Self-criticism can take a toll on our minds and bodies
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This assertion may sit outside conventional medical science and mainstream accepted wisdom, but it aligns with my own experience.
After trying unsuccessfully for years to overcome depression/anxiety, chronic fatigue and other mysterious illnesses (asthma, skin problems, headaches, back tension/pain) using conventional/material remedies (antidepressants, exercise, diets), I added emotion-based treatments to my regimen about 6 years ago, and have had much greater success.
In particular, I've undertaken practices that identify negative beliefs, traumas and sabotaging behavioural patterns that are held in the subconscious, then allow these issues to be understood and resolved. Self-criticism has been big part of what I've been able to work through.
It's been no quick fix (it seems I've had a lot of baggage to work through), but bit by bit, as my emotional health has improved, my physiological health has steadily improved, as have all the outer-world indicators like relationships, productivity and career.
I'm now comfortable suggesting that this approach is overlooked by mainstream medicine to the great detriment of many people suffering chronic illness, and given the link with inflammation that has been suggested in this article and elsewhere, and that I seem to have experienced myself, far more progress could be made in addressing inflammatory and autoimmune illnesses if this approach were to be taken seriously.
You're welcome to contact me directly for details - address in profile.
Conventional medical science is still at the level chemistry was in the alchemy days. Heck, it was just a few decades ago that they thought lobotomy was a cure -- and tons of other BS non-scientific convictions held in the last and this century.
It should itself better align with individual experiences and physiological responses...
There's a workbook (Mind over Mood 2e, Greenberger & Padesky, $18 on Amazon) that is often recommended.
I don't suffer from any kind of mental illness but even so have found CBT useful for managing my day-to-day emotions.
The techniques that have been most successful for me are those that involve kinesiology muscle-testing, which identify where emotional triggers lead to neurological/physiological responses. There are several versions of it around. There's a book about a do-it-yourself version called Self Clearing [1]. I've used that approach a lot, but it's worth having a good practitioner to see from time to time. Good practitioners are hard to find, but persistence pays handsomely in the end.
To my knowledge the closest thing that mainstream psychiatry offers is CBT as another commenter suggested; I can't attest to its effectiveness as I'd already sought and found other approaches before having a chance to try it.
I'm happy to share more details via email. I've found that discussions about this stuff on forums like this very quickly get stuck in the weeds.
[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Clear-Your-Shit-Accelerated-Evolut...
It's a nascent area, so solid references are scant. I hope to remedy that myself some day.
A better known author on the topic is Bruce Lipton, whose 2006 book The Biology of Belief [1] introduced these concepts to a broad audience.
I've found the book insightful and helpful, but whilst he's a credentialed scientist himself (former cell biology researcher at Stanford School of Medicine), he gets hand-wavy about concepts like epigenetics and quantum entanglement and leaves himself vulnerable to attack from mainstream skeptics.
Still, I recommend the book for anyone who is able to overlook that. The science may be unclear but the core principles and healing techniques are solid, in my experience of applying them over the past 6+ years.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-10th-Anniversary-Consc...
> I'm now comfortable suggesting that this approach is overlooked by mainstream medicine to the great detriment of many people suffering chronic illness
If people are interested in this, checkout https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connectio...
I think it started as a measure of self protection after a long string of broken promises when I was a kid, but it's a shitty way to live. My biggest realization was just that pessimism is no more logical than optimism.
My solution has been to give equal time to positive thoughts. So, if I find myself thinking for a couple minutes about how something might go horribly wrong, I spend the next couple minutes imagining what the best case scenario would be like.
I'm basically forcing hope back into my life.
Why do people always bring that in ? Suffering of the same stuff described in parent posts, I tend to focus on stability and appreciation of what is here and now. I guess it's another way to cope with it.
It helps you realise that a lot of positive stuff will happen during your day that you don't notice, because the anxiety about what the future might hold dominates your attention. Even if it's as simple as making toast with that perfect level of crunchiness, or saying good morning to someone and noticing a smile.
I'm a strong advocate of finding a therapist you trust, though. These things can help a great deal on the surface, which is fantastic, but it's important to have somebody there if your awareness goes deeper into your past, which is where the 'why' is.
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cynic+gratitude+journal
[1]: https://theweek.com/articles/734555/how-overcome-inner-cynic...
[2]: https://medium.com/the-mission/gratitude-journaling-for-cyni...
Being optimistic, without setting expectations so high that you're constantly disappointed, seems to be a more pleasurable way to live your life. Also, the consequences of failure to meet whatever high standards self-critical people put on themselves are rarely as bad as you think before it happens.
I like your way of finding some balance between being pessimistic and optimistic.
I don't know, in my experience having high expectations seems to set you up for a higher fall and a lower upside, thus leading to less happiness. I have generally quite low expectations and am generally quite happy. Some people around me have generally much higher expectations and are generally quite unhappy. The things in life where I do have some higher expectations about are also the things I'm the least happy about.
I used to feel this way, but I no longer think that optimism and expectation have to be that closely linked. To me optimism is about having hope, not expectations. Similarly, my pessimism isn't about what I expect to happen, it's about what I fear happening.
So, I choose to balance my fear and hope.
On the second part: or you could just set high expectations and learn how to live in a constant disappointment without being any less happy because of it.
Confession is possible because of the Gospel: God saves sinners not perfect people. " But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." We can admit to our failure because we stand not on our own righteousness but on Christ's.
In it we can find acceptance just as we are and hope for change in the future: "he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion"
Directed self talk can be very helpful. You arr the person you listen to most in life and what you tell yourself can radically alter your perceptions.
That said, self talk is very hard. We are easily deceived, and you can get trapped in your own thoughts: anxiety, depression, neurosis.
We're not meant to go it alone. Seek help. "Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed."
I've recently started therapy (four sessions so far), and I really struggle with self-criticism and self-worth in that I question if I should take up the therapist's time when there are people out there with bigger problems than me. People lose their spouses to suicide and their kids in car accidents, and I make enough money to spend it on complaining about not being happy enough for 45 minutes a week.
I also question my therapist's motives, since they obviously want to sell this service and would probably put up with any of my nonsense for a quick buck, while shaking their head at how minor my issues are compared to their other clients. But it feels nice to be able to talk uninterrupted for a whole session, without a regular conversation's context switching back and forth, so there's that.
It is difficult to be obedient to every last commandment in Mormonism. I would feel guilty for a multitude of small things, like forgetting to read religious texts one day, forgetting to visit my assigned home teaching family one month, simply thinking of a swear word, drinking soda with caffeine, and many other insignificant foibles. I also felt tormented by the fact that my conscience did not align with what I was told God thought was right, particularly regarding the treatment of LGBT people in Mormonism.
I became an agnostic secular humanist. My mind no longer considers my prior thought patterns healthy, and I practice mindfulness meditation to stop unnecessarily negative self-talk.
Now that I don’t have to be perfect, I can be good.
You don't have to practice the inward neurotic obsession of identifying flaws or the external compulsion of alleviating the burden of knowing yourself - because you'll focus on them when you do. Every person you meet knows you and every person you know is you.
It would seem obvious that when you hurt someone, you are merely hurting a different version of yourself, a version simply displaced in time and space and sitting in another man's shoes.
But we always are that, generally, we experience those emotions eventually, in some shape or form. We judge we get judged. Til the end of time, eventually we die, we are alone, with only our thoughts, and a question of what we will become next. And all we have is everything we have ever known and thought, on a deathbed. And all we have ever known and thought are, how we know ourselves and how we know others.
And all of that is in the mind, at the moment of death.
So I think while living, it's important to let go of whatever causes the cycle of wanting to judge and wanting to hurt, people hurt when they feel hurt.
When we feel judged, we judge. But generally, we can never really know if we are being judged or hurt. Because life is an experience, of coming and going, of interacting with a self we think we are not, but we are.
Zen koans can be good to think about (to me), when one dwells too much on what a self means, when one has to interact with other selves in real life. People need a sense of self, because sometimes we are with other selves, sometimes we are with our self.
However, it's very useful to recognize that self-criticism is the _emotional_ self giving feedback, rather than the _logical_ self. Obviously, this is the worst self to receive feedback from!
I think once you can reconceptualize this, you see self-criticism as the dark half of constructive feedback. You can practice self-compassion, yet still independently recognize that you can logically focus on improvement (without the emotional criticism).
IMHO that's a very unhealthy perspective. Your emotional self is just as important, healthy, and useful as your intellectual side. They are both essential; try to operate using one without the other and you will be crippled.
Although those are comically extreme examples, media and society makes is easy to do this sort of thing on smaller scales. I also realized that even when I did come out on top of any mental comparisons, it did not make me feel any better. So now I try to catch winner think early and instead remember: there will only ever be one me, I should strive to be the best, most complete version of myself I can be. This mindset has been a far more productive
Facebook often shows you posts and photos from the same time in previous years, like memories but not particularly authentic. I found myself getting into a worse state of mind when I started comparing who I am now to who I was a year ago, two years ago... because my own highlight reel back then was far more exciting and vibrant than it has been more recently. Or that's what Facebook will have you believe, because it's just a one-dimensional window into a vast and diverse existence. It won't show you anything from your past that doesn't unambiguously register as 'happy'.
It makes it really easy to forget that there are positive notes to things you can't share so easily, so the comparison is as misleading as it is damaging.
For me it was, and is, all about my faith. This article doesn’t acknowledge that aspect of healing, but this has been very real in my life. I’d recommend reading the book Wild at Heart by John Eldridge for anyone curious.
It finally clicked for me when someone described how we are seemingly capable of providing compassion/validation/understanding/kindness to and/or seeking them from others. However, we were really bad at giving ourselves those same things.
It made me realize that I was inflicting tiny psychological wounds at every turn, saying things like "You're such an idiot"..."how could you be so stupid to do..."...or the worst one..."You're never going to succeed and everyone will see you as just as much of a failure as you see yourself if you don't do this perfect".
It is not something that can be changed over night and takes consistent practice. It takes about as much effort, for me, as learning a new intellectually challenging skill. However, it has been incredibly worthwhile, valuable, and life-changing in many ways.
This is so true. But I do wonder whether this is because when we apply it for others, because it is "distant" to ourselves, we afford a certain amount more "slack". Maybe.
The point being, we are likely trained from an early age to focus on criticizing our negative behavior(s) instead of reinforcing our positive ones.
That makes perfect sense though. It is harder to forgive our own faults and failures because we generally care more about our own outcomes than we do about others'.
However, that is not to say we should not acknowledge mistakes, take accountability for actions, and constantly strive to be better. I think you have to do both though, and unfortunately, I think many people are far more self-critical as opposed to their own best advocate.
Mind trained for ubiquitous perfectionism / black-white thinking* -> perfectionist self-criticism -> chronic stress
If this is right, the alternative solution is to not apply the thinking patterns that lead to performing well in those types of work in those many areas of life where there is no clear answer, or no place for such patterns.
Even worse, those with perfectionism will either A) Not ever complete the work because nothing can ever be perfect, or B) See their work as a failure due to it not being perfect. "A" causes work-related issues when timelines are unmet or interpersonal problems with coworkers. And "B" means the individual always sees themselves as a failure, no matter how much they put into an effort.
Sometimes, "good enough" really is good enough and making mistakes is something all humans do. For perfectionists...they'll invest all their energy into trying not to face that aspect of their humanity. Once they do face it, it can be really difficult.
I finally left that behind around age 40, mostly from just being worn out by it I think.
- I'm not 'normal'. Expecting life to proceed 'normally' doesn't make sense for me.
- Other people's expectations are none of my business (related to marriage, property ownership etc).
- I may die before the end of this sentence, or in 60 years time; 'too late' is relative. (Phew, made it).
I'm not making assumptions about them applying in your case, but wanted to share in case they're helpful.
Four years later - I'm about to get married and we're thinking of buying - or living overseas. My income has gone up. I have so many friends.
There's no timeline. There's no time limit. My aunt got married for the first time and then she got retired. A friend of mum's got married for the first time five years ago.
My life isn't yours and don't set a timeline by it. If you're stuck in a rut try and get creative, but most of the things you try - you'll still have to try something else afterwards. There's nothing wrong with having a few experiences, especially if you're bored of social media and video games. And so many people will envy you for it. "Success" in adult things is just when you're too busy to try new things - lots of people would love a bit of failure.
There is a difference between observation and judgement. Sometimes it's easy for people to separate the two. For example, let's say I am drawing a picture. I draw a line. It is a line. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a fact.
The line is not straight. Again, it's just an observation. The line is not straight enough. Here I'm comparing the observation against some ideal. It's a kind of discrimination. When drawing a line in this circumstance, there is some advantage to it being straighter than the line I drew. This has an air of judgement to it, but I can still view it objectively if I fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of making the line more or less straight.
I am bad a drawing. This may also be true, but we're slowly making our way from a helpful objective comparison to an unhelpful judgement. Against what criteria am I bad? Do I need to be better than I am?
I should not draw because I am bad at it. Now we're making a lot of implied judgements and making conclusions based on a lot of things that we haven't necessarily thought about. What's wrong with drawing badly? Why should I avoid it? etc, etc.
So in that way, the stress is not inherent in the "perfectionism". It is not stressful that a math question may only have a single defined answer. It's not even inherently stressful if I don't know the answer. It's only really stressful if I think I should know the answer, or if I'm pretending to know the answer when I don't.
There is nothing wrong with thinking critically. It's the assignment of value where it becomes problematic.
i totally messed up my career, i backed myself into a corner by ending up a jack of all trades. I saw it coming, i should have been pushing to ensure i was more employable after my positions ended but i became complacent and now im paying the price. I know hindsight is 20/20 but that doesnt really stop the feeling that i should have been better prepared.
so the moral of the story here is dont let yourself fall into that trap in the first place, no job lasts forever, no matter how much praise is heaped on you for what you do your position can end unexpectedly, be ready for it as its easier to do than forgiving yourself for not doing it
The caveat was that all this was done with no manufacturer approval, i had to be able to make any alterations without damaging the warranty of the device, there was no correct process or list of things i was or wasnt allowed to do, as long as i got the job done the how didnt matter.
this left me using all sorts of various tricks, exploits, scripts and tools to do the job, im not a great coder by any means but i know enough to get what i need done in a few languages, i also dealt with basic IT support and another random requests that came in such as data recovery (i have never had any sort of training for any of this, im entirely self taught, my skill isnt in a particular area really, its my ability to adapt and solve problems that gets me by)
The problem was i knew this job was not going to last, as the years rolled on and the security of mobile devices tightened up it became more and more difficult to achieve what was needed, the advent of efuse protection like Samsungs Knox flag made things even harder and many companies previously requiring these solutions were now having custom budget devices direct from chinese oems rather than customizing off the shelf devices from the likes of samsung or htc etc. it became clear that the job wouldnt last.
However i enjoyed what i did, so i became complacent, i just carried on doing my job ignoring the fact that it would inevitably end, i should have been preparing myself for a new career, either strengthening my coding or obtaining IT certifications, anything to ensure i was able to transition into a new industry more smoothly once the inevitable end came.
when i was finally made redundant i found myself in limbo, i lacked call center/customer service skills to get me into first line support roles usually being told i was too technical and better suited to a second line position, however having no experience in a support role i was not getting second line jobs either, usually being told "there was nothing wrong, the other candidate was just a better fit" or something similar i take this generally to mean they had time served in a previous role so were a better prospect
now after a staggering number of applications, phone screens and interviews i have given up on finding a job in IT, i can understand why few are willing to take a chance, it makes sense to take someone with time served over an unknown quantity. I know there are those who will say i just need to keep applying but eventually you have to start considering if your efforts are wasted, especially as the work gap on my CV grows larger.
almost every significant job ive gotten has been because someone took a chance on me or noticed my potential and when they did i have always excelled usually going from "the new guy" to a key player very quickly. it doesnt matter what i have to do i have an ability to get very good very quickly (likely a quirk of my autism) but this isnt something i can really demonstrate and unless potential employers go to the trouble of contacting my previous employers to confirm my claims they have little but my word to go on.
But that also comes from a mentality of being on the bottom and working your way up. At some point the people on the top get to relax. Is that you? Do you get to relax and not climb all the time? That self criticism can cause you to never enjoy anything because you’re always trying to reach the next level.
When i'm on periods of fatigue and "other mysterious illnesses" i often think:
- I'm working too hard; - "It's stress"; - Sleeping bad or tired and don't know why; - Just keep going, this will pass;
It takes a lot of time for me to understand that self criticism is causing all the problems.
A real life example is, i'm working on a project, and i've been having a good performance and i've been praised about it, but since i'm working alone my head thinks:
- "They're just motivating me, this doesn't even have 40% unit test coverage". - "When the i start working with other people, this won't work". - "When i integrate react with my api, this will go bananas".
Truth is, i have zero evidence of this, and truth is, it's not that bad, but in my head, i have this deep fear that all of those things will become true.
Generally it hits me when i reach point where i'm out of ideas on why i'm feeling so bad and so stressed and i start exercising and my head relaxes and starts thinking and only then i realise, "hey, chill dude. Remember that you have a tone more stuff important than that project, life, wife , kid, cat, family."
And i keep exercising so i stay with a focused mind.
Until i stop because i started a new project or other cool stuff, only to fall on the same trap all over again.
I hate this, and i haven't been able to overcome this for years. It's up and down.
Does anyone know where I can learn more about this?
I'll speculate that chronic self-criticism is, results from, and/or produces chronic stress. Chronic stress is known to be harmful to health in several ways.
You might start with an interesting article [1]: From Stress to Inflammation and Major Depressive Disorder: A Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression. Not paywalled, maybe a place to begin looking at connections between self-criticism (which I find immensely stressful and debilitating) and consequent illnesses.
Cultivating, maintaining and protecting a healthy and positive inner dialogue is so important, as is avoiding doubt worshipping. It's interesting the type of negativity that positivity attracts.
Recognizing doubt worshipping is incredibly beneficial to learn to recognize.
Little by little, aware, or unaware, doubt worshippers spread seeds of doubt, attempting to validate and plant their own self-doubt by projecting their interpreted self-doubts on others. Some seeds of doubt eventually sprout if they make up too much of the energy and mindset around us.
Many doubt worshippers take things very personally even if someone seems happy or is stretching their own boundaries. Society in many ways supports seeking external validation before inner, and buying back our self-worth through many external forms.
I try to surround and anchor the world around me with as many creators, who are creating, in as many ways as possible. It's helped me to remember that innovation can only exist in a mindset of possibility, and keep a buffer between the negativity that can be around.
People who hang onto positivity much longer than most are also great to learn from. Many have learnt how to demonstrate being genuinely happy or supportive of others - something that doubt worshippers don't do for themselves.
Among doubt worshippers, self-criticisms can be found presented as rational thought, skepticism of thought or logical behavior. One question that reveals individuals practicing negativity is: Does it mean there is no understanding of something if a someone hasn't understood it yet and chooses to be skeptical? It would be interesting to explore if faithless cynicism really is productive.
There's a big difference between thinking less about yourself, and thinking less of yourself. One frees you up, the latter can debilitate.
We all can identify behaviour like this in our lives, and sometimes in ourselves. There's benefit from trying to be aware of this. I don't have any answers or desires to change the behaviour of others, only to be able to be free to be as hopeful, and positive as someone else might want to be doubtful and self-defeating.
Learning how to push forward, with incremental and additive effort is much different than pushing yourself through self-criticism.
It's nice to learn to genuinely not give a f about what the world thinks, only what you think, and how well treat yourself, and as an indicator of that, how well you treat others. By setting our own bar, haters often reveal themselves to be doing little themselves and will see what they want to no matter you may want to show.
Let's go out on a limb and consider that while being less critical of yourself addresses the symptoms of disappointment, it doesn't address the causes of inutility of smart and capable people.
Let's consider that the quote "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" is actually pretty insightful.
We are, as a culture and a species, failing in myriad ways. In my humble opinion, we should feel bad and we should change as well. We're just powerless to do much because of the strength of institutions that exist out of ritual and not out of rationality.
We're left to hate ourselves, because nature and ignorant humans with money and power do not care what we think, and have an answer for everything we do.
Furthermore, is there evidence that mankind is meant to be well? I've heard native Americans talk about how nobody went hungry and nobody was broke before the concepts that colonialism brought to reality, but isn't that part of the cost of a modern world?
It's horrific that human history reveals that periods of conflict are usually actually pretty helpful for advancing technology (ww2, middle east, Internet to some extent), but there's no obvious alternative.
It seems that humans are invested in not going collectively backwards, technologically and this the possibilities created by new things becomes a sort of ew cursive expectation that we are trying to meet.
Folks a hair older than I am remember a time when man had not gone to space, much less landed on the moon. Now we are within several decades of having permanent structures on the moon that human beings will live on. It took us tens of thousands of years, but now we are here.
Humans being have to go forward until there's a better alternative.
Personally, I think we'll all be better off when AI surpasses us. If we behave, maybe it will fix our planet and leave us somewhere safe while it explores the cosmos.
I don't hate myself, either. I used to, but I had to stop when I put the bottle down. I'm not a psychologist, but self loathing is very often linked to some sort of addiction or disruptive emotional condition, just by my experience with other addicts and other miscreants like myself.
I don't hate myself, either. I used to, but I had to stop when I put the bottle down. I'm not a psychologist, but self loathing is very often linked to some sort of addiction or disruptive emotional condition, just by my experience with other addicts and other miscreants like myself.
I can relate to that - not exactly "putting down the bottle" but with the self loathing, being a miscreant and at the same time letting go of the self loathing. Not suddenly, but bit by bit in different scenarios of life, as I hopefully become a more mature person.
The phrase "Approach, friend" is from a song lyric that stuck with me.
A soldier calls out into the night:
- Halt! Who goes there?!
- ... Death
- Approach, friend.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/marillion/forgotten+sons_200889...
nature and ignorant humans with money and power do not care what we think, and have an answer for everything we do.
It is interesting to me that you identify an error mode in one sentence, and then demonstrate in yourself a few lines later. It seems you've abrogated your responsibility for your own well being, and moreover intellectually believe that this is the correct position.
The best argument against what you're saying is that if you accept it, then you accept futility of action. Since most such discussions are leading toward positive change, this makes the argument self-defeating. Another argument against is the simple truth that people can find happiness in the most unpleasant of circumstances, and unhappiness in the most pleasant. Society will never be perfect, therefore it really is within our power to be at peace.
Ironically, it is from a position of inner peace that the greatest and most lasting and most beneficial societal change can spring.
Please keep those two things seperable in your mind. Harsh criticism in nearly unlimited quantities is very healthy when directed at the powerful.