Nobody is perfect, and even the best and brightest make mistakes. Instead of dwelling on failures, learn from them and move on. Silence the inner bully that persistently goads you to hurt and neglect yourself. Following are 5 practices to help you become the best you can be:
Being kind to yourself is just as important as being kind to others. Here's a rule: Things that you would never say to your loved ones, either out of consideration or for the fear that you might offend them, should never be said to yourself, either. Imagine the amount of suffering it would cause others to hear these things from you, and realize that you are hurting yourself just as much. To quote from an old song by Helen Reddy:
Don’t Beat Yourself Up
For example, in one study, university students who fared worse than desired on an exam subsequently performed better on the next test if they were high rather than low in self-compassion. Presumably, students low in self-compassion beat themselves up and overreacted, which led them to avoid the issue. Students high in self-compassion surveyed the situation and their role in it, and took steps to improve in the future. Similarly, in our study of people living with HIV, participants who were low in self-compassion indicated that shame about being HIV-positive interfered with their willingness to seek medical and psychological care, whereas those high in self-compassion took better care of themselves. Self-compassion was related both to better psychological adjustment and more adaptive behaviours.
The first step in cultivating self-compassion is to start noticing instances in which you are not being nice to yourself. Are you telling yourself harsh and unkind things in your mind? Do you punish yourself by pushing yourself too hard or depriving yourself of pleasure when things go wrong? Would you treat a loved one this way under similar circumstances?
If you catch yourself treating yourself badly and increasing your distress, ask yourself why. Is it because you think that being hard on yourself helps to motivate you, makes you behave appropriately, or increases your success? To some extent, you might be correct: negative thoughts and feelings do help us to manage our behaviour. The question, though, is how badly you need to feel in order to motivate yourself. People who are low in self-compassion often make themselves feel far worse than needed to stay on track. A little bit of self-criticism can go a long way.
Finally, learn to cultivate self-kindness. Treat yourself nicely, both in your own mind and in how you behave toward yourself. Many people are surprised to see that they are often much nicer to other people than to themselves.
Instead, the key is to be gentle with yourself. Allowing for failure can give you enough energy to get back up after you stumble and start over again. If you want to cultivate perseverance, resilience, and grit, then you can reinforce these characteristics with praise. Support can create encouragement so you actually want to continue the difficult work of self-improvement.
10. Inner child work: Imagine one the first times you told yourself, or were told from someone else, the negative message in question. Who first taught you that eating an extra cookie was repulsive? If you can picture your younger self getting that message, feeling hurt and shame, then you can imagine holding that kid, that part of you, and comforting them.
Self-compassion describes behaviors such as self-forgiveness or, more colloquially, cutting yourself some slack. A person with high levels of self-compassion may not blame themselves for stress beyond their control or may be more willing to move on from an argument, rather than dwelling on it for days.
It's time to stop beating yourself up if you're stuck in old patterns. I'm going to show you how with science-backed tools that are proven to help you identify the root causes of your stress, and allow you to move forward with your life.
With this understanding, you have a little bit of compassion for yourself and realize that you're in a situation where everything in your house is going to remind you of a cigarette. Instead of trying to get rid of the triggers -- which is impossible -- you need to find a new, adaptive behavior that you turn to as soon as you are triggered. An example might be changing the flavor of your coffee or replacing having a smoke with going on a three-minute walk. If you can't break a habit, there's nothing wrong with you. You're just going about it in the wrong way.
If you are somebody who is smart, is able to identify the things you need to do, and yet you constantly don't do them, there is an underlying story that you have about yourself -- and it keeps playing out. You become a self-sabotaging, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe you've been there. Maybe you're there now. We all have different reasons for being there. Maybe you were in an abusive relationship, maybe you haven't recovered from a huge setback in life. Whatever it is, you've got to stop being so mean to yourself. With self-sabotage, we take something that someone else used to do or say to us, or something life has done to us, and we do it to ourselves. The reason you don't carve out time for yourself, and blow off the things that mean the most to you, is because of this underlying feeling that you're not important or worthy of happiness.
It's probably because you gain support (or the ability to manipulate) from others with your complaining. Ask yourself why it matters to you without needing external validation. This will help you make sustained changes, starting with ending the habit of complaining.
Many of us get hooked when thinking about the past. Even if you've changed and today no longer have the destructive habits and mindsets that you once did, it can be incredibly hard to make peace with your past. However, when you're making yourself wrong about your past, you're not being proud of how far you've come.
If you want to be happy, you need to forgive yourself for the mistakes that you've made and embrace and be proud of where you're at now. No matter where you are, I know that in several areas of your life you have come a long way. How could you possibly move beyond the mistakes that you've made in the past if you're not proud and celebratory of how far you've come?
Life is full of surprises, of twists and turns lurking in every corner. For this reason, goal setting is essential to keep you from being lost in the jungle of what is called life. In a world where competition beats the best from everyone, you become obsessed with your goals to beat the odds. And end up beating yourself up.
When was the last time you did something for the first time? When was the last time you did something that made you happy? If you want to know how to stop beating yourself up, you have to start living the life you wanted. Step out of your comfort zone and wiggle out the things that are stressing you out. Do something out of the ordinary. Do something fun. Create a bucket list and try to accomplish at least one per month.
Befriending your worst enemy, yourself, is the greatest feat that you can take on. Understand that this does not happen overnight and requires a conscious effort to make it work. But nothing is more fulfilling than bringing out the best version of yourself into the universe. You can do more things if you learn to accept and love yourself even more without beating yourself up.
You're beating yourself up when you're extensively scolding yourself inside your head because you're unhappy with something you did or didn't do. It's something I used to do a lot. As I'm growing more conscious around my thoughts, behaviors and habits, I've come to the conclusion that beating myself up is an incredibly ineffective and actively harmful behavior. This view seems now so obvious that it is bewildering that I ever thought differently. I want to write this post as a reminder to myself that I did think that way at some point in time, document why I don't think so anymore and what I think is a better approach to dealing with my failings and shortcomings. I also have a faint hope that this may help some people who haven't embraced this realization or at least by making everyone else chuckle that some people are stuck with this masochistic view for so long and then make a fool of themselves by writing about it.
Beating yourself up is a form of negative motivation. I thought that wanting to avoid the negative experience of beating myself up would motivate me to do the things I wanted to do. Let's say I have set up a long to-do list of things that I want to accomplish but instead I only do none or a few items on it and am fooling around the internet the rest of the time. At the end of the day, I would beat myself up by extensively reasoning through why this behavior was bad, how I had squandered a precious opportunity and how this behavior would lead to me becoming a complete failure and not reaching my dreams. I thought beating myself up would connect the unwanted behavior (procrastination) with the unwanted experience (beating myself up) and was thus necessary to provide negative motivation for me to stop doing these kinds of things. The idea was that by punishing myself for not doing what I had planned to do I would create an unpleasant experience and that this experience would deter me from acting in this way again in the future.
I am now fully convinced that beating myself up doesn't work. Instead, it lowers my self-esteem and makes the activity I wanted to do riskier. This pretty directly leads to what I call the guilt procrastination cycle. When I procrastinate something, this is usually caused by overwhelm, fear of failure, unclear goals or another inner resistance. When I beat myself up over this behavior, it increases the likelihood of having negative feelings connected with these tasks that I had planned on doing, increasing the risk and pressure connected with that task. That means beating myself up pretty directly contributes to the causes of procrastination. 2ff7e9595c
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