MenteWhy you go to bed exhausted and cannot fall asleep
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Isha Judd
Mente · 6 min read
Why nothing you do ever feels like enough
You do something well and all you see is what it was missing. It is not that you are demanding about your work: it is that the bar moves every time you reach it.
Isha Judd
You finish something, it turns out well, and instead of relief you get the list of what it was missing. That does not happen because your judgment is poor. It happens because the bar is not set on the work: it is set on you, and it moves every time you get there.
Isha puts it plainly: “The demanding mind is trained to suffer, because there is always more.” Trained is the important word. It is not a trait you were born with, it is a way of looking that was learned, and for that very reason it can change.
Being demanding does not improve the result: it takes you out of the result
People tend to believe that self-demand is the engine of quality, and that easing it means settling. Isha sees it the other way around: “When you are demanding, nothing is ever good enough, because you are not enjoying what you do.” Your attention is on the possible flaw, not on what you are making, so self-demand does not bring you closer to the work: it takes you away from it.
She says she lived inside that belief for a long time: “I used to think that success was synonymous with stress: work, work, work.” And she describes where it led: “I could see that the moment I achieved what I wanted, I had to achieve something more.” That is the whole mechanism. The goal never fails, it gets met. What fails is that arriving is not enough, because the problem was never in the goal.
Underneath the bar there is a sentence, and it is not about your work
Isha names what holds all of this up: “Our biggest addiction is confirming: I am not good enough. I do not deserve, I am a victim.” Every piece of work revised fourteen times serves to collect one more piece of evidence for that sentence, and that is why work done well does not switch it off. No amount of achievement is enough to disprove something that is being confirmed with every attempt.
And that sentence is not originally yours either. “We have been told there is something wrong with us, and we believed it,” Isha says. Her proposal is not to lower the quality or to stop caring about what you do. It is to change the place you are looking from: “We spend so much time worrying about being good enough, and we only have to be loving.” Resting from yourself is not delivering less. It is no longer using every delivery as an exam.
Signs that the bar moves on its own
When someone praises you, your first reaction is to explain what was missing.
You review something finished far more times than necessary, and you still hand it in with doubts.
The achievement lasts a short while: the next day you are already looking at the next step.
You put off starting something until the conditions are perfect.
You find it hard to rest without feeling that you are wasting time.
A scene you may recognize
You hand in a piece of work, they tell you it turned out very well, and instead of enjoying it you start going over the two things you could have done better. The good comment passes right by, the two flaws stay with you all afternoon.
It is not humility or a critical eye. It is that the praise is measured against a bar that has already moved. Isha points at it with an uncomfortable question: if your achievements define your success and something fails, where is your joy? It is gone, it disappears. If the floor is the result, that floor keeps moving all the time.
The practice: letting go of the bar without lowering the quality
- 1
You stop for a few minutes and bring your attention from the mind down to the heart. There is nothing to evaluate there.
- 2
When you finish something, perhaps you can stay a moment before moving on to the next thing: the rest is exactly in that gap you currently skip.
- 3
You notice the difference between wanting to do it well and needing to prove something to yourself. The first one moves you, the second one wears you out.
- 4
When someone acknowledges something you did, you can receive it without adding the note about what was missing.
- 5
You hand something in without it being perfect, on purpose, and you watch what happens next. Almost always less happens than the mind anticipated.
If you're giving your best, it's always wonderful, because you feel good with you.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Because the bar is not set on the work but on you, and it moves every time you get there. That is why the achievement brings no rest: as soon as it is met, the next step appears. Isha describes it from her own experience, saying that the moment she got what she wanted she already had to get something more. Underneath there is usually a very old sentence, the one about not being good enough, and every delivery ends up working as evidence to confirm it or to argue with it. That way no result is enough, because the problem was not in the result. Once that is seen, it stops being a character flaw and becomes something you can look at.
#self-demand#perfectionism#mind#achievement#self-love
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