inadvertently get stuck below the zone of enjoyment in the fascinating game of self-improvement.
You don’t need to make any improvements, because you’re perfect already? How boring!
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