Why you tend to criticize yourself too harshly every step of the way, despite being fairly productive.

You will always have a tendency to criticize your work right after you finish it, because you’ve exerted a lot of energy making it, and so the question was it worth the effort and time will always be there, even if you did a good job.

You are also processing what has happened, and growing because of it.

That doesn’t mean that you are too hard on yourself or your self esteem is too low.

It also may be because the same reasons why you hate your life are still there untouched, and you haven’t moved an inch away from them after having exerted all that effort. Also after all this work, you may have less energy, but you are certainly more active than before you started working today, and thus you become more capable of detecting why your life sucks more than how clearly you normally can. If you happened to not get enough reward from what you worked towards achieving today, you’d definitely feel worse afterwards, like nothing ever happens no matter how hard you try. You’d start to feel hopeless, and ask yourself: what’s the point? Nothing that you ever do changes anything. It never has, and it never will.

In this case, you either fix your situation, or produce massive results that grant you enough reward that makes you say: nevertheless, I ended up with a masterpiece today. Certainly better than running around all day hoping to feel good at some point when everything that you know your life sucks because of still remains intact.