I spent six months trying to become more disciplined, more productive, more consistent — then I realized the version of myself I was chasing was just another way to avoid sitting with who I already was

by Lachlan Brown | May 6, 2026, 3:27 pm
Woman in cozy knitted sweater using smartphone at home with a serene expression.

Six months ago, I set an alarm for 5 a.m. I downloaded a habit tracking app. I bought a journal with little checkboxes in it. I made a colour-coded schedule. I was going to become disciplined. Productive. Consistent. I was going to become, at last, the version of myself I had been putting off becoming for years.

Here’s what I eventually figured out: the whole project wasn’t about growth. It was about avoidance.

When productivity becomes a way to hide

There’s a real phenomenon that psychologists have started calling “toxic productivity.” Harvard Health describes it as an obsessive preoccupation with being productive, marked by a false sense of urgency and guilt or shame over not accomplishing enough. Clinical psychologist Natalie Dattilo, an instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, says people caught in this pattern often feel that every moment is wasted, even when there’s nothing left to actually do.

That landed hard when I read it, because it was exactly what I had been doing. Every morning that I didn’t hit my targets felt like a moral failure. Every hour I spent playing with my daughter instead of working on a system or a process felt like a small betrayal of my future self. I was so focused on becoming something that I was completely unable to just be where I was.

The self-improvement industry is enormous for a reason. It sells a very seductive promise: that somewhere on the other side of better habits, better routines, and better discipline, there is a version of you that finally feels okay. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it clearly: we become so obsessed with what we want to be that we fail to accept, or even reject, what we already are. In his words, “self-improvement can be self-sabotage,” a distraction, a refuge from your own actual life.

I think about that a lot. Because the more honestly I look at those six months, the more I can see what I was really doing. I was using productivity as a kind of noise. As long as I was working on myself, I didn’t have to sit with myself.

The brain rewards the planning, not the doing

There’s a psychological reason this kind of self-improvement spiral is so easy to fall into. Research by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, published in Psychological Science, found that people who openly shared their goals were actually less likely to follow through than those who kept their intentions private. The reason is something called a premature sense of completeness. When you announce a goal, or even just plan it in detail, your brain registers a small reward. You start to feel like you’ve already made progress. The identity of “someone who is improving” feels established, and the motivation to act drains away, because emotionally, the job already feels done.

This is exactly what was happening with my colour-coded schedule. Planning to be disciplined felt almost as satisfying as being disciplined. And so I kept planning. I kept downloading apps, setting intentions, redesigning systems. The planning became the product. And underneath all of it, the same anxious, restless version of me was still right there, waiting.

What Buddhism actually says about this

I discovered Buddhism during some of the worst months of my life, back when I was shifting televisions in a warehouse in Melbourne in my early twenties. I read on my phone during breaks. And one idea kept stopping me cold: that so much of our suffering comes not from life being hard, but from our resistance to life as it is. From this constant, exhausting effort to be somewhere other than where we are.

Research on self-acceptance backs this up. A study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that self-acceptance mediates the relationship between contentment and life satisfaction, and that dispositional contentment was among the strongest predictors of psychological wellbeing, purpose in life, and overall satisfaction. Contentment isn’t laziness. It’s actually a foundation for a meaningful life, not the enemy of one.

And research by Kristin Neff, one of the leading psychologists in the field of self-compassion, consistently shows that treating yourself with kindness rather than relentless judgment doesn’t undermine motivation. It actually supports it. The obsessive self-improvement project, it turns out, is often driven by something closer to self-rejection than genuine desire for growth. As Neff’s work highlights, self-improvement should come from a place of caring about yourself, not from the belief that you’re fundamentally inadequate as you are.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. Wanting to grow because you value your life is very different from wanting to change because you can’t stand who you currently are. One builds on something solid. The other is just another form of running away.

What I do now instead

I still wake up early most mornings. I still go for a run, which is its own kind of practice. I still drink my black coffee slowly and deliberately. But I’ve stopped trying to make these things into evidence of my worth.

What changed, quietly, over those months after I gave up on the project, was that I started spending more time just noticing things. Noticing the particular way my daughter laughs. Noticing the taste of the coffee. Noticing what I actually feel like, without immediately trying to improve it. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But it was harder than anything in the colour-coded schedule.

The self I was chasing during those six months was a fantasy, and a fairly joyless one. Always disciplined, always on, always optimised. Always becoming, never quite being. And the thing about that self is that you can chase it your whole life. There’s always one more system to implement, one more habit to lock in, one more version of you that’s just slightly better than the one you are right now.

The Buddhist idea that I keep coming back to is that the solid, fixed self we keep trying to perfect may not exist in the way we think it does. What’s actually here is something more fluid, more alive, and frankly more interesting than any optimised version we could plan on a spreadsheet.

I’m not saying don’t grow. I’m saying, check what you’re growing toward, and check what you’re running from. Because sometimes they’re the same direction. And sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop, put down the habit tracker, and just spend five minutes with whoever you already are.

That person might not need fixing as badly as you think.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.