Bonji Foods Aficionado Smart Brief: Volume 29
Hi all, welcome back to the Bonji Food Aficionado Smart Brief! We hope the weekend treated you well and you are ready for a new week full of new opportunities! Many of us tend to be pretty hard on ourselves, usually thinking it may push us to work harder. While occasionally that may be true, it's important to realize that a lot of self-criticisms also has its negative effects such as ruining your mood, focus, and real productivity. Thus, we have a few tips to help you balance the roles of self-criticism and giving yourself the credit you deserve.
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Tips To Help Balance Your Self-Criticism 1. Personify Your Inner Critic By naming your inner critic, you create psychological distance between it and yourself. This makes it a whole lot easier to keep it in check. Use a funny, silly name to really hammer home to yourself that your inner critic can be tamed. In a study discussed in Harvard Business Review, personifying your thoughts leverages your cognitive defusion, the process of separating your thoughts from yourself. In fact, this defusion is shown to reduce the stress, discomfort, and believability of your negative thoughts. 2. Use a Timer For Your Emotions Using a timer can be beneficial in many aspects of your life. However, specifically for emotions associated with negative self-talk, shame, and humiliation, a timer may be just what you need. Generally, these emotions only last 30-40 minutes before you move on to something else. Therefore, you can set a timer and fully process your emotions for the allotted time. Then, once the timer goes off, make a conscious choice on how to move forward and get going. 3. “Anything That Can Go Wrong, Can Go Right” We often look at the negative side of situations and think about the outcomes that may be detrimental to us. Yet, anything that has the potential to go array also has the potential to be beneficial. You may have heard about one of Murphy's Laws, stating that anything that can go wrong, will. However, we don't believe that thinking like this is healthy, it may be true in some cases, but not for productivity and mental health purposes. This is a massive research topic for psychology, with many books being written on the idea of thinking positive can attract positivity. Although we aren't aiming to get too deep into this concept, the general idea of changing your perspective to look at what can go right will have tremendous positive effects.
