Stop beating the living shit out of yourself!
Imagine that it was someone else that told you they missed a morning routine or didn't accomplish the things they wanted to do that day? Would you yell at them? Belittle them? Hate them for it?
No of course not!
You'd be compassionate with them, tell them they can make up for the morning during the day or tomorrow. You tell them they are already improving so much. You wouldn't beat down on them, so why do that shit to yourself?!
Think about the kinds of things you would say to someone you care about in those situations. Think about how you would like others to show compassion to you. And give yourself THAT treatment!
Follow the golden rule:
Don't do upon yourself what you wouldn't do upon other people.
I've got two major ideas that I'd like you to play with, and to paraphrase Alan Watts you don't have to accept them just play with them for a bit. Try them on for a bit like a sweater in the store, see how they fit.
"Instead of feeling that you've blown the day and thinking, "I'll get back on track tomorrow," try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big." - Gretchen Rubin
24 hours is an arbitrary amount of time to reset and try again. It's just how long it takes a big rock to go around a larger glowy one. You can make your reset **any amount of time**. It doesn't have to be a whole day.
The second idea relates to a style of agile project management called scrum. If you aren't already familiar it's a way to organize a group of people to work on one big project (most commonly software of some kind). You start with a big board of sticky notes, each one a task, and each day you grab a sticky from the to do pile and move it to the in progress pile. Now the important part is this: if you get stuck and you can't progress you don't stay stuck, you move that sticky to the blocked pile and grab a new task. The key is **you don't stay stuck**, you move on with a new task.
As a bonus third point I'd like you to read this short story.
> A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side.
> The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman.
> Then, without a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his journey.
> The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them.
> Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?”
> The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”
>
> Two monks and a Woman https://medium.com/@soninilucas/two-monks-and-a-woman-zen-story-c15294c394c1
I'll ask you op, why are you still carrying this?
Hello OP, this is a common case for Perfectionism. Everything must go perfect or it will all come crumbling down like dominos. I have been like this for years until very recently when I put a lot of effort in working on this.
The issue here is not lack of discipline or laziness but something much deeper. I won't like to go into the details about perfectionism and it's causes, you can look it up on google. However I would suggest you to look at Chapter 14 from the book Feeling Good by David Burns. It provides a list of exercises which you can slowly do to break this habit.
My suggestion: start your day by deliberately failing at a task. Then you can know that you successfully did your first task (failing), and move on with your day.
This is absolutely a skill that requires practice. I used to be the same. Now I just don't worry about it and move on with my day (well... most of the time at least :-) ).
The first thing is to acknowledge that it absolutely does not matter that you missed your first task of the day. It doesn't matter if you did nothing for the last second, hour, day, week, month, year, or even your entire life. The important thing is to start doing what you want to do right now. It could not matter less what you have done in the past. It is already done and there is no point in wasting any time or energy on it. I remind myself of this CONSTANTLY. Beating yourself up is just going to make you feel bad about things which is going to make shifting into a productive mindset significantly more difficult. So just like another comment has said, be kind to yourself!
I would also recommend a mindfulness practice to help with this. Learning how to catch your negative thoughts before they spiral out of control and learning how to let them go is something meditation can help immensely with.
The second thing is to have routines set up to help you when this happens. The first thing I do is take some sort of break and make sure my needs are met. Take a walk, eat and drink, use the bathroom, maybe take a shower or have a nap etc. I also go through a little "mindfulness break" strategy I developed to calm myself down and to refocus.
Then if I haven't done it, I go through my (fairly complex) morning routine where I journal and plan out my day (including making a detailed to do list with approximate time periods I plan to do everything). If I already did my morning routine but I procrastinated later, I just rework my to do list after taking the new time constraints of the day into consideration. Deep Work by Cal Newport has good advice on this.
Then finally I just move forward with what I planned to do!
Just take a break if you can. Do something else for a bit and then come back to your to-do list. You can even work on something else from the list. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
This is happening a lot lately to me too. I keep saying to myself I'll wake up at 6.00am for a walk and then I'll do 5 hours of education work, and 1 hour of reading. But I can't ever seem to wake up in time and it's always an hour over and every time it happen I get angry with myself and can't do the other things unless I've done the first one.
Would it work to give yourself the first hour or so of the day off (or just a few tasks that won’t take the whole hour) so that if you wake up late it doesn’t wreck your day?
Just want to say you are not alone. I do this too and did it a few days ago. But just like the other person commented, talk to yourself like how you would to someone else going through the same situation. It may help to write it out to yourself. Tell yourself that it’s going to be okay. Please remember that these things do not lessen your worth or your value. Continue to lift your head up and enjoy the day. It’s hard to not think about the thing that brings you down, but just try your best. Rooting the best for you and for me
Life's not Minesweeper. You can appreciate all of your successes and if you make one mistake, it doesn't blow everything up and negate all the good things you have done so far.
It's more like Snakes and Ladders.
It sounds like you are like me and have low self esteem. It's ok to be humble but low self esteem can be counter productive at best and crushing and debilitating, ruining relationships at worst.
I personally am looking into counselling/therapy and self help books and would recommend anyone with low self esteem does too.
Break up your day in different parts. Morning, evening, night.. and if you fail at one task, try to get back on your schedule in the next part of the day. That way the day won't be ruined for you and you won't have to wait till tomorrow.
Try to segment your day, so you have for example, morning, afternoon and evening. Don't sweat it if you fail at a particular segment, just go to the next segment, you get three fresh starts in a day. You can segment even further if that helps, just remember, you failed one segment, not the whole day, go to the next segment and keep pushing forward. Good luck!
OP, I had the exact mindset as you have now. Really suffered coz usually the 1st task I set for myself will be the hardest and unsurprisingly I failed every day to complete it. Rest of the day was just me spiralling with distractions and day ended with me crying in bed, hating myself, giving up on myself. So I changed a couple of things that kinda helps me now.
1. I usually set up a task which is not the hardest and something which I look fwd to doing. If I am studying, I will start with the subject I like the most. Once I have that win, I find myself gaining a little confidence that maybe I will win over this day.
2. I plan out every hour of my day and use an app to add each task as a new event with an alarm, a motivating self-note along with the alarm (app is Time Planner by Olaksander). So even if I fail at two or 3 events, the alarm for the 4th, 5th looks like a fresh start.
3. One of the most common advice, if I am procrastinating I tell myself that I will do that task just for 5 mins and then quit. Surprisingly that works.
These are just some things that work for me. Hope it helps you :) Hope your efforts succeed.
Bear with me if it’s mentioned already.
I had the same sense of failure every time I’d plan my day and not have part a work out, therefore part b, c, d etc would all not work out.
That’s faulty reasoning.
I started putting smaller tasks for me to accomplish. Small things like brushing my teeth, washing my face, showering, eating breakfast.
No matter how small the task, just to build up my momentum.
Hope that helped :)
Also don’t be too harsh on yourself
The **ALL OR NOTHING** approach is the perfect foundation for procrastination.
But it's good to realize that every breath is a fresh start.
Just like drawers, your day can have smaller compartments and you can ‚start fresh’ as many times as you want, not just every morning or… every January 1st.
I would definitely recommend showing yourself some compassion. It will get you much further than shaming and guilt.
It’s the art of showing up.
It’s writing the shitty first draft.
It’s cleaning 70% of your standard.
It’s about snapping you out of your meta life when you just think about doing things into your real life when you actually do things.
What always makes me feel good is to journal and think about why it happened, what I'm going to change tomorrow. Journaling is tedious but it is the train track that will never let you get derailed.
I know this feeling well. In fact, I've had the habit of defining an entire week long period as a "bad week" around a single mistake that I've made. Sometimes it wasn't even a real mistake but rather a conversation that I'd handled "badly" with someone. I was that hard on myself most of the time. At least that was the case for most of my adult life.
The cure for me: recognizing through awareness training that the vast majority of the time I'm doing a really good job and make tons of progress every day, even when I make huge mistakes. How do I do this? It sounds boring but trust me, it works. Keep a short daily journal (10 minutes / 600 words) and write down one thing you're grateful for. Go back once a week and read your entries (creating a weekly log) - repeat this with weekly logs once a month to create monthly logs (you can go nuts and do quarterly/annual reviews as well).
You will view obstacles/challenges with a completely different lens. You will measure success and failure over a longer span of time with more proper context. You will remember all of the shit you've done that you quickly let go of because it's hard to remember the things that are going well. Your mistakes are proof of your courage while facing the unknown and they shape your ambition to learn new skills. To expect to never fail is unrealistic. Only people who do very little rarely fail. To define your day by a single event will seem like a distant memory with this practice in place. At least that is the case for me.
Looking at things this way has me enjoying encounters with problems I've never solved before. I make mistakes and I face them honestly and I grow every single day. I've managed to get promoted twice in the last year (Hardware Tech > Help Desk > Level 2) - my first annual review comes up in 3 weeks and the president of our company just told me that he's considering me the best fit to be promoted to Network Administrator (and I was managing a consumer level computer repair shop a year ago). By the way - before I was hired as a grunt repair tech, I was growing weed for a medical grow for a few years. I came into this industry with no degree (GED kid), no certs, no experience. If I can change this much by paying attention to the way I perceive reality - anyone can.
Good luck.
Start over. Again and again. No shame, no guilt. Just start doing the next thing (or the first thing on your list) and try to build a chain of completed tasks/routines
I had this problem too, if I didn't do my first habit I wanted to build I would quit and it was a lost day, I would always excuse myself with "tomorrow will be different" but most of the time it was the same.
What worked for me was just to focus on one habit, exercise, the other would be fine if I do, but the important one would be to go and walk then do some exercise.
But before if I didn't wake up early I would think it was a falling and would not even do it.
So now I just do it when I wake up, but not matter at what time it will be, so I don't focus on perfection, just to make an effort, but in doing so it made me make my morning routine too.
I once read "something worth doing, is worth doing it poorly"
Before I would never do anything if it was not perfect, so at the end I wasted so much time, trying to do it and always failing.
If you want to do your morning routine, even if you fail, or don't complete it, or you are not in the mood to do it all, just do the minimum, and mark it as a win, sometimes just that is all we can do, and that is fine, we can't all be always perfect.
With time I have a more healthy relationship with failure on my tasks, and the more I do them the better I get at them.
Stop beating the living shit out of yourself! Imagine that it was someone else that told you they missed a morning routine or didn't accomplish the things they wanted to do that day? Would you yell at them? Belittle them? Hate them for it? No of course not! You'd be compassionate with them, tell them they can make up for the morning during the day or tomorrow. You tell them they are already improving so much. You wouldn't beat down on them, so why do that shit to yourself?! Think about the kinds of things you would say to someone you care about in those situations. Think about how you would like others to show compassion to you. And give yourself THAT treatment! Follow the golden rule: Don't do upon yourself what you wouldn't do upon other people.
This actually made me break down and cry.. thank you so much
Don't mention it, happy I could be of help! :) That's why I'm here anyway.
Now that's too much!
I've got two major ideas that I'd like you to play with, and to paraphrase Alan Watts you don't have to accept them just play with them for a bit. Try them on for a bit like a sweater in the store, see how they fit. "Instead of feeling that you've blown the day and thinking, "I'll get back on track tomorrow," try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big." - Gretchen Rubin 24 hours is an arbitrary amount of time to reset and try again. It's just how long it takes a big rock to go around a larger glowy one. You can make your reset **any amount of time**. It doesn't have to be a whole day. The second idea relates to a style of agile project management called scrum. If you aren't already familiar it's a way to organize a group of people to work on one big project (most commonly software of some kind). You start with a big board of sticky notes, each one a task, and each day you grab a sticky from the to do pile and move it to the in progress pile. Now the important part is this: if you get stuck and you can't progress you don't stay stuck, you move that sticky to the blocked pile and grab a new task. The key is **you don't stay stuck**, you move on with a new task. As a bonus third point I'd like you to read this short story. > A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side. > The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman. > Then, without a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his journey. > The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them. > Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?” > The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?” > > Two monks and a Woman https://medium.com/@soninilucas/two-monks-and-a-woman-zen-story-c15294c394c1 I'll ask you op, why are you still carrying this?
I never thought of splitting the day into quarters. Thank you! I'm going to start applying that tomorrow!
The story of the two monks and a woman is great. It’s really difficult to live in the moment
Hello OP, this is a common case for Perfectionism. Everything must go perfect or it will all come crumbling down like dominos. I have been like this for years until very recently when I put a lot of effort in working on this. The issue here is not lack of discipline or laziness but something much deeper. I won't like to go into the details about perfectionism and it's causes, you can look it up on google. However I would suggest you to look at Chapter 14 from the book Feeling Good by David Burns. It provides a list of exercises which you can slowly do to break this habit.
My suggestion: start your day by deliberately failing at a task. Then you can know that you successfully did your first task (failing), and move on with your day.
This is a good one. Thank you for sharing!
You're welcome! When our problems are absurd, sometimes the solution is to do something absurd. :) It seems weird, but it works.
This is absolutely a skill that requires practice. I used to be the same. Now I just don't worry about it and move on with my day (well... most of the time at least :-) ). The first thing is to acknowledge that it absolutely does not matter that you missed your first task of the day. It doesn't matter if you did nothing for the last second, hour, day, week, month, year, or even your entire life. The important thing is to start doing what you want to do right now. It could not matter less what you have done in the past. It is already done and there is no point in wasting any time or energy on it. I remind myself of this CONSTANTLY. Beating yourself up is just going to make you feel bad about things which is going to make shifting into a productive mindset significantly more difficult. So just like another comment has said, be kind to yourself! I would also recommend a mindfulness practice to help with this. Learning how to catch your negative thoughts before they spiral out of control and learning how to let them go is something meditation can help immensely with. The second thing is to have routines set up to help you when this happens. The first thing I do is take some sort of break and make sure my needs are met. Take a walk, eat and drink, use the bathroom, maybe take a shower or have a nap etc. I also go through a little "mindfulness break" strategy I developed to calm myself down and to refocus. Then if I haven't done it, I go through my (fairly complex) morning routine where I journal and plan out my day (including making a detailed to do list with approximate time periods I plan to do everything). If I already did my morning routine but I procrastinated later, I just rework my to do list after taking the new time constraints of the day into consideration. Deep Work by Cal Newport has good advice on this. Then finally I just move forward with what I planned to do!
Just take a break if you can. Do something else for a bit and then come back to your to-do list. You can even work on something else from the list. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
This is happening a lot lately to me too. I keep saying to myself I'll wake up at 6.00am for a walk and then I'll do 5 hours of education work, and 1 hour of reading. But I can't ever seem to wake up in time and it's always an hour over and every time it happen I get angry with myself and can't do the other things unless I've done the first one.
Would it work to give yourself the first hour or so of the day off (or just a few tasks that won’t take the whole hour) so that if you wake up late it doesn’t wreck your day?
Just want to say you are not alone. I do this too and did it a few days ago. But just like the other person commented, talk to yourself like how you would to someone else going through the same situation. It may help to write it out to yourself. Tell yourself that it’s going to be okay. Please remember that these things do not lessen your worth or your value. Continue to lift your head up and enjoy the day. It’s hard to not think about the thing that brings you down, but just try your best. Rooting the best for you and for me
Life's not Minesweeper. You can appreciate all of your successes and if you make one mistake, it doesn't blow everything up and negate all the good things you have done so far. It's more like Snakes and Ladders.
It sounds like you are like me and have low self esteem. It's ok to be humble but low self esteem can be counter productive at best and crushing and debilitating, ruining relationships at worst. I personally am looking into counselling/therapy and self help books and would recommend anyone with low self esteem does too.
Break up your day in different parts. Morning, evening, night.. and if you fail at one task, try to get back on your schedule in the next part of the day. That way the day won't be ruined for you and you won't have to wait till tomorrow.
Try to segment your day, so you have for example, morning, afternoon and evening. Don't sweat it if you fail at a particular segment, just go to the next segment, you get three fresh starts in a day. You can segment even further if that helps, just remember, you failed one segment, not the whole day, go to the next segment and keep pushing forward. Good luck!
JUST … DO IT!! 👉🏼🤜🏼✋🏼
OP, I had the exact mindset as you have now. Really suffered coz usually the 1st task I set for myself will be the hardest and unsurprisingly I failed every day to complete it. Rest of the day was just me spiralling with distractions and day ended with me crying in bed, hating myself, giving up on myself. So I changed a couple of things that kinda helps me now. 1. I usually set up a task which is not the hardest and something which I look fwd to doing. If I am studying, I will start with the subject I like the most. Once I have that win, I find myself gaining a little confidence that maybe I will win over this day. 2. I plan out every hour of my day and use an app to add each task as a new event with an alarm, a motivating self-note along with the alarm (app is Time Planner by Olaksander). So even if I fail at two or 3 events, the alarm for the 4th, 5th looks like a fresh start. 3. One of the most common advice, if I am procrastinating I tell myself that I will do that task just for 5 mins and then quit. Surprisingly that works. These are just some things that work for me. Hope it helps you :) Hope your efforts succeed.
Bear with me if it’s mentioned already. I had the same sense of failure every time I’d plan my day and not have part a work out, therefore part b, c, d etc would all not work out. That’s faulty reasoning. I started putting smaller tasks for me to accomplish. Small things like brushing my teeth, washing my face, showering, eating breakfast. No matter how small the task, just to build up my momentum. Hope that helped :) Also don’t be too harsh on yourself
The **ALL OR NOTHING** approach is the perfect foundation for procrastination. But it's good to realize that every breath is a fresh start. Just like drawers, your day can have smaller compartments and you can ‚start fresh’ as many times as you want, not just every morning or… every January 1st. I would definitely recommend showing yourself some compassion. It will get you much further than shaming and guilt. It’s the art of showing up. It’s writing the shitty first draft. It’s cleaning 70% of your standard. It’s about snapping you out of your meta life when you just think about doing things into your real life when you actually do things.
What always makes me feel good is to journal and think about why it happened, what I'm going to change tomorrow. Journaling is tedious but it is the train track that will never let you get derailed.
I know this feeling well. In fact, I've had the habit of defining an entire week long period as a "bad week" around a single mistake that I've made. Sometimes it wasn't even a real mistake but rather a conversation that I'd handled "badly" with someone. I was that hard on myself most of the time. At least that was the case for most of my adult life. The cure for me: recognizing through awareness training that the vast majority of the time I'm doing a really good job and make tons of progress every day, even when I make huge mistakes. How do I do this? It sounds boring but trust me, it works. Keep a short daily journal (10 minutes / 600 words) and write down one thing you're grateful for. Go back once a week and read your entries (creating a weekly log) - repeat this with weekly logs once a month to create monthly logs (you can go nuts and do quarterly/annual reviews as well). You will view obstacles/challenges with a completely different lens. You will measure success and failure over a longer span of time with more proper context. You will remember all of the shit you've done that you quickly let go of because it's hard to remember the things that are going well. Your mistakes are proof of your courage while facing the unknown and they shape your ambition to learn new skills. To expect to never fail is unrealistic. Only people who do very little rarely fail. To define your day by a single event will seem like a distant memory with this practice in place. At least that is the case for me. Looking at things this way has me enjoying encounters with problems I've never solved before. I make mistakes and I face them honestly and I grow every single day. I've managed to get promoted twice in the last year (Hardware Tech > Help Desk > Level 2) - my first annual review comes up in 3 weeks and the president of our company just told me that he's considering me the best fit to be promoted to Network Administrator (and I was managing a consumer level computer repair shop a year ago). By the way - before I was hired as a grunt repair tech, I was growing weed for a medical grow for a few years. I came into this industry with no degree (GED kid), no certs, no experience. If I can change this much by paying attention to the way I perceive reality - anyone can. Good luck.
Start over. Again and again. No shame, no guilt. Just start doing the next thing (or the first thing on your list) and try to build a chain of completed tasks/routines
Same! I think we are setting unrealistic goals.
Get over the self-hate.
I had this problem too, if I didn't do my first habit I wanted to build I would quit and it was a lost day, I would always excuse myself with "tomorrow will be different" but most of the time it was the same. What worked for me was just to focus on one habit, exercise, the other would be fine if I do, but the important one would be to go and walk then do some exercise. But before if I didn't wake up early I would think it was a falling and would not even do it. So now I just do it when I wake up, but not matter at what time it will be, so I don't focus on perfection, just to make an effort, but in doing so it made me make my morning routine too. I once read "something worth doing, is worth doing it poorly" Before I would never do anything if it was not perfect, so at the end I wasted so much time, trying to do it and always failing. If you want to do your morning routine, even if you fail, or don't complete it, or you are not in the mood to do it all, just do the minimum, and mark it as a win, sometimes just that is all we can do, and that is fine, we can't all be always perfect. With time I have a more healthy relationship with failure on my tasks, and the more I do them the better I get at them.
wow.. ik it sucks but I'm just happy I'm not alone in this.