What if you’re not broken?
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Self-improvement culture has convinced us that we’re all works in progress, perpetually insufficient in our current state. The goal is constant optimisation, endless becoming, relentless pursuit of better versions of ourselves. Who we are right now is just a placeholder for who we should be working to become.
This is exhausting. And it’s based on a fundamental lie: that you’re broken and need fixing.
What if you’re not broken? What if the constant self-improvement project is itself the problem, not the solution? What if the most radical thing you could do is simply be with yourself as you are – without agenda, without improvement plans, without needing to become anyone different?
This isn’t giving up on growth. It’s questioning whether perpetual becoming is actually serving you, or whether it’s just another way to avoid the vulnerability of being.
Over the past month, we’ve been exploring the stress reset – but not as another fix-yourself programme. The reset isn’t about correcting what’s wrong with you. It’s about creating space to be with yourself as you are whilst your nervous system recalibrates. It’s about developing capacity to sit with discomfort, to notice patterns, to expand what’s possible – not because you’re broken, but because you’re curious about what else you might hold. The practices work precisely because they don’t start from inadequacy. They start from recognition that you’re whole, and they give you tools to explore that wholeness more fully.
The Improvement Trap
Self-improvement promises that you’ll finally be enough once you achieve enough, optimise enough, grow enough. Once you’ve read the right books, implemented the right practices, become the right kind of person – then you’ll be acceptable.
Except that moment never comes. Because self-improvement culture has no endpoint. There’s always another level, another area to optimise, another version of yourself to pursue. The goalposts move continuously. You’re perpetually insufficient, perpetually becoming rather than being.
And this serves certain interests. A population that feels fundamentally broken is a population that consumes endlessly – books, courses, programmes, products – all promising to finally make you enough.
But it doesn’t serve you. It keeps you in perpetual inadequacy, always reaching toward future acceptability whilst never arriving at present enough-ness. Your worth becomes conditional on growth that never ends, improvement that’s never sufficient.
The Difference Between Growth and Fixing
There’s an important distinction here. Growing isn’t the same as fixing. Learning new skills, developing capacities, expanding understanding – these can emerge from curiosity, from genuine interest, from desire to engage with life more fully.
But the self-improvement model starts from the premise that you’re broken, insufficient, unacceptable in your current state. It says you need to change who you are to be worthy.
This is violence dressed up as self-care, rejection disguised as support. It’s a constant message that who you are isn’t enough, never will be enough unless you’re perpetually working to become someone else.
Genuine growth feels different. It comes from curiosity rather than inadequacy, from wanting to expand rather than needing to fix. It doesn’t start from belief that you’re broken but from recognition that you’re whole and might enjoy exploring new territory.
The self-improvement model says: you’re not enough, so change. Genuine growth says: you’re enough, and you might choose to expand. The first comes from wound. The second comes from wholeness. And the difference in how they feel, in what they create, is profound.
What “Broken” Actually Means
When we call ourselves broken – or treat ourselves as if we are – what we’re usually describing is one of several things:
Normal human responses to difficult circumstances. You’re anxious because your circumstances are genuinely anxiety-producing. You’re exhausted because you’re chronically over-extended. These aren’t evidence of brokenness but of appropriate responses.
Patterns developed for good reasons that no longer serve you. That hypervigilance developed when your environment wasn’t safe. That people-pleasing emerged when your worth felt conditional. These weren’t mistakes but intelligent adaptations, evidence of resourcefulness rather than brokenness.
Aspects of yourself that don’t match cultural standards. You’re sensitive in a culture that values toughness. You’re introverted in a culture that rewards extroversion. This isn’t brokenness but simply being who you are in contexts not designed for you.
Natural human limitations. You have finite energy and need rest, support, realistic expectations. These aren’t flaws – they’re features of being human.
None of these constitute actual brokenness. Some might benefit from addressing – changing circumstances, developing new patterns whilst honouring why old ones formed, finding environments better suited to who you are. But that’s different from treating yourself as fundamentally broken and requiring transformation to be acceptable.
The Practice of Being
So what does it look like to stop the constant self-improvement project? To sit with what is rather than perpetually pursuing what should be?
It looks like meditation in its deepest sense. Not the wellness-culture version promising optimisation and peak performance, but the traditional version: sitting with yourself exactly as you are. Noticing thoughts, sensations, emotions without needing them to be different. Developing capacity to be present with what is rather than constantly reaching for what might be.
This is harder than it sounds. Because when you stop the constant improvement project, when you cease the perpetual distraction of becoming, you’re left with yourself – raw, unpolished, uncomfortable.
All the imperfections are visible. All the limitations are apparent. And without the distraction of working to fix them, you’re here, being this imperfect, limited, not-yet-improved person.
The impulse is to immediately start improving again. To identify what’s wrong and work to fix it. To turn even sitting with yourself into another improvement project – getting better at presence, optimising your meditation practice.
But the actual practice is simpler and harder: just be with whatever arises, without needing it to be different, without turning presence into performance.
This is where the stress reset work becomes revolutionary. Because chronic stress isn’t just about external demands – it’s about the internal demand that you be different. That you do more, be more, become more. That you constantly optimise, perpetually improve, never simply rest in enough-ness.
Your nervous system can’t distinguish between the stress of impossible deadlines and the stress of impossible standards for yourself. Both trigger the same physiological cascade. Both keep you in perpetual activation, perpetual striving, perpetual becoming.
When you practice simply being with what is – when you develop capacity to sit with yourself without immediately needing to fix, improve, or optimise – you’re not just practising acceptance. You’re actually interrupting the stress cycle at its source. You’re giving your nervous system permission to rest not just in physical stillness but in the deeper stillness of enough-ness.
This is why all the stress management techniques in the world won’t create lasting change if you’re still treating yourself as fundamentally broken. Because you’re asking your nervous system to rest whilst simultaneously telling it that who you are isn’t acceptable. These messages contradict each other at a physiological level.
What Acceptance Actually Means
Acceptance gets misunderstood in self-improvement culture. It’s treated as giving up, as settling. But acceptance isn’t resignation – it’s recognition of reality without resistance.
Acceptance means: this is what is, right now, and I can be with that without immediately needing it to change. This doesn’t mean you can’t work to change circumstances or grow. It means you start from accepting what currently is rather than rejecting it.
When you accept yourself as you are, you’re not saying you’re perfect or that nothing could change. You’re saying: I’m enough right now, and my worth isn’t conditional on becoming someone different.
And from this foundation of enough-ness, genuine growth becomes possible – not because you need to fix what’s broken, but because you’re curious about expanding what’s already whole.
Being With Rather Than Becoming
The deepest challenge is learning to simply be with yourself. Not working to improve yourself. Not evaluating your progress. Just being with this person you are right now, in this moment, without needing them to be different.
This requires developing tolerance for imperfection and limitation, for all the ways you don’t match idealised versions of yourself.
It requires accepting that you’re human with finite capacity, genuine limitations, real needs. That you can’t be everything to everyone. That you’re going to fall short of standards repeatedly, and that this doesn’t make you broken or insufficient.
It requires recognising that the constant improvement project often keeps you from actually living. That whilst you’re perpetually focused on becoming, you’re missing the experience of being.
The Ultimate Permission
You’re allowed to not be working to improve yourself. You’re allowed to simply be who you are without constant growth plans attached. You’re allowed to accept yourself as enough right now without needing to become someone different to be acceptable.
You’re allowed to have limitations, to not be everything, to not optimise all areas of life. To be imperfect and still valuable, limited and still worthy, human and still enough.
You’re allowed to stop treating yourself as a project requiring improvement and start experiencing yourself as a person worthy of acceptance.
The self-improvement project promises you’ll finally be enough once you become enough. But you’re already enough. You always were. The becoming was distraction from the discomfort of being. The constant improvement was avoidance of accepting who you actually are.
What if you stopped? What if you sat with yourself exactly as you are – imperfect, limited, human – and discovered that this is actually enough? That you don’t need fixing because you were never broken?
This is the practice. Not of improvement but of presence. Not of becoming but of being. Not of fixing what’s broken but of recognising what was always whole.
And in this recognition, paradoxically, genuine growth becomes possible – not from wound but from wholeness. Not from inadequacy but from enough-ness.
You’re not broken. You don’t need fixing. You’re allowed to simply be, right here, right now, exactly as you are.
And that’s not just acceptable – it’s enough. It’s always been enough. You’ve just been too busy becoming to notice that being was already sufficient.
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