Read This If You Are Your Own Worst Critic (And You Need To Give Yourself A Break)

Franca Gimenez
Franca Gimenez

You do not have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, even if it feels like you have to. Being too hard on yourself often leads to negative thoughts and feelings of self-blame, self-criticism, self-judgment and so on, but you are only human and sometimes you need a break as well. You don’t have to always worry about pleasing others if you are not pleasing yourself in the process. You don’t have to say yes to everything if you really want to say no. You don’t have to overwork yourself if you’re making yourself sick. Being hard on yourself is good, but only to a certain extent.

Being hard on yourself means that you have high expectations of yourself and you want to see yourself succeed. But success can consume us and that is never a good thing.

Setting goals is a great thing, but if you can’t accomplish them all it will be okay. You need to realize that if you’ve never run a 5K before it is unrealistic to make it your goal to be able to run a marathon in a month. You need to set the goals over time, train and pace yourself. You can’t accomplish everything in a day.

You need to work on embracing the journey and realizing that being perfect is out of reach because no one is perfect, everyone is flawed in some way or another and that is okay. Flaws are what make us human. You need mistakes to learn and you need failure to succeed. Instead of focusing on what you did wrong try instead to focus on what you did right and what you can improve on. Focus on the things you have the power to control and let the rest go.

Realize that asking for help is not a sign of weakness.

Being hard on yourself means that a lot of times you think you can handle it all, and most of the time you can, but not always. Sometimes you have to treat yourself as you’d treat your best friend. By being kind, telling them words of wisdom and that things will work out, because they will and you need to believe that yourself.

The biggest downfall of being hard on yourself is the voices between your ears, your worst enemy, which is yourself. Talking negatively to yourself only makes you harder on yourself, and that is not what you need. Your negative thoughts distort reality and there is nothing to be gained by repeating over and over all the things you could have done better. Instead of dwelling on the negatives think of all the energy you are wasting on bad thoughts and channel all that extra energy you now have to positive, uplifting thoughts. If you’re too hard on yourself you won’t notice them.

Being too hard on yourself is draining and it keeps you from moving forward and succeeding. Shake off the dust and channel the negative thoughts to positive ones. The biggest thing you have to realize is that you can’t do it all, sometimes you need to step back, take a break and let someone else step up because you are human and you can’t do everything. Breathe in, breathe out and let your self-esteem build up, you work too hard to be too hard on yourself. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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