Why Are We Trying So Hard? The Ways Excessive Effort is Ruining Our Lives
There is a better way.
What I know is this: Trying harder didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t until I made room to be who I was without all the trying that I saw a way forward—a way to exist hand in hand with my drive to create a beautiful existence and my fear of falling short.
Late last week, I was brainstorming topics for this edition of House Call, and nothing felt right. I’ve talked in the past about my “Goldilocking” tendency (I initially wrote about it here)—waiting for circumstances to be just right before getting started. I am forever in search of “just right,” and over the years, I’ve watched myself whittling my options down to the point of indecision. Last week was different, though. A new question popped up, offering an escape door to the never-good-enough lens I’ve worked through in life. As I parsed through ideas over and over again, I heard myself ask, Why am I trying so hard?
In every endeavor, I’ve always strived for “better.” It’s gotten me a lot of things I thought I wanted in this life. Even as things in the past year unraveled and revealed a whole new set of unmet needs, I never stopped trying for better in every area of my life, often without even realizing it. I’ll be doing something totally innocuous, like loading the dishwasher, and find myself thinking, This isn’t the right way to do this. You should know this by now. Do it differently. Do it better. Do it the right way. This way of thinking had become so intrinsically wound into every minute action that when I noticed it for the first time, I could barely perceive where my desire to perform stopped and my true self began. I couldn’t just stop trying, even once I consciously saw it as unnecessary.
So over the past few months, I have made it my job to listen and observe how I move through life. I wanted to watch myself, notice the judgment as I watch myself, and in the end, realize that even without all my try-harding, I am OK. Things are not falling apart. In doing so, I’ve started to unravel the motivation behind the extra effort and try-hardness. And even as I saw that I didn’t want to be exhausted by my own expectations, the idea of letting that go was terrifying. What would become of me if I let it all slide? I was terrified to find out. I still am.