Will going easy on yourself make you lazy?
· Source: Breines & Chen, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012
You failed the driving test. Again. On the drive home with your instructor you were quiet, and since then a familiar voice has been going over everything: the missed mirror check, the roundabout, the stall at the lights. Useless. How hard can it be. Everyone else passed first time.
A friend tells you to go easy on yourself. Part of you would love to. Another part refuses, because the harsh voice feels like the only thing keeping you from giving up. If you stop being hard on yourself, won’t you just stop trying? That worry is common enough that psychologists set out to test it.
The worry, put to the test
Breines and Chen framed it as a plain question: if people treat themselves with compassion after a mistake, does their drive to improve go up or down? Self-compassion here means meeting your own failure the way you’d meet a friend’s, honestly and without contempt.
They ran four experiments. Each one looked at a different kind of shortcoming, from a personal weakness to a test that went badly. In every experiment, the self-compassion group was compared with a group prompted to boost their self-esteem, and with either a group that got no prompt or a group given something pleasant to think about instead.
That design matters. Without the self-esteem group, you couldn’t tell whether kindness itself made the difference or whether any mood lift would do.
More time with the books after a fail
The experiment closest to the driving test is the third one. People first failed a test. Then the groups went their separate ways: some were prompted toward self-compassion, some toward self-esteem, and a comparison group got neither.
Afterwards, everyone could study for a difficult test that came next. The people in the self-compassion group spent more time studying than the others.
That’s the heart of the answer to the laziness worry. Kindness after failing didn’t lead to coasting. It went with more effort on the very thing that had gone wrong. The authors themselves call the pattern somewhat paradoxical, and it does run against what most of us were taught.
Kindness and a pep talk aren’t the same thing
Notice who the self-compassion group beat: not only people who got nothing, but also people who were told to think well of themselves. A pep talk like “you’re smart, you’ll be fine” wasn’t what produced the extra effort.
Here is one plain way to see the difference, and it’s our reading rather than the paper’s finding. Self-esteem argues with the failure: it says the result doesn’t count, or that you’re better than it shows. Self-compassion lets the failure count. It says yes, this went badly, and you’re still someone worth helping. Only the second one leaves the problem on the table where you can work on it.
Believing a weak spot can change
The first experiment asked people to think about a personal weakness, something about themselves they weren’t happy with. Those given the kind prompt came away more convinced that the weakness could shift with effort, and less sure it was a fixed part of who they are.
That belief matters for effort. If you think you’re simply bad at driving, practice looks pointless. Treat the roundabout as a skill you haven’t got yet, and practice becomes the obvious next step.
Looking at the people who do it better
The fourth experiment found something easy to miss. Once they had reflected on a weakness, people in the self-compassion condition leaned toward measuring themselves against someone stronger in that area, not someone weaker. They also reported more motivation to change the weakness.
Comparing upward can sting. It’s much easier to look at people doing worse and feel relieved. Being drawn to the ones who do better suggests that people weren’t hiding from the weakness. They were looking for ways to get past it.
In the second experiment, the same kind of prompt went with more motivation to make amends after a recent wrong and to avoid repeating it. So across all four studies, kindness toward a shortcoming went together with wanting to do something about it.
What these experiments leave open
These results come from four experiments, and most of what was measured were people’s own reports of their beliefs and intentions, plus the time they chose to spend studying. Nothing in the abstract says how long the effect lasts, or whether people did better on later tests in real life. Those are fair questions to keep in mind.
The direction, though, is consistent across very different tasks. In each of them, self-compassion pointed people toward improving rather than away from it.
Saying it to yourself, out loud
What follows is our suggestion for how to try this. It’s built on the idea in these experiments, not tested in them.
Start with the facts, said plainly. “I failed the test. I stalled at the lights and missed a mirror check.” No adjectives about yourself, just what happened.
Then add the kind part, the way you’d say it to a friend sitting across from you. “That’s disappointing, and it makes sense to feel low about it. Lots of people need more than one try.” If speaking to yourself feels odd, use “you” instead of “I”. Kross and colleagues found that people who talked to themselves by name or as “you” handled a stressful moment better than those who used “I”, and it can make the friendly tone easier to find.
Finish with the next small step. “Book two lessons on roundabouts before the next attempt.” The kindness isn’t the goal. It’s what lets you stay with the problem long enough to choose that step.
Here is an invented example of the whole thing in one go. Leo missed a deadline at work and spent the evening calling himself lazy. At ten he tries again, out loud: “Leo missed the Friday deadline. He underestimated the data cleaning by two days. That’s frustrating, and it happens to good analysts. Next time he’ll add a buffer and tell his manager on Wednesday if it’s slipping.” It takes under a minute, and the last sentence is something he can actually do.
When the critical voice won’t let up
Being hard on yourself after one bad result is ordinary. If the critical voice runs most days, stops you from trying things at all, or leaves you feeling worthless for weeks, that’s worth talking about with a therapist or your doctor. Learning to speak to yourself differently is something people often work on with help, and there’s no reason to do it alone. Notes from your evenings will tell you how often the harsh voice turns up. They can’t stand in for that conversation.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, say what went wrong in one or two plain sentences, with no labels for yourself.
- Add what you’d say to a friend in the same spot, and say it to yourself.
- End with one small step you’ll take before the next try.
Say it out loud in Halflight. It writes it down under today’s date, so next month you can hear how you talked yourself back into trying.