How to Stop Beating Yourself Up: 10 Tips From a Therapist

Reasons Why You Keep Beating Yourself Up

As humans, we tend to be very hard on ourselves. We push ourselves to do better, be better and achieve more. Though this is often seen as good, it can become problematic when we start beating ourselves up for not meeting these self-imposed expectations. This type of negative self-talk can damage our long-term mental and physical health, hold us back from achieving our goals, and cause depression.¹

Reasons why you keep beating yourself up may include:

• You made a mistake in the past: It’s natural for humans to make mistakes – but sometimes those mistakes can haunt you for years, causing overwhelming guilt, shame, and self-blame.² The worst part is that despite your best efforts to move on, your mind replays the incident repeatedly, leaving you feeling trapped and helpless.
• You stress about the little things: When you are overwhelmed, it’s easy to feel stressed out about the little things. However, worrying about insignificant things can lead to irrational concerns, anxiety, or depression.
• Fear of failure: While failure is an inevitable part of life, you may be afraid to fail and don’t know how to stop beating yourself up. While a certain degree of concern is natural, excessive fear of failure can lead to feelings of anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.
• Past trauma: Trauma is an experience that can leave an indelible mark on your psyche and can significantly impact your self-perception and thought processes. Research shows that trauma may significantly impact somebody’s sense of self.³
• Comparison: In today’s social media-driven world, it can be easy to compare yourself to others. This comparison game can damage your self-esteem and lead to negative self-talk.
• Perfectionism: As humans, we often set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, striving for perfect grades, the perfect job, the perfect relationship, or the perfect body. When you don’t meet these high standards, you can become overly critical of yourself and can’t stop beating yourself up. A study shows that perfectionism accounts for increases in symptoms of depression and anxiety.⁴
• People pleasing: While it’s important to be kind and considerate to others, constantly catering to other people’s needs without considering your own can lead to negative consequences. One of these consequences is negative self-talk, which can have a significant impact on one’s mental health and well-being.
• Overthinking: When overthinking becomes a habit, it negatively affects mental health, relationships, and overall well-being. Overthinking can fuel negative self-talk by keeping you trapped in a cycle of rumination, self-doubt, and anxiety.

10 Ways to Stop Beating Yourself Up

Life isn’t perfect. So making space for future mistakes, failures, and hiccups is essential. Allowing room for errors allows you to pass through life more calmly and happily.

Ten ways to stop beating yourself up are:

1.   Don’t Be Afraid of Failure

One of the most significant impacts of fear of failure is that it undermines self-confidence and esteem. When unwilling to challenge ourselves, we undermine our abilities and belief in ourselves. Over time, small losses may seem insurmountable, leading to a sense of hopelessness and negative self-talk. In the end, we may settle for less than we deserve, losing confidence and self-respect.

However, by overcoming our fear of failure, we can begin to live life to the fullest. Realize that no one is perfect, and making mistakes is a natural part of life and personal and professional growth. We must believe in ourselves, learn from our mistakes, and set small achievable goals that help us develop confidence and self-respect. By embracing and learning from failures, you can stop beating yourself up and allow yourself to evolve and live a more fulfilling life.

2.   Practice Self-Compassion & Acceptance

It’s normal and healthy to be critical of ourselves from time to time. Self-criticism can be a double-edged sword. On one end, it can be a motivator to push us to strive for excellence and improve ourselves. On the other end, it can overwhelm us, erode our self-esteem, and cause us to doubt our worth and abilities. Self-criticism ties in with cognitive distortions, where our minds convince us to believe negative things about ourselves and the world that aren’t true.

Although learning from our mistakes and striving to be better versions of ourselves is essential, pay attention to signs that you are too self-critical. Specific indications include focusing more on limitations, faults, and weaknesses than strengths and accomplishments. How can we overcome self-criticism?  Practice self-compassion, which means treating ourselves with the same kindness and understanding that we would give to a good friend. It’s important to learn how to love ourselves and practice self-acceptance. When we make a mistake or don’t meet our expectations, we should be kind, compassionate, and gentle with ourselves.

3. Focus on Healing Your Inner Child

When we find ourselves constantly beating ourselves up over a mistake or a wrong decision, it’s essential to step back and take a moment to focus on healing our inner child. Often, the root of our self-criticism stems from our past experiences and childhood traumas. Recognize that these experiences have shaped us into who we are today, but they do not define us.

Healing your inner child requires seeing and acknowledging the pain and trauma we may have experienced. It means giving ourselves the love and attention we may not have received as children. This type of healing can be a long and difficult process, but it’s worth it as you begin to achieve a greater sense of self-love and self-acceptance. Focusing on healing your inner child can help you develop a more positive and loving relationship with yourself.

4. Practice Meditation

Letting go of the emotional baggage from your past can be an overwhelming challenge. Living with regret, guilt, shame, or disappointment can hold you back from feeling content and happy in the present moment. If you find yourself struggling to let go of your past, meditation can help overcome your past regrets.

Loving-kindness meditation uses mantras that emphasize kindness towards yourself and others. Research shows that this type of meditation can improve emotions, life satisfaction, self-compassion, interpersonal interactions, and self-reassurance. It can also contribute to decreased anxiety and depressive symptoms, self-criticism, and psychological distress, compared to before beginning the practice.⁵

5. Use Thought Stopping Techniques

Sometimes, we can become our own worst critics by continuously beating ourselves up over something we did or said that we regret. That type of negative self-talk can hinder our growth and prevent us from moving forward. That is where thought-stopping techniques come in handy.

Thought-stopping can help us break that cycle by redirecting our attention to more constructive, positive thoughts. Remember to be kind to yourself and practice self-care regularly. You deserve to be happy and healthy. Negative thought patterns can harm your mental, emotional, and physical well-being if left unaddressed.

6. Reframe Negative Thoughts

Reframing negative thoughts can help us turn our negative self-talk into positive self-talk. This involves taking our negative thoughts and finding a positive spin on them. For example, instead of telling yourself, “I’m a failure,” try telling yourself, “I may not have succeeded this time, but I can learn from my mistakes and do better next time.”

Reframing negative thoughts when you’re beating yourself up is not easy, but you can do it by practicing self-compassion. The best approach is to identify your negative thought patterns, reframe them, practice gratitude, and set realistic goals. With time, you’ll be able to shift your focus away from negative self-talk and onto growth and empowerment.

7. Be Mindful

Mindfulness is the practice of being present in the moment without judgment. It involves bringing attention to what’s happening right now with openness and acceptance. This can be applied to the way we treat ourselves when we make mistakes. Instead of beating ourselves up for what we did wrong, mindfulness can help us be kinder to ourselves and learn from our mistakes.

By being mindful, we can learn to stop negative thoughts in their tracks, recognize them for what they are, and redirect our focus. Mindfulness can be practiced through meditation, mindful breathing, or simply taking a few minutes to focus on our surroundings.

8. Accept Your Imperfections and Flaws

Dealing with imperfections and flaws can be difficult. It’s natural to want to try and fix everything and be the best possible version of yourself, but sometimes this can lead to beating yourself up over things that are a natural part of being human. Learning how to stop beating yourself up when dealing with imperfections and flaws is an important step toward building self-acceptance and self-love.

Acknowledge your imperfections, be compassionate with yourself, challenge your negative self-talk, practice self-care, and seek support when you need it. Remember, imperfection is a natural part of being human, and it’s okay to make mistakes and have flaws. Learning to love yourself unconditionally is a journey worth taking.

9. Forgive Yourself

All of us have experienced moments from our past that we wish we could go back and change. Moments where we regret what we did or didn’t do or where we feel we could have done better. These are experiences that can leave a mark on our confidence and self-esteem and cause us to constantly beat ourselves up about the past. However, it is possible to overcome these negative feelings and build your self-confidence and self-esteem.

It’s important to accept your past, forgive yourself, focus on your strengths, surround yourself with positive people, practice self-care, keep a positive mindset, and set realistic goals. With these strategies, you can overcome the negative feelings from your past and move forward with a more positive outlook on life.

10. Take Responsibility for Past Mistakes

Taking responsibility for your past mistakes is not easy. It requires acknowledging your emotions, accepting your errors, forgiving yourself, making amends, and learning from the experience. By following these steps, you’ll be taking the right steps to move forward and grow from your mistakes.

Just remember that nobody is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. However, it’s how you deal with mistakes that define the kind of person you are. By taking responsibility for your faults, you show others who you are and what you stand for.

When to Seek Professional Help

If you find that you’re struggling with beating yourself up and can’t seem to overcome it on your own, seeking help from a therapist or counselor can be beneficial. There are specific ways to determine if you need therapy. Therapists can help you build coping strategies, develop a positive self-image, and learn to overcome negative thought patterns.

As depression can happen when you are continually beating yourself up, be sure to take the time to discover the symptoms of depression. It’s important to explore what kind of therapy is helpful to you. Keep in mind there are online therapy options available too.

In My Experience

In my experience, silencing our inner saboteur and learning how to relate to ourselves with loving self-compassion is one of the best ways to improve our self-esteem and reduce anxiety. Becoming more mindful of when we have self-sabotaging thoughts is the first step. The next is replacing those thoughts with self-compassion, self-affirmation, and self-forgiveness.

Self-criticism and blaming ourselves for past mistakes do not serve any purpose other than causing us pain and suffering. Instead, we must accept that we are human and make mistakes. Taking chances and failing is an essential component of our growth and development. You must stop beating yourself up for past mistakes, forgive yourself, and focus on the present moment. This takes time and is a lifelong process. In my book, The Financial Mindset Fix: A Mental Fitness Program for an Abundant Life, I have practical tools and strategies as well as exercises from CBT, mindfulness, and other therapies to help you stop beating yourself up and end self-limitation and self-sabotage to cultivate an abundant life of greater success personally, professionally, and financially.