Give yourself a break from time to time. You need to have self compassion in your life and not beat yourself up too much. You can practice self compassion by focusing on your health and changing your mindset to a more positive one. Things aren’t as bad as they seem.
We are generally harder on ourselves than we are on others. From when we were a little kid, adults taught us that we need to be kind to strangers. They never taught us to be kind to ourselves. For some reason, we tend to treat the ones we love badly and strangers well.
We should be treating everybody well, not just strangers. There are times when you should blame yourself. However, you shouldn’t blame yourself so much that it spills over to other aspects of your life. Setbacks and failures are more common than you think. If we treat ourselves badly that often, that’s a recipe for disaster.
Think about your friend. How do you react when he or she had a bad week or is going through emotional distress? With compassion, kindness, and empathy. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t treat yourself that way either. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn from your mistakes or failures.
However, it does mean that you shouldn’t beat yourself up as much as you are. I used to blame myself for every mistake. These days, I give myself a break and not let things get to me as much. I grew a thicker skin and started caring less about the little things.
Give yourself a break. Self blame and feelings of guilt doesn’t do anything positive for your life in moving forward. There are more productive things that you should focus on.
How to Give Yourself a Break
So then how do you give yourself a break? One way to do that is to DESTROY that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends may need a self compassion article and are being too hard on themselves. They might just need this article to feel better and keep moving forward.
Sharing articles is completely free to do so. It may just help your friends out, not just you!
So with that said, let’s go into the actual steps you can take to practice self compassion.
1) Get Plenty of Sleep
Did you know that if you go 17 hours without sleep, your alertness is similar to the effects of a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%? On a legal scale, that’s considered “impaired”. You can’t give yourself a break if you can’t make sound and clear decisions with intent. Therefore, you need a good amount of sleep.
People love to shame people who love sleep. They think that it’s for the defeated. That couldn’t be more false. Sleep is a necessary component of life and you need it. Your entire day can be ruined if you don’t get enough of it. Otherwise you can make subpar decisions that snowballs into worse decisions the day after.
Society tends to use work as a sense of pride. Hard work is used to boast of how much effort that they put in. Hard work is fine, overwork is not. One easy way to tell you are overworking is if you are feeling tired and groggy. If you want to treat yourself with kindness, you need to take care of your physiological needs.
Before you take care of your emotional or psychological needs.
2) Eat Well
Another way to give yourself a break is to eat very well. I don’t mean eat a lot of food, I mean eat quality food. You will not notice the results of this habit until it’s too late. When I diet badly throughout the day, I am unable to sleep. By then, it’s too late. My body still digests even till 2 in the morning if I didn’t plan my meals right.
It makes me feel really bad the day after. I don’t notice the effects of my bad eating habit in the day until it’s too late. By the time 10pm turns around, I have a good sense of whether I ate a sound diet in the day or not. I have a good sense of whether I’ll have to stay up past midnight to finish digesting the bad food I ate.
Don’t be like me. You won’t notice the bad effects of your bad eating habits until it’s too late. When you don’t sleep well, the effects roll over to the next day as well. You feel tired and groggy the next day. You won’t get quality work done, let alone make yourself feel better when you are tired.
Take careful note of your eating habits. They affect you in the day more than you know.
3) Give Yourself a Break by Accepting Who You Are
You are who you are. There’s no need to apologize or think about how bad you are. Whatever mistakes you made in the past, accept them. They are a part of who you are. Accept yourself. There’s no need to change for any other reason unless you want to change.
Many people dislike themselves when they look in the mirror. They don’t like how they look or far behind that they are to where they thought they would be by now. That’s not right. Give yourself a break. No one is perfect and perfection is actually the enemy of success.
By trying to be perfect, you actually end up creating imperfection because flawless is a hyperbole world. It doesn’t exist in the real world. There’s no need to be flawless because you can find at least one fault with anything or anyone in the world. Don’t strive for something that can’t be achieved by the end.
Accept yourself for who you are and stop going for perfection.
4) Practice Self Care
Give yourself a break by engaging in self care. Meditate once a week and calm your mental mind to navigate through the busy parts of the week. Even better, go for a walk after work or before work. It sounds like a very small thing to do but it has a big impact.
One of the ways you can keep your heart healthy is to keep your heart rate up. Also, artificial is not good for the human body. We have artificial lighting but nothing beats the natural light set by the sun. We’re not biologically designed to stay cooped up in a desk and continue with Excel models.
These tiny things are excellent ways to practice self care and elevate yourself to success. It’ll be the biggest differentiating point versus someone who spends all their time hunched over a desk. Your body will thank you for it and you will feel so much better aftewards.
5) Understand that Your Worth is Not Your Productivity
So many people tie their sense of purpose to their productivity. They have this misguided notion that their whole purpose is to produce output. We’re not machines. Our actual purpose is to pass on our DNA so that our species can move on. However, mankind created other goals besides this that is tied to productivity.
When you have a lazy weekend where you just sat on your couch doing nothing the whole day, that’s completely fine. Give yourself a break. Productivity is measured over your entire lifetime, not a single weekend, month, or year. Your life is worth far more than what you input to get output.
Some days, you just want to relax and enjoy the calm before the storm that comes. There’s no need to be “on” all the time. It’s not useful. We’re not machines and we never will be. So just kick back and enjoy the free time you have. Enjoy it the guilt free way.
6) Stop Noticing Your Flaws
The only one who really knows or notices your flaws is either you or your parents. People who spent a lot of time with you already. The outside world is too busy with their own flaws. Yes, there are super judgmental people out there who will notice your flaws the second they meet you.
However, they are in the minority. Don’t let that fill your thoughts. The 1% of people should not fill out 100% of your thoughts. Don’t think about how you can be better. Everyone is flawed in their own unique way. The ones who point out your flaws are desperately trying to distract themselves from their own flaws.
Give yourself a break. Your flaws are what makes you human. They are what makes you great. The next time that you feel bad about yourself, recognize it and move on. Don’t ever think about something when the only ones who care about it are in the minority.
You have other much more important things to do, anyway.
7) Accept that You Deserve Happiness
Too many people beat themselves up because they don’t think they deserve love or happiness. You deserve to be happy and to live a good life. Others may shame you for having a great life because they’re secretly jealous. Criticism is self hate projected outward. Don’t let others stop you from having happiness.
You may feel like you are being selfish by being happy when there are so many others that are unhappy. You shouldn’t feel like that. As long as you didn’t get happy through hurting innocent people, it’s something to be proud of. There are people who get nervous when they are happy.
They question why it was them who got so much happiness when there are millions of other more deserving people in the world. Give yourself a break. You got there through your hard effort and you deserve to enjoy the benefits of your results. Happiness in your life is never a bad thing or anything to be ashamed of.
8) Don’t Reserve Compassion Only for Others
We usually treat the ones we love the most badly. If we love ourselves, we usually treat ourselves badly. We’re taught that we should be kind to strangers. When we invite them into our home, then we need to be hospitable. Which is great, that’s how it should be.
However, we are the least hospitable to ourselves when it really comes down to it. Practice self compassion for yourself as well. Others deserve your kindness but you deserve your kindness as well. I used to blame myself and thought that everyone else was right while I was wrong.
It helped me out in so many ways before by resolving conflict. However, that came at a huge cost. It costed me my sense of feeling right. I used to think that I was wrong until others proved me right. Now I think I’m right until others prove me wrong. Giving kindness to others is a great act but make sure to not stomp yourself in the meantime.
Give yourself a break and practice self belief. You are right more times than you think. When others are telling you you’re wrong is when you’re right.
Give Yourself a Break Because You Deserve It
You already came this far, which is a great feat in and of itself. This is the farthest you have ever come in your life. The great news is that even if there’s a setback, you have ample chances to make it even farther. When you get to the top, you deserve all of your successes through your hard work and effort.
There’s a fascinating video I watched about Elon Musk’s roommate. How Elon Musk’s roommate will never feel happy because his comparison scale is a multibillionaire who revolutionized the world. However, that’s illogical. You don’t need to create something that changes the world for the better.
Even if you’re not as far ahead in your life as you would like to be, that’s completely OK. Give yourself a break. You have plenty of time. Life is long. Take a breather. Take a week, a month, or a year to do nothing but reflect on your life. Before Reed Hastings created Netflix, he spent some time in Africa with ten dollars in his pocket.
You don’t need to go upwards in a linear line. Some days you are going to experience failure and some days you are not. Your overall trajectory in your life is onwards and upwards. Your best years are ahead of you. That isn’t just a saying, it’s true. The only time this stops being true is if you’re literally on your last dying breath.
As long as you’re not, there’s plenty of life to experience. Give it everything you’ve got, you’re tougher than you give yourself credit for. When you give yourself a break, you will be absolutely amazed at how far you’ll get to. The possibilities are truly endless and limitless. There’s no telling what you can create or accomplish.
How to Give Yourself a Break List:
- Get plenty of sleep
- Eat well
- Give yourself a break by accepting who you are
- Practice self care
- Understand that your worth is not your productivity
- Stop noticing your flaws
- Accept that you deserve happiness
- Don’t reserve compassion only for others
