The Improvement Contract

Most of us have been influenced into subscribing to a contract we never read.

No one sets out the terms. We pick them up over time and start keeping to them long before we think to question where they came from. We should be using our time better, progressing at work, looking after our health and being more thoughtful with money, while also being less distracted and more present than we manage to be.

Taken one by one, none of those expectations seems especially unreasonable. The difficulty begins when we treat them as though they should all be possible at the same time.

We recognise the person they add up to. That person does the things we keep meaning to do: exercises often, sleeps well, keeps a grip on spending and is the friend people can count on.

What makes them difficult is not simply their number, but the fact that they often ignore the limits of ordinary life. Time is finite. Energy changes. Work becomes demanding. Other people need us. Health shifts. Priorities move. Some periods of life allow for more ambition than others.

But we’re hard on ourselves, judging ourselves against standards that allow very little room for error.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis led by Viyona Khossousi, published in Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, looked at 83 studies involving more than thirty thousand adults. It found a clear difference between striving for high standards and worrying about falling short. Perfectionistic concerns, including fear of mistakes and not meeting expectations, were associated with lower self-esteem, while striving for high standards alone was not.

Nothing in the terms covers a demanding month, bad sleep, or just needing to be there for other people more than for ourselves.

There is a difference between failing to meet a reasonable expectation and repeatedly setting expectations that don’t account for the conditions we are living in. We are quick to blame ourselves when we don’t meet them, and slow to ask whether the expectation was realistic in the first place.

The language we use with ourselves makes that obvious. We tell ourselves we should be further along by now, that we need to be more consistent, that we already know what we need to do.

Part of the problem is that improvement has no obvious stopping point. Once one thing becomes easier, it quickly becomes the new baseline.

The person who wanted to exercise twice a week begins to think they should manage four times, because twice a week has become the floor, and the effort it took to get there is forgotten.

Over time, this can create a peculiar relationship with improvement. We become better at things without necessarily feeling that we are doing better.

The problem is not that we want too much from life. It is that we often behave as though wanting something automatically creates the capacity to pursue it.

So when the capacity is not there, we question our discipline before we question the contract.