Are you someone who carries around baggage from past experiences with you each day you wake up?
Do you find yourself dwelling on actions or situations you blame yourself for messing up or obsessing over lost opportunities, ways that you have messed things up in your life and this keeps you from being happy in your life?
Some of you may immediately recognize this as the case in your life while for others this deep-seeded tendency to constantly beat yourself up is so engrained in their thought process they are no longer conscious of it.
Here are a few common examples…you most likely have your own:
- You regret having broken a relationship or not tried harder to keep someone important in your life OR the opposite may be true where you regret having let someone control you or stay in your life and impact it negatively for so long without making a change
- You constantly blame yourself for how other people treat you without respect. That self blame can range from feelings of not being worthy of greater respect to something specific you did that you feel brought on this negative behavior
- You consider yourself the unluckiest person alive! For all of these bad things to happen there must be something wrong with you – this becomes an excuse for giving up trying and losing hope in your life
- You constantly find yourself apologizing or deriding yourself for making mistakes or messing up in life…things don’t just bounce off of you, instead you take everything to heart and end up blaming yourself
If you can relate to this concept of “beating yourself up” – leave a comment and let us know your insights and how these tips may help you finally escape this rut in your life
3 Ways To STOP Beating Yourself Up And Move On In Your Life
How can you go about changing from someone who constantly puts themselves down to someone who has a much more healthy outlook on life? Try these 3 ways to stop beating yourself up and experience true and lasting happiness
1. Change Perspective On Mistakes, Challenges and Setbacks
Today, you most likely try to avoid making mistakes at ALL costs, right?
This means you avoid saying, doing and participating in things due to the fear of being wrong or of screwing up.
In addition, you most likely have a pretty HOT list of ways you have made mistakes in the past, been embarrassed, criticized, and where you ended up feeling very uncomfortable.
Except, the pain associated with these one-time challenges has been repeated over and over again in your mind as you embed that event and even amplify the pain you experienced so that you will never go through that again
But, consider this…your beliefs around setbacks, mistakes and being wrong are deeply embedded within you by school, your parents, friends, etc…and THIS is what frames your current analysis of how you perform in life
What if you had a different frame of reference…different sets of beliefs around what making mistakes really means?
Some of the most successful, happy and productive people in life have done exactly that, changed their beliefs around what setbacks, mistakes and challenges mean in their lives.
Instead of having fear and looking at mistakes as negative they view mistakes, setbacks and embarrassments as mandatory and necessary parts of life that result in feedback, learning and constant improvement
Instead of fearing and avoiding situations that put them at risk of making mistakes, they embrace them
Instead of fretting over past situations like this, they view these as passing points in their lives that would have resulted in important lessons, feedback and learning opportunities on this exciting journey of life
Work on your perspective of what mistakes, setbacks, failures really mean – suddenly your entire frame of reference will change and soon you will be letting go of the negative beliefs and thoughts that have you beating yourself up in life
2. Perspective
We tend to lament on past experiences, mistakes or lost opportunities to such an extent that we begin to reinforce them with even more negative feelings and thoughts until we have completely overblown the original experience having replaced it with a much more profoundly negative view of what really happened
One of the ways I have found to best control these exaggerations is through meditation.
Now meditation can mean different things to different people, some choose a more traditional, mantra-based meditation while others can meditate in tune with either nature or something they love (music, art, etc…)
In my case, I use nature sounds in place of a chant or consistent mantra (ex sound of ocean waves) and that works for me. 10-20 minutes of daily meditation allows me to place my thoughts and beliefs into perspective, helping manage the overly exaggerated visions of pain replacing them with more realistic and desired thoughts
3. Change Your State
To initiate any meaningful change in your life you want to break patterns that reinforce the thoughts and beliefs you want to challenge or change.
For instance, if you are someone who can’t sleep at night because you are flooded with negative thoughts and this is when you beat up on yourself the most, then focus on diverting your state – choose to listen to some jokes and laugh, practice gratitude (which changes your state completely), listen to relaxation music and replace negative visuals with desired snapshots in your head (favorite people, places, things)
On the other hand, if driving in to work is where you launch into your negative thought patterns, then consciously take another route to work, work from home, listen to different music or self-improvement mp3’s, again practice gratitude noticing the greatness around you.
We all tend to be hard on ourselves, if you are a person that is beating yourself up over your self-image, finances, your career, relationships or your health, then take action and make changes in your life now to stop this self-destructive behavior replacing it with more positive thought patterns.
Have a question, tip or experience to share, leave us a comment on the blog and share with our community.
Leave a Comment