How To Stop Beating Yourself Up Mentally

Appreciating others is easier than looking at our accomplishments. Therefore, most of you fail to do so when it comes to self-compassion and appreciating yourself for success as you are busy criticizing yourself for what did not happen. If you struggle with the same issue, here are steps to help you stop beating yourself up to become more self-reliant and enjoy life fully.

Throughout your lifetime, you criticize yourself for what did not happen or what you did, like making a bad decision, passing a comment, not treating another person nicely, taking a loan, etc. Basically, instead of being as compassionate as you are with your friends, you criticize and judge yourself. You complain and feel guilty and ashamed for what did not happen.

This makes you look negatively at yourself and criticize yourself. Therefore, if you want to create a balance between a realistic view of yourself and working towards the goal of your life, in this regard, we will explain how you can stop beating yourself up.

Reasons You Keep Beating Yourself Up

Humans tend to overanalyze and criticize themselves. This is done as it is believed that it helps perform better. However, when it happens frequently, you start to beat yourself up, and a negative cycle of self-talk starts to surround you, which is detrimental to your mental and physical health, causing issues like depression, anxiety, stress, and various other mental health problems.

Here are some reasons that explain why you put yourself down.

• When you make a mistake in the past and keep thinking about it over the years, it causes guilt, shame, and self-blame, making one fall into the trap of thinking negatively about oneself.
• Despite trying hard to forget past mistakes, the incident keeps replaying in your mind, leaving you feeling trapped and helpless.
• You get stressed over little things, and they overwhelm you. Due to this, you get irritated, anxious, and depressed easily.
• Fear of Failure is another reason why you blame yourself. Everyone knows that failure is an inevitable part of life, yet your fear of failure leads to anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.
• Trauma imprints memory and life and makes one see things differently. When you find yourself self-blaming for what you have not done or look at the past events that have happened and might have caused trauma, you get into the trap of self-blame.
• Another reason why you get into the self-blame cycle is because of comparison. Due to the increase in technology, more and more people are getting connected over social media, which makes one see their shortfall without understanding the difference between virtual and real life.
• Humans have a habit of setting unrealistic expectations, and when you cannot live up to them, you start to criticize yourself. To prove this point, various studies have been performed, and all of them show that when a person wants to be perfect in everything, it accounts for the symptoms of anxiety and depression.
• It’s important to be kind and considerate of others. Still, when you try to please others and be available for them whenever they need you, irrespective of how you feel and what you want to do, you feel insignificant, impacting your mental well-being.
• Overthinking and repeating things that have gone wrong affects your mental health, relationships, and overall well-being. This makes you trapped in a cycle of self-doubt and anxiety.

Ways to Stop Beating Yourself Up

Neither life is perfect nor are you. Therefore, you should always keep space for making mistakes, failures, and hiccups. Allowing room for errors helps you pass through life’s struggles and live a happy life.

Here, we explain different ways to stop beating yourself up for whatever went wrong and didn’t go your way.

1. Face the fear of failure

One of the significant reasons you end up beating yourself is the fear of failure. When you fear that you might fail and things might go south, two things that get affected the most are self-confidence and self-esteem. When you stop challenging yourself and undermine your abilities, you believe you will fail because you start to lose focus and become hopeless. Also, you see yourself negatively and ultimately believe you don’t deserve happiness. This makes you disrespect yourself.

Luckily, by overcoming this fear of failure, you can start to live a fulfilled life. For this, you first need to realize that no one is perfect, and making mistakes is part of being human.

You should make mistakes to be successful personally and professionally because this is how you will learn. When you make a mistake, rather than beating yourself up, see it as an opportunity for growth and learn from it. Mistakes help you develop your confidence and self-respect.

2. Self-compassion and acceptance are the keys

If you are critical of yourself occasionally, it’s normal and healthy. However, if it becomes a habit, you are dealing with the double-edged sword of self-criticism that will keep you motivated on the one hand while harming your self-esteem and causing self-doubt on the other. Self-criticism is also responsible for cognitive distortion, making the mind believe that negative things about yourself are true.

Therefore, when looking for a way to stop beating yourself up, you should learn from your mistakes and try to be the better version of yourself. Each day is a new day for new learning. When you focus more on your limitations and weaknesses than strengths, you look at yourself negatively.

Therefore, instead of looking at everything you don’t have, look at the things you have. Try to practice self-compassion and self-love. Acknowledge all your achievements, strengths, and what you are good at. When you learn to love yourself and practice self-acceptance, even when you make mistakes, you accept and learn from them.

3. Focus on inner child healing

When you beat yourself up for a mistake or a wrong decision, you harm yourself and wound your inner child. Hence, to heal and overcome the scars, take a step back and focus on what went wrong. This will help heal the inner child. Usually, past experiences and childhood traumas are responsible for self-criticism.

To heal, you should recognize that each life experience shapes you and your thoughts, but they do not define you. Your thoughts create vibration, and this is how you attract things. To heal your inner child, you need to acknowledge the pain and trauma you have experienced. You need to pay attention to yourself and your needs like others.

It is okay if you have not received love as a child, as now you can give it to your inner child. Indeed, this process will take time, and it won’t be easy as you will fear talking to your broken self.  But the time you will invest in healing your inner child will be worth it as you can achieve greater self-love and self-acceptance. When you focus on healing your inner child, you build a positive and loving relationship with yourself.

4. Practice meditation

Your emotional baggage is very dear to you, so letting it go is challenging. But you need to remember that there is no sense in holding onto guilt, shame, and disappointment you felt in the past. When you keep thinking of the past, you cannot experience the good things happening in the present moment. If you try to leave the past, but it is still haunting, then try to do meditation, as it will help overcome your past regrets.

There are different kinds of meditation that you can try. You can go with love and kindness meditation that emphasizes kindness and love and makes you realize your importance. It makes you content to develop self-love and even improves interpersonal relationships. Moreover, when you do meditation and keep practicing it, you feel less anxious and depressed.

5. Pay attention to your thoughts

You might think that others are why you judge yourself, but if you look closely, you will find that you are your worst critic. Before anyone can find a mistake, you are the one who judges yourself, looks for negativity, and criticizes yourself. You beat yourself up for something you said or did, and then you get into the negative self-talk cycle, stopping you from growing and preventing you from moving forward. This is where the technique of paying attention to your thoughts and eliminating negative thoughts comes into play.

Thoughts topping is a process that helps break this negative cycle and redirect attention toward constructive and positive thoughts. It enables you to be kind towards yourself, take care of yourself, and keep reminding yourself that you matter.  With the thought-stopping process, you can make the negative thoughts disappear, harming your emotional, mental, and social well-being.

6. Reframe Negative Thoughts

People say to change your negative thoughts into positive ones, but is that possible? Can a negative thought be changed or spun around into a positive talk? Well, it is possible only when you consider how you think. When you see that each of your sentences consists of a negative word or no, you will understand that you are attracting negativity and having negative self-talk.

For instance, if you say I am a failure, I will not be a successful person. You know you are distributing your capabilities, which is pulling you back. Hence, instead of using such negative sentences or focusing on what you don’t want to try, saying this itself says that you have no trust in yourself and are concentrating on what you don’t want in life: change it.

You need to focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want. I am successful. I am working on learning new things. If you use words like this, I am confident you can change the negative self-talk into a positive one as you practice. You can shift your focus from negative sir talk to positive empowerment and growth.

7. Be Mindful

Being mindful means being fully present in the moment without passing judgment. It means being aware of what is happening now with an open and accepting mindset. This practice can also extend to how you treat yourself when you make mistakes. Instead of being harsh and critical towards yourself, mindfulness allows you to be more compassionate and understanding, enabling you to learn from your mistakes.

By developing mindfulness, you can effectively halt negative thoughts, acknowledge them without attachment, and shift your attention elsewhere. Mindfulness can be incorporated into your daily life through various methods such as meditation, mindful breathing, or simply taking a few moments to appreciate your surroundings.

8. Accept Your Imperfections and Flaws

Dealing with imperfections and flaws can be challenging, yet most people try to fix everything to improve. This is a good thing, but when you look at your flaws more than required, you end up beating yourself over things that are a part of being human. Hence, you must stop looking at what is wrong or imperfect to get out of this loop. Instead, you need to learn to embrace your flaws, as it is the first and essential step towards building self-acceptance and self-love.

It’s important to recognize and accept your imperfections. Show yourself compassion and kindness, and don’t let negative self-talk bring you down. Take care of yourself and prioritize self-care. And remember, it’s completely normal to make mistakes and have flaws. Embrace your humanity and know that learning to love yourself unconditionally is worthwhile.

9. Forgive Yourself

We all have had those experiences where we wish to return what we said or did wrong. Moments of regret and failure are some that we would like to change as these incidents leave a mark on a personality and shatter confidence and self-esteem. But can you go back in time and undo things? No, you can’t, so why keep holding onto things you cannot change?

Instead of focusing on negative things, try to think positively and pay attention to your strengths, which will help overcome these negative feelings. Accept what happened in the past. You need to forgive yourself for what went wrong, and today, you need to focus on your strengths, practice Self-care, and see that you learn from your mistakes. With these strategies, you can overcome negative feelings and move forward in life with a positive outlook.

10. Take Responsibility for your mistakes

Acknowledging your past mistakes can be challenging. It involves recognizing and accepting the emotions associated with those errors, forgiving yourself, making necessary amends, and gaining valuable lessons from the experience. Following these steps will pave the way for personal growth and progress.

Hence, it is important to remember that perfection is unattainable, and everyone is prone to making mistakes. However, how you handle these mistakes truly reflects your character. Taking responsibility for your faults demonstrates integrity and reveals your values to others.

11. Listen to your self-talk

Most of you self-talk throughout the day, narrating your triumphs and setbacks. This constant inner dialogue, known as “self-talk” in cognitive-behavioral therapy, often occurs without our conscious awareness.

For instance, when you accidentally spill your coffee, do you immediately label yourself clumsy and believe you ruined everything? Or do you simply laugh it off as a minor mishap? Similarly, when a friend compliments your outfit, do you confidently think, “I feel amazing in this!” or question if she’s subtly criticizing your usual fashion choices? Attention to how you speak to yourself is crucial to transforming your self-perception.

A Word From Calm Sage

When you have decided to walk on the path of healing and stop blaming yourself, you must focus on your thoughts. If you find yourself having negative self-talk and criticizing yourself, remember there is no sense in thinking about the past. If you keep repeating past mistakes and moments, you will be stuck in the exhausting cycle of self-doubt. To overcome this, you need to be compassionate towards yourself, as this will help you be productive and motivated without self-judgment, fear of failure, or self-criticism.

In addition to this, you need to remember that being perfect is not always possible. Humans are bound to make errors, and they have flaws. It is okay to make mistakes; everyone sometimes goes through hard times and feels painful or confusing emotions.

Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself the way you deserve to be treated. If you face issues and need support, you can drop us a line. We at CalmSage are here to help.