"You should have started yesterday. You should be further ahead. Someone your age is already doing more."
Even when you make progress, there is another thing to improve: your appearance, fitness, income, habits, relationships, emotional health. Rest starts to feel like falling behind. What began as wanting a better life becomes a life spent trying to catch up.
Maxxing culture gives this pressure a contemporary vocabulary. From a therapy perspective, its more punishing forms can look like an old psychological pattern with a new platform: The Unrelenting Standards Schema on steroids—sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally.
Wanting to grow can be meaningful. The question is what happens to your relationship with yourself along the way. Does the pursuit make room for pleasure, limits, and being human? Or does it keep moving the point at which you are finally allowed to feel good enough?
What Is Maxxing Culture, and What Does Looksmaxxing Mean?
Maxxing is internet language for maximizing or optimizing something about yourself or your life. Looksmaxxing focuses on physical appearance. The broader language of maxxing can extend to fitness, productivity, health, and any and all other areas of self-improvement.
The term can be used casually, playfully, or intensely. Someone joking about optimizing their evening routine may mean something very different from someone who spends hours ranking their facial features.
Looksmaxxing itself spans a range of behaviours, from grooming and clothing choices to risky attempts to change the body. Johns Hopkins Medicine describes both relatively ordinary appearance advice and more dangerous practices, including anabolic steroid use promoted by some influencers.
Those distinctions matter. A word alone does not tell us whether a habit is supportive or harmful. We also need to consider the behaviour, its risks, and the emotional pressure behind it.
Is Maxxing Healthy, or Can Self-Improvement Become Harmful?
Some activities described as maxxing can support well-being. Enjoying your clothes, building strength, learning a skill, or becoming more intentional about your life can be satisfying.
The psychological difficulty begins when improvement becomes an ongoing requirement for feeling acceptable.
You might exercise because you enjoy feeling stronger. You might also feel unable to miss a workout without experiencing shame. You might enjoy skincare, yet find yourself increasingly preoccupied with perceived flaws. Similar activities can take on very different meanings depending on how much freedom you have around them.
Useful questions include:
- Can I change this routine when I am tired, ill, or busy?
- Can I enjoy progress without immediately raising the standard?
- Is this helping me participate in life, or making my life smaller?
- What do I fear would happen if I stopped trying so hard?
Healthy growth can accommodate your needs. A punishing standard keeps asking you to override them.
What Are Unrelenting Standards? The Inner Voice That Says You Are Behind
In Schema Therapy, Unrelenting Standards describes a pattern of demanding internal expectations that can come at the expense of well-being, pleasure, and relationships. It can involve perfectionism, rigid “shoulds,” and a preoccupation with making the most of time.
In everyday life, it may sound like:
You should have done this yesterday.
You are already behind.
You could have done more.
You can relax once everything is handled.
That last promise is particularly difficult, because everything is rarely handled. There is always another task, another opportunity, or another version of yourself you could be working toward.
The defining experience is often chronic internal pressure. Even during time off, some part of you may be monitoring whether you are using it well enough. Accomplishments bring brief relief before the next demand arrives.
Maxxing culture can give this inner voice an endless supply of instructions. There is always a new routine, comparison, or supposedly essential improvement. For someone already vulnerable to Unrelenting Standards, the internet can become an external version of a familiar internal critic.
Why Can Maxxing Feel Like Unrelenting Standards on Steroids?
Maxxing can intensify the belief that ordinary effort is insufficient. You should be doing the most effective routine, using the best method, and extracting the greatest possible benefit from every part of your life.
The phrase “on steroids” is sometimes literal: certain appearance-focused communities promote anabolic steroids and other risky practices. Metaphorically, it captures the amplification of pressure. A demanding inner voice now has a constant stream of comparison material and advice available whenever you reach for your phone.
A hobby becomes another measure of competence. Rest becomes something to optimize. Personal growth becomes another area in which you might be failing.
From a psychodynamic perspective, it can be useful to ask what all this effort promises emotionally. Perhaps being more attractive seems to offer either a feeling of power or protection against rejection. Maybe exceptional achievement feels like a route to recognition and approval. Perhaps discipline offers a sense of control when other parts of life feel uncertain.
These are possibilities to explore, rather than explanations to impose on everyone. The important question is personal: What do you imagine becoming “better” will finally allow you to feel?
Can Maxxing Contribute to Burnout or Symptoms of Depression?
When self-improvement is driven by relentless pressure, it can become exhausting. Over time, constantly overriding your limits and needs may contribute to depletion, discouragement, and a loss of pleasure. Research also finds associations between aspects of perfectionism and depressive symptoms, although that does not establish that maxxing itself causes depression.
You may initially feel energized by a new plan. Eventually, maintaining it becomes harder. You feel tired, fall short of the standard, and criticize yourself for lacking discipline. The criticism then becomes a reason to push harder.
Some people describe this as feeling burned out: drained, detached, and unable to keep giving at the same level. In healthcare terminology, burnout specifically refers to an occupational phenomenon; exhaustion from optimizing your personal life can still be real and worthy of attention.
Symptoms such as persistent low mood, reduced motivation, difficulty concentrating, or loss of interest deserve care. Depression has multiple possible contributors. It should not be reduced to a failure to rest, nor treated as evidence that you need to become even better at self-improvement.
Sometimes the demand to keep pushing needs attention as much as the exhaustion itself.
Can Asking AI for Maxxing Advice Keep You Feeling Not Good Enough?
AI can generate suggestions for routines, habits, and personal goals. But a question worth considering is whether you are asking for practical information or repeatedly seeking a verdict on yourself.
Am I attractive enough? Am I doing enough? What else should I fix?
An answer may bring temporary relief. Then another photograph, comparison, or doubt prompts another question. In that pattern, the search for advice can become another way of checking whether you measure up.
An AI response is not a definitive assessment of your attractiveness, adequacy, or worth. If using these tools leaves you increasingly preoccupied, ashamed, or dependent on another evaluation, that reaction matters.
Therapy can make room to explore what you are hoping an external answer will settle, and why it may be so difficult to trust your own experience without one.
What Could “Theramaxxing” Mean in Psychodynamic Therapy or Psychoanalysis?
There is also room to use maxxing language more lightly. We do not have to interpret every playful use of the word as a psychological problem.
In that spirit, you might call a committed investment to therapy and to your inner life “theramaxxing,” or therapy maxxing. I am using this as a playful phrase, rather than the name of a clinical treatment: giving your personal healing journey the time, attention, and care it deserves.
Psychodynamic therapy, where therapy sessions are ongoing and typically at least once a week, offers a way of exploring recurring emotional and relationship patterns, including the expectations you carry within yourself. For some people, this work becomes a setting for some of their most significant personal shifts: recognizing an old pattern, expressing a previously forbidden feeling, or developing a different relationship with their own needs.
There is an irony here. Getting the most from depth therapy may involve loosening the demand to maximize yourself.
You can arrive uncertain, repetitive, frustrated, or without an impressive insight. These experiences can become part of the work. So can the wish to be a “good” client who heals quickly and never needs to revisit anything.
The aim is to develop greater understanding and freedom, including freedom from making every part of yourself into a performance.
Why Does Depth Therapy Require Time, Commitment, and Consistent Investment?
Understanding a pattern intellectually and responding differently when it is activated are often separate stages of change.
You may know that your standards are harsh and still feel guilty resting. You may understand where self-criticism began and still hear it when you make a mistake. Repeated opportunities to notice, feel, and work with these experiences can help new responses become more available.
This is where regularly sitting in the metaphorical therapy chair matters: returning consistently, making space for what emerges, and staying curious when the work feels uncomfortable or less immediately rewarding.
That commitment involves time and emotional effort. A workable pace should be discussed collaboratively, with attention to your needs and circumstances. Weekly sessions are generally a good standard which can offer continuity for ongoing depth work; with the appropriate frequency and duration varying.
Consistency creates opportunities for the work to deepen over time. Meaningful change often needs room to unfold without another deadline imposed by the part of you that already thinks you are behind.
How Can Therapy Help You Grow Without Constantly Pushing Yourself?
Schema Therapy can help you recognize Unrelenting Standards and begin developing more flexible expectations. Psychodynamic therapy can explore the personal history and emotional meanings that give those expectations their power.
Together, these perspectives can open questions such as: Whose approval am I still trying to earn? What happens inside me when I have a limit? Can I want something because it matters to me, without making it a condition of my worth?
Over time, change might mean noticing your needs sooner, tolerating an ordinary mistake, choosing a goal more freely, or enjoying something without needing to excel at it. Those shifts may look quieter than a dramatic transformation. They can still change how daily life feels.
At Smart Therapy, I offer virtual individual therapy for adults across Ontario and New Brunswick. My depth-oriented approach integrates Schema Therapy and psychodynamic perspectives to explore self-criticism, anxiety, recurring relationship patterns, and the pressure to keep proving yourself.
If you recognize yourself in the feeling that you should have done everything yesterday, therapy can offer a consistent space to understand that pressure and begin relating to yourself differently.
You can book a consultation with Smart Therapy™ to explore working together.
Do You Feel Like You Have to Improve Yourself to Belong?
Sometimes the pressure to keep improving carries a deeper hope: that becoming more attractive, successful, helpful, or impressive will finally make us feel accepted and secure in our relationships.
While everyone’s experience is different, you may recognize a feeling that belonging is something you have to earn. If you notice recurring patterns of proving your worth, people-pleasing, or trying to become someone others will choose, you may find my free Belonging Pattern™ email series helpful.
Offered through my coaching practice, this free resource includes three guided emails exploring the Emotional Orphan, Helper, and Scapegoat archetype patterns and how they can shape the ways we seek connection, navigate relationships, and experience belonging.
The series offers space to reflect on these patterns and what it might mean to feel connected without constantly having to prove yourself.
If this resonates with you, you’re welcome to explore The Belonging Pattern™.
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Rebecca Steele | Smart Therapy®
Registered Social Worker, Psychotherapist (MA, MSW, RSW, CCC)
Rebecca Steele is a psychotherapist based in Waterloo, Ontario, offering virtual therapy to adults across Ontario and New Brunswick. She supports adults experiencing anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), relationship patterns, self-worth, emotional neglect, and high sensitivity (HSP traits). Her work integrates depth psychology, emotion-focused and psychodynamic approaches with other evidence-informed treatment to help clients better understand themselves and create lasting change. She may also incorporate the Enneagram as a tool for self-understanding and personal growth.
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