The short answer: shame is about you (“I am lazy”). Responsibility is about one choice (“I let that one pass”). Research finds that the first makes people hide and the second makes them repair. So the goal is not to feel nothing about the chances you let pass. It is to look at them as choices, honestly, without turning them into a verdict on yourself.
You know the feeling. A bad week, and you would rather not open the app, the journal or the spreadsheet at all. That reluctance is the subject of this article, because it is not laziness. It is shame, doing exactly what shame does.
Shame and guilt are not the same thing
Psychologists separate two feelings that most of us use as one word.
Shame is a judgement of the whole self. Guilt is a judgement of one action. In the words of a major review of the research, “shame involves a negative evaluation of the global self; guilt involves a negative evaluation of a specific behavior.”
Tangney, Stuewig & Mashek (2007), Moral emotions and moral behavior, Annual Review of Psychology 58, 345–372.
It sounds like a small difference. It is not, because the two feelings push you to do opposite things. The same review: “shame corresponds with attempts to deny, hide, or escape the shame-inducing situation,” while guilt “corresponds with reparative actions including confessions, apologies, and undoing the consequences of the behavior.”
One hides. The other fixes.
Why shame does not work
Many of us quietly believe that being hard on ourselves is what keeps us in line. If I let myself off, I will do it again.
The evidence points the other way. The reviewers found “virtually no evidence supporting the presumed adaptive nature of shame,” and went further: “research suggests that shame may even make things worse.”
That is the reluctance to open the app. If every chance you let pass is proof of what kind of person you are, the sensible move is to stop collecting proof. You stop looking. And you cannot change what you will not look at.
Being kind to yourself is not the soft option
The worry is that the alternative to shame is excuses. It is not.
In four experiments, people were asked to respond to a failure or a weakness with self-compassion. Compared with the control groups, they were more motivated to make amends and not repeat a mistake, and after failing a hard test they spent more time studying for the next one. The authors’ conclusion: “taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves.”
Breines & Chen (2012), Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38(9), 1133–1143.
It shows up in ordinary habits too. Across fifteen samples and more than three thousand people, self-compassion was linked with eating, exercise, sleep and stress habits. The link was small, and it was there in every sample.
Sirois, Kitner & Hirsch (2015), Self-compassion, affect, and health-promoting behaviors, Health Psychology 34(6), 661–669.
Five steps, in order
1. Notice the opportunity. The chance has to be seen before anything else can happen. Most pass unremarked.
2. Mark it. You took it, or you let it pass. Two answers, and nowhere to hide between them. Mark both kinds: a record of wins only is a way of not looking.
3. Note why, as a choice and not a verdict. “I let that one pass because I was tired” is a fact you can work with. “I am lazy” is a sentence with nowhere to go. This is the whole difference between guilt and shame, in one line of a note.
4. Look for the pattern. Tired, rushed, nervous, something better on offer? After a few weeks the reasons repeat, and a reason that repeats is something you can plan around.
5. Take the next one. Not all of them. The next one. The aim was never a clean record. It was a slightly higher share of chances taken than last month.
What to ask of a tracker
Any tool you use for this should make steps 2 and 3 easy. That is the reason Opportunity Habit says “let pass” and not “missed” or “failed”, and has no streak to break: a chance you let pass is stored as one choice among many, and the number it moves is a rate, not a verdict.
But the tool matters less than the sentence you write in it. You can do all five steps on paper.
What the research does and does not show
These studies are about moral mistakes, test failures and health habits. None of them tested a habit app, and none tested these five steps. What they support is the principle underneath: judging the action leads to repair, judging yourself leads to hiding, and going easier on yourself after a lapse tends to raise the wish to improve, not lower it. The steps are my application of that principle.