TL;DR: That feeling where you irrationally hate your own work isn’t just you. It’s “Creative Dysmorphia” – a bug in our brain’s code fueled by cognitive biases. The patch isn’t to ‘get tougher’; rather, it may be to use AI as an objective ‘window’ to externalise our ideas and break the neurotic loop of self-doubt.
You know the feelings.
You’re staring at a screen, at an idea, tagline, logo, or layout that just a few hours ago felt like really good. It felt like the one.
And now?
Now you are quietly, completely, and utterly convinced that it’s all a big crap.
That feeling? That specific, gut-wrenching distortion? We’ve all felt it. But we don’t have a good name for it.
We usually lump it in with Impostor Syndrome, but it’s not the same thing.
Impostor Syndrome is feeling like you don’t belong in the room.
This is different. This is knowing you belong in the room, but believing that everything you make in that room is fundamentally broken.
It’s a bug in the code of the creative process.
I call it Creative Dysmorphia.
It’s the funhouse mirror in our heads. A mirror that takes the work we’ve poured ourselves into and twists it into something ugly, magnifying every tiny flaw until the strengths are impossible to see.
And I know this feeling in my bones. I’ve lived with it for two decades. I have a little secret.
For my entire career, I have never, ever, truly loved a single piece of work I’ve ever done.
I just assumed that was the deal. It never deterred me from jumping into the following brief or building something new; if anything, it propelled me forward. I was always running on the quiet assumption that the next project would be better. That everything up to this point was just a warm-up act for some future crescendo that was always just around the corner.
But it meant I could never look back. Because every time I did, at a campaign, at a deck, at an old project… There it was. Not a wave of pride. Just… a little sting. A quiet, persistent whisper of “Could have been better. Should have been better.”
I thought that was the price of admission for being ambitious. It’s not. It’s a bug. And it’s not just a feeling; it’s a predictable glitch in our cognitive hardware.
The Bugs in Our Hardware
Creative Dysmorphia is fueled by a couple of psychological villains that are baked into our thinking.
First, there’s a wonderful cognitive bias known as the IKEA Effect. It’s simple: we place a disproportionately high value on things we struggled to build ourselves. You love that wobbly BILLY bookshelf more than a pre-built one because you bled for it. But that attachment is a double-edged sword. You’re so invested, you can’t see it objectively. All you can see is the stripped screw on the back panel and the slightly misaligned door. You’re just too close to the crime scene.
Second, there’s something even more potent: The Empathy Gap. When you look at your peer’s impressive campaign, what do you see? The finished article. The shiny, perfect, glorious final outcome.
But when you look at your own work? You don’t see the outcome. You know the process. You see the 17 failed versions, the panicked client email, the stupid argument you had with your boss, the sheer, grinding effort it took to get it over the line.
You are, quite literally, comparing your blooper reel to their highlight reel.
Of course, your work looks flawed through that lens. Of course, it feels broken. We’re judging ourselves with a set of criteria we would never apply to anyone else. It’s an unfair trial.
The Fix Isn’t a Better Mirror; It’s a Window.
So if the mirror in our heads is broken, what’s the fix?
Well, we need a window. A clear, objective, dispassionate pane of glass that doesn’t judge, doesn’t have baggage, doesn’t remember the painful process. It just shows you what is actually there.
For the first time, we have one. We’ve been calling it Generative AI. But I think of it as the ultimate psychological intervention for the creative mind. Its most powerful use isn’t as a tool to make things for us. It’s a system to externalise stuff from us.
Here are three therapeutic ways to use it:
- The Scribe. The next time an idea feels wrong in your head, don’t delete it. Articulate it. Open a chat window and write, “Explain this campaign idea back to me in 50 words.” The simple act of forcing your vague anxiety into a concrete, brief objectifies it. It’s not a feeling anymore. It’s a paragraph. You can work with a paragraph.
- The Reflector. Take that line of copy you hate. That script you think is clunky. Paste it in. Ask the AI, “What is the core emotion of this piece?” or “Summarise the key message.” Its answer won’t be brilliant. It will be brutally, beautifully neutral. It’s a clean reflection from a system that has zero emotional stake in your work. It’s the window, showing you what’s there without your anxiety layered on top.
- The De-Stressor. And finally, if you’re stuck on a ‘precious’ idea you’ve come to hate, use AI to destroy its preciousness. Ask it for 100 variations. Taglines, headlines, colour palettes, whatever. 98 of them will be useless. But that’s not the point. The point is to turn a moment of high-anxiety perfectionism into a moment of low-stakes play.
The goal here isn’t just better work. It’s a better, more sustainable way of working.
Our industry loves to celebrate burnout. We treat it as a badge of honour, a sign of commitment.
It’s not. It’s a symptom of a broken process. It’s the result of thousands of brilliant people wrestling, alone, with the funhouse mirror in their heads. The future of creative work has to be about a healthier state of mind. It’s time we stopped working so hard and started working more sanely.
You’re welcome.
//A ☀️🪟