Anyone who has pursued a difficult goal that’s taken a long time and a lot of effort to achieve has probably experienced the subject of this post, which is Success Fatigue. For those of us who are goal-driven and success oriented success fatigue is a real threat to the accomplishment of our goals and dreams. I’ll speak about it from my own personal experience as I have experienced success fatigue while working on my health, career, finances and relationships. I’ve also witnessed success fatigue in other goal-driven individuals, either those who I’ve known personally or people whose stories I’ve seen in the media. So what is success fatigue and why is it so important to understand? Success fatigue is a state in which a person who has been actively pursuing a goal begins to resent the effort and sacrifices they have made and begins to feel deprived of experiences they might have had if not pursuing their goal. These feelings often lead to a regression in habits from the disciplined ones practiced during the pursuit of a goal to the undisciplined ones that left the person dissatisfied with a particular aspect of their life in the first place. It’s important to understand success fatigue because, if not acknowledged and addressed, it can lead to a situation where a person backslides and gives up all of the gains they have made towards their life goals. How sad do you think it would be to spend months or years pursuing an important life goal and then find yourself back at square one after abandoning virtuous habits due to success fatigue?
My own personal experience with success fatigue is what colors my perspective on this issue. About 11 years ago after a divorce I decided to dedicate myself to getting in better physical condition. After a decade in the corporate world, advancing my education at night and helping to raise children I had let myself go. My waist had expanded my a few inches. My chest and arms had shrunken. My stamina was all but gone. I had one of those ”I’ve had it” moments one day while looking in the mirror and considering my life situation. Something lit a fire in me to start exercising regularly and eating better, which I did for many months. After about 9 months of focus, discipline and sacrifice (using knowledge gained years earlier when I was a fitness trainer) I found myself in the best physical shape I was in since more than a decade before. I could run for miles without stopping. I had muscle tone and decent strength again. I had dropped inches from my waist and could fit into pants I hadn’t worn for years. Success! Touchdown! It was a great feeling, but perhaps too great. When I realized how well I’d done I was proud but I also failed to realize that I also had started to feel as though I deprived myself too much during that 9 month period. I celebrated my success by getting lax on my diet and exercise regime. I began to skip workouts and splurge more on rich foods and alcohol. Weeks went by and I didn’t notice a difference so I thought everything was good. Then I decided to take an end of summer trip to Miami Beach. The celebration continued. Mojitos, Cuban food, sand and sunshine. Good times! While preparing to go to the beach I put on a swim suit that I had worn months before when I was slimmer. The swimsuit was now tight on me around the waist. I wondered what was wrong. Taking my first critical look in the mirror since I had realized how well I’d been doing months before I could see that my physique had once again changed, slowly but surely, over the weeks when I had changed my habits.
At that time I didn’t understand the concept of success fatigue. And while it sounds crazy I at first acted like the negative changes in my body were something outside my control. Not related to anything I had done. Given some time and contemplation I accepted the reality that my lifestyle had changed once I deemed my goal of being fit again a success. While I hadn’t slid back all the way to where I started my physical transformation I had lost enough ground that I knew that getting back to my best would be very difficult. Of course, that in itself is quite disheartening. I fell into a mild depression thinking about how hard I’d have to work to get back on track again.
Beyond my own experiences I’ve paid attention to other people’s stories as well and that has informed me greatly in developing my ideas on success fatigue. The area of personal finance is one where many people experience success fatigue. In my younger years I had direct experience with financial success fatigue. I’d set goals for saving money and then after months of sticking to my plan and building my savings I would have the urge to plunder my savings for one purchase or another, be it a physical item (like a nice guitar) or an experience (like a trip to Belize). In the early days of online stock trading I wanted to be a long-term investor like the great Warren Buffett. As with my savings goals I was very intense in my investing for months at a time. Markets in general were rising during that time in the late 1990s (also known as the Dot-Com Boom) so my account balances grew. I searched for excuses to why I should cash out my holdings, and boy did I find them. It was a battle between my desire to have wealth and my desire to chase things that made me happy in the short-term. I rationalized at that time that I could start building my portfolio once again and repeat my early success. Alas, around 2000 the investing party ended for a while as markets broadly pulled back. So getting back into the market didn’t provide the same returns as they had before. If I had sold my stocks to serve the broader goal of wealth building instead of spending on my wants and desires I probably would have saved most of the money from my stock sales in a way that it could do serve me well in the future. I did not do that though. It took me years after that to start investing confidently again.
Thankfully I’ve been able to control my urges to spend over the past 20 years and that’s helped me to build wealth. I chalk that up to experience and maturity. I’ve heard the stories of many other people who experience financial success fatigue. One example of that is a couple whose story I heard on a national radio show. They spent years living on budget, controlling expenses, maximizing their income, paying off debt and saving money. The husband reveals to the radio show host that a few months before they had reached a goal of being totally debt free, including their home. The husband then announces that, almost immediately, they went back into debt. They leased a fancy car. They took out a home equity loan to renovate the house. They splurged on an expensive vacation. To name a few financial indulgences. All of a sudden their budget is super sized just so they can keep up with their required payments. Money is not being saved, it’s being drained from their accounts. The man wanted to find out how they could get back on track. Success fatigue strikes once again. Years of financial discipline and accumulated wealth was nearly wiped out in a few months. The story reminded me of my financial misadventures in my 20s. The lesson I hope that couple learned was that financial success is too rare a thing to be treated foolishly. I could hear the pain in the man’s voice as he was talked through what it would take to get back to where he and his wife were financially just a few months earlier. Know that succumbing to success fatigue when achieving important goals be they in personal finance, health, career or relationships can have devastating consequences on your psyche. Which is why you want to do all that you can to understand and avoid success fatigue.
For those of us who put the considerable time and effort into achieving life goals it’s critical first and foremost to understand that success fatigue exists. The brief anecdotes I’ve told about are far from comprehensive in terms of my own personal experiences or stories I’ve heard. I don’t wish to bore you with more examples. What I think it’s important is that you contemplate your own experiences, personal or otherwise, to see if you now recognize the effects of success fatigue. Have you, or someone you know, lost a bunch of weight then gained it all back? Have you, or someone you know, worked hard to beat a bad habit (like smoking, gambling or substances) only to return to that habit with a vengeance? Have you, or someone you know, met a financial goal only to slide back into old financial habits to the point where you felt like you might not be able to overcome your spending habits? Have you, or someone you know, worked to build a strong relationship with a significant other only to get bored with the sameness and start seeking thrills on a dating app? I am quite sure that everyone has experience with these, or similar, scenarios. You also need to acknowledge that success fatigue is a risk to the important goals that you’re working towards in life. This is where it’s important to have internalized the “why” of any important goal that you have in life. One thing that I think allows success fatigue to take hold in people is the failure to remember why they started on a difficult life goal in the first place. In my own experience, unless you remind yourself often of the why you will begin to resent the discipline that drives you towards a major life goal. That leads to the vicious cycles brought on by success fatigue. Ironically, it’s usually at the point where a person has ceded most (or even all) of their progress that they snap out of it and regret having strayed from the path of discipline. You for sure will know what you had when it’s gone!
The final step in conquering success fatigue is addressing the fundamental question as follows. What is success fatigue in a real sense? At the start of this post I outlined how a person feels when success fatigue sets in. It’s also important to understand what drives those feelings. I view success fatigue as a psychological off ramp. It’s the point where you feel that you’ve deprived yourself of a guilty pleasure to the point where your psyche revolts and sets you off on a binge. It’s the invisible switch in your mind flipping from a disciplined, virtuous cycle of behavior to an undisciplined vicious cycle of behavior. Let’s face it though, being “bad” sometimes feels so good! The problem is that good feeling fades quickly when we’re faced with the real world consequences of our binging behavior.
All of the above begs the following question. How do we avoid the pitfall of success fatigue as we seek to attain personal goals? The important thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s the feeling of deprivation that leads to success fatigue. It’s why people who go on crash diets often eventually respond with an eating binge. Or why people who go cold turkey off just about any ingrained bad habit eventually revolt and return to a bad habit with a vengeance. What’s needed to prevent feelings of deprivation, and thus success fatigue, is a controlled release of the tension that can build up when practicing a discipline for months of longer. By taking an action that blows off steam you can prevent the explosion that often comes from stress fatigue. For example, if you’re working on a financial goal and living on a tight budget plan for a bit of celebratory spending when you reach certain milestones. That might entail purchasing something off a wish list of items you’ve created or taking a long weekend vacation with excess money you’ve saved. If your goal is health related it could mean having one or two days every month where you ease up on diet and exercise. An exception to this approach would certainly be if your discipline is related to a serious addiction like alcohol, drugs or gambling. In that case I’d rely on professional advice on how best to release tension when working on an addiction related goal. If your goal is relationship oriented and you’ve been working on a relationship with your significant other, plan days when you each do your own thing so that the work of the relationship doesn’t start to seem like a non-stop chore.
In short, the above advice is to give yourself a break from time to time during your journey to achieving your difficult goal. Plan on it too. Put your “blow of steam” days (or whatever you want to call them) on your calendar. Set reminders so that you don’t forget about them. How often you schedule such days is not an exact science, but you don’t want to have them so often that you break the virtuous cycles in your quest for whatever goal you’re trying to achieve. The other thing you can do to stave off success fatigue is to plan phases of your goal seeking journey. In the earliest phase of your goal seeking journey you would apply strict discipline so that a new, virtuous cycle in your life takes hold. As you have success and reinforce the virtuous cycle you can move to a new phase where you ease off your discipline just a little bit to take the pressure off while still moving strongly towards your goal. Finally, when a difficult long-term goal is achieved you want to move into a maintenance phase. In the maintenance phase you relax a little bit more but still adhere to the underlying discipline that helped you achieve success. The combination of cheat days and phases in your journey to success will minimize feelings of deprivation and improve the chance that success fatigue does not become a factor in your goal seeking process.
My final words on this will be about forgiving yourself if you backslide and succumb to a little (or even a lot) of success fatigue. You may even be reading this as you’ve hit bottom on a vicious cycle following some nice success on a life goal. Remember that it happens to everyone at some point in their lives. There’s no point wallowing in regret when you mess up. To err is human. Start rebuilding as soon as you realize that success fatigue has taken hold, wherever that may be in your process. Remember the why of your goal, give yourself a break from time to time and come back stronger than before.
In The Midst Of A Journey 