Your own approval should require something meaningful from you.

Approval you give yourself for nothing becomes worth nothing. If you can feel fine about a day regardless of what you did with it, that fine feeling stops carrying information, and you lose one of the few internal signals that could guide you. Making your own regard cost something is not harshness. It is keeping a measure that still means something when it reads well.

Decide what would genuinely earn your approval on an ordinary day, and keep it modest and real rather than heroic. Then let yourself feel it fully when you meet the bar and honestly when you do not. The aim is an accurate instrument, not a punishing one.