How to Be Nicer to Yourself

September 7, 2007

Let’s face the facts: there are times when life is just overwhelming. Things fly at you from all directions, you’re in over your head, and you just can’t figure out which way to turn. People are clambering for your attention and you don’t know who to please, who to let down, and which category your personal life is going to fall into. It happens to all of us at some point, but what can we do about it? Well, to handle these overwhelming situations, the best thing to do is to focus on yourself. By spending more of your time on what you can control in this moment you can better prepare yourself for everything to come. Spend your time focused on yourself because once you have you under control, controlling the rest of your life will be simple.

Exploding the Myth of Control

We all, for some strange reason, have those friends or relatives who seem totally in control of their own lives. We stand in awe of these people and the strange powers that they have. They seem to handle stressful situations with aplomb and they never get flustered at being bombarded with a dozen different tasks. We watch them and silently wish that we could be that way too. We wish that we could be so calm and happy all the time. We wish we knew what was going on around us all the time, the way they seem to. Why can’t we be like that too? The answer is that we are just like that, we just might not have realized it yet.

The idea that there are people in the world who have it all together is a complete myth. Do you think Donald Trump never loses money? Of course he does, he’s just gotten good at making more than he loses. Do you think there are times when Steve Jobs get overwhelmed at the amount of work he has to do on any given day? Sure he does, he’s just gotten good at juggling his schedule (his iPhone probably helps). The point is that no matter how these people may seem on the outside, on the inside they have the same doubts and fears that you do.

Nobody is ever in perfect control of their own lives. The truly proactive amongst us have learned to shape and guide the events of their lives to a certain extent, but believe me when I say that a large part of everyone’s day is spent ?rolling with the punches.? No one can ever control all of the things that come into their lives. No one, no matter how spiritual or proactive they may be, has ever created their life so that bad things stopped happening to them. That idea is a myth. You cannot hope to ever stop all of the bad things in your life. This may seem, at first glance, to be a horrible idea and not something that most people who claim to be personal development enthusiasts like to hear, but trust me, this can be quite a comforting thought..

It’s comforting, for me anyway, to think that if hardships and stress happen to everyone, the difference is not in the frequency of their occurrence but in how the events are handled. Put another way, I don’t have to control how often life throws stress at me, I simply have to control my reaction to it. This is an infinitely simpler solution! This means that you do not have to seek to change the way life or the Universe works towards you, that would be a loosing battle in and of itself. You don’t have to try to control fate, you simply have to control yourself which, lets face it, is the only thing you ever truly have control over.

Handling Stress

The key to handling those times in your life when everything is coming at once is to realize that the world won’t fall apart if you just do nothing. People might get mad at you or yell at you, or there may be some small penalty to pay, but in the end the world continues to turn and you will still be alive once everything is said and done so, in the great scheme of things, this is kid’s stuff. Just realize that while there may be things that are of true urgency, most of the time, the crap you have to deal with just isn’t worth the time or effort it takes to put it right.

Look at it from this perspective. If you’re a student, which would you worry about more? The paper due in the class in which you have an ?A? or the paper due in the class in which you have a ?C?? The answer seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it? When put before us like this the solution is clearly that we would worry more about a paper in the ?C? class than the ?A? class. It seems more logical to put more effort into the class in which we are doing badly. What usually ends up happening, however, is that we choose to worry about both equally, split our focus and end up doing poorly on both. This is what tends to happen when life gives us more than we think we can handle: We look at everything we have to do, try to do it all at once, do none of it very well, and still end up stressed.

When life starts throwing things at you, the first thing to do is to stop and breathe for a few seconds. Just take a second and figure out where you are. Don’t worry about how you got there, or even how you’ll get out, those things aren’t important at the moment. What’s important right now is where you are. Write down a list of all your commitments if it will help, just sort out in your head everything that needs to be done. Normally you’ll find that just this simple act alone makes you feel better because you realize you had less to do than you thought, which is always a plus. Once you know where you are, start planning your escape. The first step is to figure out what must be done. Sort out only those tasks which are truly urgent. If something can be pushed back to a later date, push it back. If something can stand being done half-heartedly, do it half-heartedly. You may find you have no tasks that are truly urgent, which should serve to take some weight off your shoulders. The point is to find those tasks that need to be done to the best of your ability and in a timely manner. Pick the tasks that fall into that category and do those first; everything else can wait.

Being Nice to Yourself

Too many people like to beat themselves up when things don’t go according to plan. They try to do everything at once, which never works, so they beat themselves up more for failing. This is really terrible thinking because you’re only serving to make your situation worse. When life swamps you, you’re going to be either your own best friend or you worst enemy. If you try to put undue pressure on yourself, you’re only going to explode. You have to learn to be nicer to yourself when life gets stressful and learn to set yourself up for success rather than failure.

Steps to being nice to yourself:

1. Don’t think while tired. It won’t work; you’ll only make yourself feel worse. Go home and take a nap, then look at the problem fresh once you’re better prepared. You will usually find that it isn’t as bad as your exhausted mind thought it was.
2. Learn when you can’t help. There are times when there is nothing you can do to help solve the problem. When these moments arrive and there is nothing you can do to stop the train from crashing, sit back and relax. Take a bath, take a nap, watch television, just chill out until something happens that you can do something about.
3. Don’t push yourself. Trying to wring solutions out of your head for hours on end won’t help anybody. Eventually you’ll burn yourself out and have wasted a great deal of time. Go easy on yourself, take breaks, breathe and eventually you’ll find your answer.
4. Rig bad days in your favor. If you’re having a terrible day, don’t make it any worse on yourself than it already is. Rig your day for happiness. Go home and don’t do anything. Put on that movie you love, or the music that makes you happy. Have that piece of cake, have that drink. Do something that is strictly for yourself. Leave your stress at the door and pick it up when you go back outside. For right now, make your day a little easier.
5. Focus on one task at a time. You could muti-task, but will that really help anything? Are you truly getting more done, or are you or are you just creating a poorer quality of work?

The key to being nicer to yourself is to learn when you’re pushing too hard. So often we push and push ourselves, only to end up feeling worse. We end up exactly where we started, only now we really feel like crap and are in no position to find our solutions. Learn when it’s just best to go take a nap, or go do something else. Learn when to give up and go home. If what you’re doing isn’t really helping the situation, then just stop and take a break. Remember that you are the only thing you can control, so when you start to feel stressed you can either help yourself out or let yourself be buried by it.

Set Yourself Up for Success

For some reason, people think that just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s worth doing. We think that if your task is hard it must be worthy of your time. Because of this type of thinking we’ve trained ourselves not to see the easy victories in our lives. We’ve tuned out all of the little ways in which we can make ourselves feel better.

Some people start exercise regimes and weigh themselves everyday, wondering why they are so heavy. They tend to weigh themselves in the middle of the day, fully clothed, everyday. This is setting yourself up for complete failure. Will you loose weight? Yes. But you can start making yourself feel better about your weight right now. Weigh yourself naked, in the morning when there is absolutely no food or water to weigh you down. On top of that, don’t weigh yourself everyday. If you weigh yourself every three to six weeks the changes will be more dramatic and you’ll feel much better about them.

Learn to pick the little victories in between the larger battles you fight. Learn to set yourself up for success. Do everything in your power to make sure that you are in the right environment for success. Make sure that you have every tool that you can provide yourself with to help see you through to the end. Why make life harder on yourself when the world seems to be beating up on you as it is? Let yourself have some space to breathe in. Give yourself time to think before you act and you might just save yourself some time in the long run.

It’s important to remember that you can’t change how the world works. You can close your eyes and wish for your problems to go away, but that never worked for anybody. When you’ve got to get into the fight and face them head-on, make sure you’re giving yourself every chance for victory you can afford. But more than all that, just learn to be nice to yourself when life gets rough, because you are the only thing in your life that you can truly control from moment to moment. Help yourself out of difficult situations, but letting go of negative self-talk and judgments. Learn when you need a good kick in the pants and when all you need is a little room to work. Once you’ve figured those out, proceed accordingly.

Posted in Emotions, Fear, Goal Setting, Self Improvement, The Mind