13 Ways You Are Ruining Your Life By Being Too Hard On Yourself

1. You overthink every little thing you say and do. If you tell a joke that nobody laughs at, you dwell on it for the rest of the day. If you stumble over your words, you won’t be able to stop yourself from blushing. You have trouble getting over moments of embarrassment, because to you, they are a bigger deal than in reality.

2. You apologize for everything. If you are too loud. If you are too quiet. If you arrive too early. If you arrive too late. You always assume you are bothering someone, just by existing.

3. You feel like the failure of the family, the failure of your friend group, the failure of your graduating class. In your eyes, it seems like everyone has something they are proud of accomplishing, except for you. You feel like you are behind.

4. You frame your ideas as questions. Instead of stating your opinion with confidence, you will act unsure. When your friends ask you where you want to grab dinner, you will say something like, “I was thinking about going to The Cheesecake Factory, but you guys probably don’t want to go there. I don’t know. What do you guys want?”

5. When you are talking about yourself, the only things that come out of your mouth are negative. You will talk about how your skin keeps breaking out or about how you keep gaining weight or about how your boss keeps catching you during awkward moments. You never have anything nice to say about yourself.

6. Whenever something goes right in your life, you never take a second to stop and celebrate. Instead, you think of all the ways things could go wrong in the future and stress yourself out when you should be relaxing.

7. You quit before seeing whether you could have accomplished what you set out to do, because you assume you are going to fail. And you end good relationships prematurely because you would rather hurt the other person before they have the chance to hurt you.

8. You blame yourself when people leave or when you get rejected. Even if there was no possible way you could stop the outcome of a situation, you still feel like it’s your fault things ended poorly.

9. You compare yourself to every single person who walks past you — and you always find something they have that you don’t have. You always feel like you are the inferior one.

10. You act like your accomplishments aren’t a big deal. When someone congratulates you on graduating or getting a promotion, you will answer by insulting yourself about how it’s not that big of a step up.

11. When you make one little mistake, you beat yourself up for it. You feel like a complete idiot instead of shrugging and remembering that everyone screws up from time to time.

12. When someone compliments you, you shake your head, because you don’t believe any nice things that are said about you.

13. You feel like you deserve all of the bad things that have happened to you. You feel like happiness is not something you have earned.