“My life sucks.”
“I’m a failure.”
“I’m not where I want to be.”
It should be obvious, but even if you’re not exactly where you want to be in life — or you’re unsatisfied with your current situation — beating yourself up over the fact that you aren’t where you wish to be only serves to make things worse.
Rather than help, this kind of negative thinking puts the one person most capable of fighting for your well-being at a disadvantage. It turns you into your own enemy.
You wouldn’t tolerate a friend belittling your accomplishments, rubbing your mistakes in your face, or trying to put you down. So why would you accept that kind of behavior from yourself?
You don’t win an award for seeing how low you can go or how miserable you can make yourself feel.
If you have a tendency to do this, it’s time to stop. It’s time to take note of when your line of thinking is leading you in a downward spiral. It’s time to remind yourself that making yourself feel worse about whatever situation you find yourself in isn’t helpful or necessary and no good will come of it.
“This isn’t helping me. I need to stop thinking this way. I need to stop revisiting these thoughts. I need to focus on something else. I need to remember that, ‘This, too, shall pass’.”
While you may not be able to immediately change the situation you find yourself in, you can change is your attitude about it. And rather than focus on your problems, you can focus on solutions to your problems. Even if the most immediate solution is to stop beating yourself up — because that’s a problem you can solve.
It’s important to remember that success in anything is often comprised of many failures. And comparing your life to others isn’t fair. We are each on our own unique journey. No two people are following the same exact paths in life.
And not only do people rarely make their struggles known, they often don’t highlight their failures either. What you see when you look at others’ lives is often only a fraction of a complete picture.
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” — Steve Furtick
If revisiting the past in your mind makes you miserable or comparing yourself to others makes you feel like a failure, stop doing it. Because no amount of thinking about these things in this way is going to help you. No matter what you do, you cannot change the past.
The only thing you have complete control over is your attitude and how you choose to act in this moment. This moment matters.
Rather than waste time and energy tearing yourself down, use that time to focus on what you want to achieve. Taking steps to stop yourself from feeling worse is a start.
You, more than anyone, have the ability to be your own best friend, it seems a shame to waste that opportunity by becoming your worst enemy.
Retire those tired old dysfunctional thoughts. Push forward with new ones. Be thankful for what you have and work with it and take positive action.
You can be the hero of your life and the champion of your well-being, but first you have fully commit to the role.
And that transformation will only take place after you stop beating yourself up & tearing yourself down.
Don’t give power to your unfriendly thoughts.
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*This isn’t about positive thinking or negative thinking. This is about stopping the barrage of unfriendly thoughts that lead one down a debilitating downward spiral that often leaves one feeling helpless and hopeless.
Negative thinking can actually lead to positive change, but it requires that one be in a mental state capable of finding the motivation to initiate that change. There is a huge difference between focusing on self-abuse that makes one’s self miserable and using negative thinking to initiate positive changes.
As I’ve written before, it’s ok not to be happy.
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