The Voice That Says ‘You Should Be Better By Now’
It whispers when you’re having a hard day after weeks of progress. It shouts when old patterns resurface despite your best efforts to change them. It judges when healing doesn’t follow the timeline you expected. “You should be better by now.”
At Televero Health, we hear about this voice from so many people who are working on their mental health and wellbeing. They describe the particular pain of not only struggling, but also criticizing themselves for still struggling – for not recovering faster, healing more completely, or changing more permanently.
“I keep thinking I should be further along by now,” they tell us. “I’ve been working on this for months. I’ve read the books, done the exercises, talked about it in therapy. Why am I still dealing with the same issues? What’s wrong with me that I haven’t fixed this yet?”
Maybe you’ve heard this voice too. The one that turns recovery into a performance to be evaluated. That compares your pace of healing to some imagined standard. That finds you lacking not just for your struggles themselves, but for how long they’re taking to resolve.
This voice adds an extra layer of suffering to whatever you’re already experiencing. And while it often disguises itself as motivation or tough love, it typically creates more obstacles to healing than it resolves.
The Timeline Myth
One of the most persistent myths about mental and emotional healing is that it should follow a predictable timeline – that there’s a “normal” schedule for recovering from grief, trauma, anxiety, depression, addiction, or other challenges.
This myth shows up in many forms:
- The expectation that grief should resolve within a year
- The idea that trauma can be processed in a specific number of therapy sessions
- The belief that recovery from addiction follows a straight line of progress
- The assumption that depression lifts completely after a certain treatment duration
- The notion that anxiety should diminish steadily with the right techniques
Reality is far more complex and individual. Healing rarely follows a linear path or adheres to external timelines. It’s influenced by countless factors – the nature and duration of what you’re healing from, your specific biology and temperament, your access to resources and support, your current life circumstances, and many other variables that aren’t under your direct control.
One client reflected: “I kept thinking there was something wrong with me because I was still having panic attacks six months into therapy. Then my therapist helped me understand that I’d been living with anxiety for twenty years – of course it wouldn’t resolve in a matter of months. My expectation of how quickly things should change wasn’t based on anything real.”
Another shared: “After my divorce, someone gave me a book about grief that laid out what I should be feeling at 3 months, 6 months, a year. But my experience didn’t match that timeline at all. I felt like I was grieving ‘wrong’ on top of everything else, until I realized that everyone’s process is different.”
The timeline myth creates unnecessary suffering by adding shame and self-judgment to already difficult experiences. It turns healing into another standard you can fail to meet, rather than a personal process unfolding in its own time.
Where the ‘Should Be Better’ Voice Comes From
This critical voice doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s shaped by various influences, both external and internal:
Cultural messaging about productivity, efficiency, and progress creates the expectation that all processes – including healing – should be optimized for speed. Our society values quick results and visible progress, often at the expense of deeper, slower transformations.
Media portrayals of recovery often compress complex healing journeys into simplified narratives with clear resolution, creating unrealistic expectations about how healing actually unfolds.
Well-meaning but misguided support from others who say things like “Aren’t you over that yet?” or “You should be feeling better by now” can internalize as self-criticism.
Comparison with others whose healing journeys appear faster or smoother (though we rarely see the full reality of anyone else’s process) can fuel the belief that your own timeline is somehow wrong or inadequate.
The very real desire to be free from pain can transform into impatience with the healing process itself, particularly when that process involves moving through difficult emotions rather than around them.
One person described their experience: “I realized my ‘should be better by now’ voice sounded exactly like my mother, who was always pushing me to get over things quickly. Any display of ongoing struggle was met with, ‘Still upset about that? You need to move on.’ I had internalized that message so deeply that I was continuing it even without her present.”
Another reflected: “Part of my ‘should be better’ pressure came from financial concerns. Therapy was expensive, and I felt like I needed to see results quickly to justify the cost. That created this constant evaluation of whether I was improving ‘enough’ for what I was spending.”
Understanding the origins of this critical voice doesn’t immediately silence it, but it can help you recognize that its standards aren’t objective truth – they’re constructed from particular influences that may not actually align with what healing really requires.
The Paradox: How Pressure to Heal Can Impede Healing
There’s a painful irony to the “should be better by now” voice: the very pressure it creates often makes healing more difficult, not easier. This happens through several mechanisms:
Stress activation: Self-criticism triggers the body’s stress response, which can exacerbate symptoms of anxiety, depression, and other conditions you’re trying to heal.
Avoidance reinforcement: When you criticize yourself for not healing faster, you create an additional layer of pain that you’ll naturally want to avoid. This can strengthen patterns of numbing, distraction, or denial that interfere with the healing process.
Resource depletion: Fighting with yourself about your healing timeline consumes emotional and mental energy that could otherwise be directed toward the healing itself.
Authenticity barriers: Pressure to “get better” can lead to pretending you’re further along than you actually are, preventing you from receiving the support you still need.
Process interruption: Healing often requires moving through difficult emotions rather than around them. When you’re pressuring yourself to “be better already,” you may try to skip crucial parts of the process in pursuit of faster results.
One client shared: “I was so angry at myself for still having PTSD symptoms years after the event. That anger made me push myself too hard – trying exposure techniques before I had adequate coping skills, forcing myself into triggering situations to ‘prove’ I was better. It actually set back my healing because I’d overwhelm my system and then have major setbacks.”
Another described: “I wanted so badly to be ‘over’ my grief that I tried to rush through it. I’d catch myself feeling sad and immediately try to talk myself out of it – ‘It’s been six months, you should be moving on.’ But fighting the grief just made it last longer. When I finally gave myself permission to still be sad without the timeline pressure, I actually started to heal more genuinely.”
The path through this paradox isn’t to abandon any hope of healing, but to approach the process with patience and self-compassion rather than criticism and arbitrary timelines.
Healing Happens in Its Own Time
What if the timeline itself is part of the wisdom of your healing process? What if the pace at which you’re moving isn’t wrong or insufficient, but exactly what your particular journey requires?
Healing from significant mental health challenges, trauma, loss, or other difficulties isn’t just about feeling better. It’s about integration, meaning-making, identity reconstruction, and developing new relationships with yourself and others. These profound changes rarely happen quickly – nor should they.
Consider these perspectives:
Neural rewiring takes time. When you’re changing patterns that have been reinforced in your brain for years or decades, the process of building new neural pathways is genuinely gradual. This isn’t a failure of effort or commitment – it’s the nature of how brains change.
Healing isn’t just about the original wound. It often involves addressing layers of adaptation, compensation, and secondary issues that developed around the original problem. Each of these layers may have its own timeline for resolution.
Some healing happens in spirals rather than lines. You may revisit similar themes or struggles at different stages, but with new awareness or capacity each time. What looks like “being stuck” might actually be a deeper engagement with an issue you could only partially address before.
Life doesn’t pause for healing. You’re navigating your recovery process while also managing current stressors, relationships, responsibilities, and challenges. This reality naturally affects the pace of change.
One person described their realization: “I was beating myself up for still struggling with anxiety after two years of work. Then my therapist helped me see that in those two years, I’d also moved, changed jobs, and ended a relationship. I wasn’t failing at recovery – I was actively healing while also navigating major life changes. Of course it was taking time.”
Another shared: “I finally understood that my healing couldn’t be rushed because it involved learning to trust again – both others and myself. Trust doesn’t develop on a schedule. It builds slowly through consistent experience. Trying to rush trust would actually contradict the very thing I was trying to develop.”
This perspective doesn’t mean resigning yourself to suffering or abandoning hope for change. It means recognizing that the timeline of your healing has its own intelligence – one that deserves respect rather than constant evaluation and criticism.
Working With the Critical Voice
When the “should be better by now” voice emerges, there are ways to respond that create more space for genuine healing:
Recognize it as a voice, not a truth. When you notice thoughts about how you “should” be further along, label them as a perspective rather than an objective assessment. “There’s that ‘should be better’ thought again” creates some distance from its apparent authority.
Investigate its concerns with curiosity. Sometimes this voice is expressing legitimate desires for relief or change, just in a harsh way. You might ask it: “What are you afraid will happen if healing takes longer? What are you trying to protect me from?”
Offer the compassion you’d give a friend. Most people would never tell a struggling friend, “You should be better by now.” They’d offer understanding about how hard the process is and validation for the effort being made. You deserve that same compassion.
Look for less visible signs of progress. Healing often happens in subtle ways before it becomes obvious. Small shifts in how you relate to your experiences – slightly more awareness, a bit more self-compassion, brief moments of feeling grounded – can be meaningful indicators of change, even when symptoms persist.
Connect with others on similar journeys. Hearing about the non-linear nature of others’ healing processes can help normalize your own experience and reduce the sense that you’re somehow “doing it wrong.”
One client described their approach: “When I notice I’m being hard on myself about not recovering faster, I try to get specific about what actually has changed, even if it’s small. I might still have panic attacks, but I understand them better now. I still get depressed, but I don’t believe the things my depression tells me as completely. Noticing these subtle shifts helps me see that healing is happening, just not in the dramatic way I was expecting.”
Another shared: “I’ve started asking my critical voice what it’s trying to achieve. Usually it thinks it’s motivating me or protecting me from complacency. Once I understand that, I can acknowledge its concern while also explaining that criticism actually makes healing harder, not easier. It’s like developing a different relationship with that part of myself.”
A Different Measure of Progress
Perhaps the most powerful shift isn’t changing how quickly you heal, but changing how you measure and define healing itself.
What if progress isn’t about eliminating all symptoms or reaching some final state of “healed”? What if it’s about developing a different relationship with your experiences – more awareness, more compassion, more capacity to be with what arises without being defined or controlled by it?
From this perspective, healing becomes less about meeting external standards of progress and more about internal shifts in how you relate to yourself and your experiences. These shifts may not be easily visible to others or fit neatly onto a timeline, but they can profoundly change your lived experience.
One person reflected after years of recovery work: “I used to think healing meant never feeling anxious again. Now I understand it’s about knowing how to be with my anxiety when it shows up. I still get anxious, but I don’t get anxious about being anxious, if that makes sense. I don’t see it as a failure or something wrong with me. That shift in perspective has changed everything.”
Another shared: “The most important progress for me wasn’t how often I experienced symptoms, but how I treated myself when they appeared. I stopped seeing myself as broken or failing when I had a hard day. That self-compassion has been more healing than any specific reduction in symptoms.”
The voice that says “you should be better by now” is measuring against an imagined standard that may not reflect what healing actually looks like for you. By recognizing this voice as one perspective rather than truth, and by developing a more nuanced understanding of how healing unfolds, you can reduce the added suffering of self-criticism and create more space for genuine growth and change – in whatever time that truly requires.
Your healing deserves the time it needs. Begin a compassionate journey today.