Why you should stop beating yourself up

How easy it is to let a mistake or a wrong decision to impact our lives negatively—long after the event happened! Can you ever stop beating yourself up? These incidences keep us trapped in regrets and stop us from enjoying our present. We end up missing new experiences and opportunities.

Staying tied up to a mistake for far longer than necessary can really mess up our lives. It makes no sense to dwell on something for so long that you find yourself struggling to break away from it. For how long can you actually carry the burden of not making the right decision?

We have to remind ourselves constantly that life is short. We cannot rewind time, no matter what. We have got to stop beating ourselves up over something that happened and learn to move on. If we don’t, we hold ourselves back from enjoying the newness in each day simply because our minds are constantly troubled by negative self-blame.

If you find it hard to move on from a specific incident in your life, stop beating yourself up over it. Being stuck in that pattern can affect your health, your relationships and just about anything you want to do.

Here are three reasons why you should stop beating yourself up.

3 reasons to stop beating yourself up

You are only human

“You need to give yourself permission to be human.” – Joyce Brothers

Yes, you needed that reminder. As human beings, we are literally programmed to make mistakes. It is human to err. We don’t come into this world holding an instruction manual that lists the right way to handle all the situations we face. We are not born knowing how to make the right decision for every event throughout our lives. So what sense does it make to go through life wanting to be perfect?

Sure, you must make the effort to make the right decisions and handle situations as well as you can—but only with the awareness that you may not always be able to do so. If you make mistakes, don’t be surprised. Just let it remind you that you are but human and fallible, just like the billions of others around you.

We’re blessed to be human with the capability to feel so many emotions. We have the ability to create and discover things. It is fine to be far from perfect. Keep in mind that mistakes will happen and that it is completely okay.

Mistakes are lessons learned

“Mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.” Anonymous

One of the best ways to stop beating yourself up over a wrong decision you took or some shortcoming you may have is to try not to see the situation from a negative point of view. Instead, why not look at it this way: mistakes are an essential part of the learning process. If you think back and reflect on your experiences, you will probably find that every single thing you ever learned to do with some expertise was through trial and error. This is an ongoing process throughout our lives. And as long as we live, we will face new situations.

So, there’s no rule that states that when you grow up and become an adult, you will somehow know the perfect response to new situations. In fact, if you ever reach that point in your life when you don’t make a mistake or two, that’s probably not a good thing! If we go through life without facing challenges, we stagnate.

Let’s look at each mistake as a life lesson that lets us adjust and learn to do better the next time we face a similar situation.

Change Your Perspective

“Perspectives are like batteries. You can see the positive or the negative, and they’ll keep you charged up, if you replace them often enough.”― Curtis Tyrone Jones

To be fair, we do try to forgive those who hurt us. This is especially true of those closest to us. Of course, we will get upset and angry for a while, but we don’t really hang on to the issue for long periods of time. We get over it.

The funny thing is we struggle with forgiving ourselves. We find it so difficult. Considering this paradox, why not try and change your vantage point the next time you find it hard to forgive yourself for something? After all, who is closer to you than you?

We already know that forgiveness is an important requirement to maintain good relationships; why not realize that this requirement holds true for nurturing our own mental environment?

Stop beating yourself up!

Rather than beating yourself up for what you are not doing, appreciate and celebrate the things you are doing. When you shift your focus away from what you do not want, you can create a vision for what you do. Don’t fight with yourself – focus on what you do, can do, choose to do, are ready to do.
Iyanla Vanzant

♥

Wednesday Wisdom is a series with short bursts of easy-to-consume wisdom in the form of inspiring stories, verse, quotes, anecdotes, reflections, easy meditation, thought-provoking questions and humor. Oh yeah, some days are not so short.