Why Self-Improvement is Making You Miserable

I hated science as a kid.

Apart from the complicated names I had to memorise and regurgitate during exams, I found it restricting that everything had to be sorted, labelled, and boxed up. I remember sitting in class, feeling a weird discomfort at the idea that animals had to belong to certain families and serve fixed roles. Why couldn’t a frog be part of the duck family if it felt like it?

Of course, five-year-old me wasn’t exactly a model of rational thinking. But still, something in me resisted the need to draw sharp lines in a world that felt so blurry, vibrant, and alive.

My thinking was obviously flawed, and a little chaotic at five years old. My slow-boil acceptance of science and eventual love for systems began with two things: symbiosis and mushrooms.

Learning about symbiosis soothed the child in me. The idea that two completely different organisms could live in close partnership, mutually benefitting from their connection was so magical. Imagine my excitement when I saw it with my own eyes at 13 while learning to scuba dive. This happened in search of moray eels in Malaysia, one of the scarier looking predators of the sea with heads that snap out of rocks. But when I saw one calmly opening its mouth to let a tiny cleaner shrimp go to work. There was no fear, and full trust that getting eaten was not on its agenda today.

That image never left me.

Then came mushrooms. And the more I learnt, the deeper the obsession grew. Before I explain why I’ve shared all this, let me share one last anecdote. If you don’t already know, mushrooms are merely the fruiting tips of fungi, and fungi rule the world.

Beneath mushrooms run a hidden network, connecting forests, feeding trees, and warning plants of danger. They communicate.

Nature, it turns out, doesn’t just operate in neat boxes. It thrives through relationships, feedback, and connection. And suddenly, that complicated world I struggled with as a child didn’t feel so alien anymore. It felt like a system, and the best part of it is I am a part of it.

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If those stories about symbiosis and mushrooms didn’t teach you anything, let me package it up neatly for you:

1. It’s innate that we thrive and grow through collaboration because even nature does.
2. Everything is interconnected. We are not separate from systems but are part of them.
3. True intelligence is networked, adaptive, and relational, not linear or isolated.

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Why This Matters for Self-Growth

So what do eels, cleaner shrimps, and underground fungal webs have to do with you?

Everything.

Systems thinking is just a different way of looking at the world. Instead of focusing on individual parts, it focuses on how things relate. It helped me make peace with the complexity that once overwhelmed me as a kid, and it continues to shape how I see myself and how I understand growth.

The same principles that help ecosystems flourish, their interdependence, feedback, emergence, adaptability, are also quietly at work in our personal lives. Yet so much of self-help advice still treats us like machines. As if we can just plug in the right habit stack and expect to function better.

But here’s the thing: we’re not machines.

We’re living, evolving, responsive systems that depend on our community.

And once you start seeing yourself that way, everything changes.

Before we go deeper, I want to introduce a visual that really helped connect the dots for me. It’s from Leyla Acaroglu’s piece on The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking. Her illustrations and explanations helped me translate this idea from abstract theory into something I could feel.

Here’s a quick walk-through of those six concepts—and how they show up in our everyday growth journeys:

1. Interconnectedness: You are also your habits & influence

We often think of self-improvement as a solo mission. Something we do quietly in journals, routines, or gym sessions. But systems thinking teaches us that nothing grows in isolation. Just like trees rely on underground fungi or eels on cleaner shrimp, we are shaped, sustained, and transformed by the systems we exist within.

Here’s an everyday example: Your mood is affected by your sleep, which is affected by your stress, which is affected by your job, which is affected by your values and environment. Your confidence isn’t just a trait, it’s an output of countless feedback loops: who you talk to, what you read, what you believe about failure, and the narratives you internalised years ago.

When you start seeing yourself as part of a system, you realise it’s not diminishing your agency, but it expands it. Once you realise change isn’t about sheer willpower, but about shifting your environment, inputs, relationships, and mindset, we start to gain leverage.

The Transition Phase: When Old Habits Die Hard

But here's what I've learned about this shift: understanding interconnectedness intellectually and feeling it are two different things. When I mapped my own time allocation recently, I was still thinking mechanistically, like a resource manager optimising inputs and outputs.

"Maybe that's why work affects my self-esteem—I see growth more obviously at work."

This reveals how deeply my identity is networked with productivity, how my self-worth depends on external validation systems I can't fully control.

It has taken a long time to admit that i’m not there yet. I’ve started to see the connections, but i’m still trying to use that awareness to optimise rather than simply understand. I do recognise I’m part of a web, but I’m still trying to pull all the strings.

🔍 Reflection prompt: What are 3 systems (people, places, patterns) that influence your growth—positively or negatively?

🔍 Self-practice: Create your own personal system map—what key areas in life influence each other?

Synthesis: Stop Fixing the Parts, Start Integrating the Whole

Traditional self-help can be reductionist: fix this habit, remove that flaw, build that skill. But systems thinking calls us to see the whole.

Synthesis isn’t about disassembling yourself to optimise each part, it’s about integrating your thoughts, experiences, emotions, and contradictions into a coherent, compassionate self.

We aren’t spreadsheets. We’re compost piles that are messy, layered, and ultimately generative.

True growth asks: How does this part of me, all of my anxiety, this ambition, this boredom—fit into a larger story? What happens when I stop trying to eliminate the “bad parts” of me, and instead seek to understand them?

🔍 Practice: Write a short timeline of a recent experience. What roles did your emotions, beliefs, habits, and people around you play? What changed when you looked at the full system?

Emergence: Trust That Something New Will Form

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You can’t plan personal growth the way you plan a career goal or a weekend trip. Growth emerges. It arises from interactions, experiments, setbacks, breakthroughs—often in surprising and nonlinear ways.

In the natural world, emergence is when a flock of birds or a colony of ants acts as a coordinated whole without any one leader. In our lives, it’s when a year of journaling suddenly clicks into clarity… when a heartbreak unexpectedly deepens your creativity… when your identity shifts not because of one big event, but because of hundreds of micro-experiences you didn't even realise were changing you.

Growth doesn’t always feel like growth, until you look back.

🔍 Reflection: What is something about yourself now that would surprise your past self? How did it emerge?

Feedback Loops: Your Life Is Talking Back to You

In systems thinking, feedback loops are how a system learns. They tell us how actions reinforce or correct themselves over time. In personal growth, these loops are everywhere—habits that spiral into routines, thought patterns that shape behaviour, relationships that mirror back our beliefs.

There are two types to look out for:

• Reinforcing loops amplify what's already happening. Think: the more confident you feel, the more you try, the more you succeed… or, the more you avoid something, the more fear grows.
• Balancing loops help restore equilibrium—like how a good night’s sleep resets your nervous system, or how a grounding conversation pulls you out of overthinking.

Growth comes from paying attention. When you recognise a feedback loop, you gain the power to interrupt or strengthen it. It’s about learning to ask, “What am I reinforcing?” and “What might bring me back into balance?”

The Transition Phase: Caught Between Competing Loops

The tricky part? You're usually caught in multiple loops simultaneously, and they often conflict. In my own mapping, I identified several running at once:

• Job unhappiness → stress → poor sleep → reduced performance → more job unhappiness
• Lack of sleep → everything affected → feeling overwhelmed → staying up late to "catch up" → less sleep
• People interactions → energy drain → less time for creativity → feeling unfulfilled → seeking validation through people → more draining interactions

But also a positive one: Creativity → energy boost → better attitude → more space for creativity

Insight: recognising these loops doesn't immediately give you control over them. In fact, it can feel overwhelming to see how many forces are at play. You might find yourself asking, "What are things I can't control?" while simultaneously strategising how to "shift" and "expand" your influence.

This is normal. You're learning to dance with complexity rather than dominate it.

🔍 Practice: Identify a loop you’re currently in—good or bad. What’s feeding it? What small input could shift it?

Causality: Nothing Happens in a Vacuum

One of the most liberating ideas in systems thinking is that behaviour doesn’t exist in isolation. There’s always a reason something keeps happening—it’s just often buried beneath the surface.

Causality isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding the sequence of connections: how beliefs lead to feelings, how feelings lead to behaviours, and how those behaviours reinforce the very beliefs that started the cycle.

Say you procrastinate a lot. Dig a little deeper, and you may find it’s not laziness, but fear of failure. Go deeper still, and maybe that fear is rooted in early experiences where mistakes weren’t safe. This isn’t self-diagnosis. It’s self-awareness.

The Transition Phase: When Vulnerability Meets Analysis

When you start digging into causality, you often uncover tender spots that your optimisation mindset doesn't know how to handle.

I experienced this recently when exploring my job unhappiness. The surface issue was clear: feeling anxious and emotional about work. But when I dug deeper, I found something more vulnerable: "Am I just not good enough?"

Notice what happened next in my own thinking: I immediately pivoted to "What mental models am I using?" - shifting from vulnerable self-recognition back to analytical problem-solving. This is the transition phase in action: you touch something real and tender, then reflexively grab for your analytical tools.

This isn't wrong, but it's incomplete. True causality work requires sitting with the discomfort of not immediately knowing how to "fix" what you find. Sometimes the cause isn't a problem to solve but a truth to accept and work with.

The deeper pattern I'm seeing: my underlying belief that I might not be "good enough" creates a cascade of behaviours designed to prove my worth through productivity, which creates stress when I can't maintain that pace, which reinforces the original belief that I'm not good enough.

Understanding this doesn't make it go away. But it does make it workable.

🔍 Try using the Iceberg Model: What’s the visible issue? What patterns lie beneath? What are the structures and beliefs holding it in place?

Systems Mapping: Make the Invisible Visible

When you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unclear—it often means you’re inside a complex system you can’t quite see. Systems mapping is a way of stepping back and putting the pieces on the table.

You can map almost anything:

• An emotional trigger cycle.
• The web of relationships influencing your time or energy.
• The sequence of events that leads to burnout or clarity.

Mapping helps you stop blaming yourself for what’s “wrong” and start seeing the conditions around your behaviour. It’s not about excusing things. It’s about empowering change with understanding.

🔍 Sketch a simple map of a situation you feel caught in. What elements are involved? How do they interact? What shifts when you step back and look at the whole picture?

The Transition Phase: Making Peace with the Middle

If you're recognising yourself in these examples, you're not alone. The shift from optimisation thinking to systems thinking isn't a clean conversion—it's a gradual, nonlinear process with lots of backsliding.

Signs you're in the transition phase:

• You can map systems but still talk about "controlling" or "leveraging" them
• You recognise patterns but immediately want to "fix" them
• You touch on vulnerable truths but quickly retreat to analysis
• You understand interconnectedness intellectually but still feel like a separate self trying to optimise
• You're frustrated that knowing better doesn't automatically lead to being better

What helps:

• Patience with the process: Your nervous system needs time to trust this new way of seeing
• Gentle curiosity: Notice when you slip back into optimisation mode without judging it
• Sitting with discomfort: Sometimes the most systemic thing you can do is nothing
• Practicing non-attachment: To outcomes, to insights, to the pace of change itself

The transition phase is actually where the real work happens. It's where you're learning to hold two paradigms simultaneously: the old drive to optimise and the new invitation to understand and flow.

This tension is generative. It's where your authentic voice emerges, not from having figured it out, but from being honest about the figuring-it-out process itself.

You're not broken for still thinking mechanistically sometimes. You're human, learning to be human in a different way.

This is the work: 
Learning to hold the tension between who you were and who you're becoming. Between the drive to optimise and the invitation to understand. Between the fear that you're not good enough and the growing trust that you're enough, exactly as you are, right now. The beautiful thing about this transition is that it never really ends. Even as you grow more comfortable with systems thinking, you'll find new edges, new places where your old patterns resurface. This isn't failure, it's being human. And slowly, gradually, something shifts. You start to feel less like a project to be completed and more like a garden to be tended. Less like a problem to be solved and more like a story still being written.

How to Cultivate a Systems Thinking Mindset

Becoming a systems thinker takes practice, and like any practice, it starts with small, repeatable habits of awareness:

🧠 Be a Critical Thinker

Question assumptions, even your own. What stories have you accepted as truth about yourself? Are they helpful? Who gave them to you?

🦡 Be a Badger

Badgers dig. So should you. Get curious. Keep asking why. Pull at the threads of your thoughts and behaviours. You'll be surprised what you uncover.

👁️🗨️ Consider Multiple Perspectives

The way you frame a problem defines the kinds of solutions you’ll find. Try reframing challenges from different vantage points: your future self, a trusted friend, even nature. What else becomes possible?

🌱 Unlearn Before You Relearn

Much of self-growth is about unlearning: perfectionism, productivity obsession, self-judgment. Systems thinking invites us to replace those with collaboration, interdependence, and patience.

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Personal growth isn’t about becoming someone else, it’s about learning to understand your inner ecosystem: the beliefs, experiences, habits, relationships, and emotions that shape how you live and grow.

You’re not a machine to be optimised. You’re not a problem to be fixed. You’re a living system—fluid, dynamic, and full of potential.

And just like forests, oceans, or fungi, your strength lies in your adaptability, your connections, and your capacity to evolve. Growth isn’t always linear. It’s emergent, messy, and deeply human.

You’re allowed to change. You’re allowed to rest. You’re allowed to take your time.

Because growth doesn’t come from controlling every part—it comes from learning to listen, respond, and flow with the whole.