Stop judging yourself for not getting it “right”. You’ll be healthier in the long run.
It’s August 2017, the Wellington southerly is gusting over 100kmph, and the rain is coming in sideways off the Cook Straight. I’d planned to go for a jog at lunch time, but hadn’t brought my jacket. My motivation to get out into the weather for 30 minutes was quickly evaporating.
I thought I’d respond to a couple of emails and give it 10 minutes to see if it died down…….
Nineteen minutes later and emails responded to, the weather was just as bad, and now I could use the excuse that I didn’t have time to get out and back, and have a shower and a quick bite before my next patient came in at 1 pm. I didn’t go.
Not only did I not exercise that lunch time, I spent the rest of my lunch break, and the afternoon - when I wasn’t interacting with someone - lambasting myself for being lazy and unmotivated, and all round useless, because I didn’t do the exercise that I had intended to.
I’m not unique in my response to this situation. A lot of my health mentoring clients have the same reaction when they can’t implement the health action that they intended to. It may not be the Wellington Southerly that stops them doing it.
Something urgent and important may have come up that cuts into their exercise time.
The cafe they have their meeting at may not serve the type of food they were wanting to eat. Their morning may have devolved into chaos so they are wound up when they get to work and didn’t get a chance to do their guided meditation.
AND they respond by beating themselves up because they couldn’t do the thing they wanted to do.
When things don’t go to plan it’s natural to be hard on ourselves
Most of the people reading this want to be performing at their best across the board in their lives. And part of that performance is holding ourselves to a high standard.
Throughout our schooling (at least when I went through) we continually get assessed and need to measure up to certain standards. When we don’t meet those standards often there are feelings of shame or guilt that come up for us, that we are never really taught to deal with. When we move into our working lives we continue to be measured with monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily kpi’s.
We see the social proof of holding ourselves to a high standard all around us. One of the most in our face examples of that are fitness influencers. The pictures of their bodies portray the message of self-accountability, discipline, motivation, and all those other admirable qualities that we want (whether that’s healthy or not is a discussion for another time). We also see this on LinkedIn. People sharing the awesome stuff that they are doing to make the world and business a better place. It’s fantastic to see, but can also feed back into some negative self-talk if we don’t de-couple ourselves from their results.
And finally our brains are naturally wired to lose ourselves in self absorbed thought. Neuroscience tells us that there is a specific set of regions called the Default Mode Network that switches on when our brain is not otherwise engaged - and sometimes even when we are trying to engage it. Unfortunately the majority of this self absorbed thought is negative, and as Dr Russ Harris points out, we often become “hooked” to these unhelpful thoughts which becomes problematic.
Being hard on ourselves actually gets in the way of being healthy
There is nothing inherently wrong with holding ourselves to a high standard. In fact it’s an important part of performance.
Where it becomes problematic is when we get hooked into beating ourselves up for not achieving that standard in a one off situation. Often a one off situation where there are external variables present that we have little or no control over.
When our default mode network is in full flight and we are ruminating and absorbed in negative recriminations of ourselves for being lazy, unmotivated, and probably morally corrupt as well, we aren’t using the executive processing areas of our brain. These areas, including the prefrontal cortex, help us with creative problem solving, planning and taking action.
We know that good health is a game of consistent healthful action over a period of time. If the Default Mode Network is gobbling up our brain power, it’s very unlikely that we will be able to come up with a creative healthful option which we can act on in the moment.
We’ve found ourselves in this situation, because things haven’t gone the way we wanted them to. AND that doesn’t mean that we can’t still take some healthful action right now to improve our health trajectory. Only it’s much more difficult to do so if we don’t give ourselves a break.
Dropping judgement allows us to take healthful action
When we choose to stop judging ourselves, we switch away from the default mode network and can start using our executive processing centre. We can flexibly change our plans, and come up with a realistic alternative to what we had planned which is both engaging and moves us closer to our vision of good health.
Which is not to say that we can’t actually constructively review the situation and take some learnings from it so we can be better next time. It’s just about being objective about it as opposed to getting hooked into self absorbed thought. Some helpful questions for this might be;
Has this situation or a similar situation happened to me before?
Is there anything that I could do in the lead up to this point that would have changed what happened?
Is it worth changing what I do next time to try and avoid arriving at this point?
What other health opportunities or tactics could I utilise to still move me towards my vision of good health were this to happen again?
It’s August 2022, there is a Wellington southerly gusting over 100kmph. The rain is coming in sideways off the Cook Straight. I had wanted to go for a run today, but I’m not going to, I’ll spend twenty minutes doing some mobility work on the floor instead. It doesn’t make me lazy, it doesn’t make me useless, it doesn’t make me unmotivated, it means I’m human and living in a world with a lot of things I don’t control. Today I can be OK with that.
There is no one “right” path to good health and performance, but there is a wrong way, and that is not doing anything at all. When you don’t drop the judgement of yourself, you spend time and energy judging when you could be spending it on improving your health.
Thanks for reading. When you’re ready to improve your health, here are a few ways we can help with that.
Want to chat about Health mentoring to improve your health and performance, or your organisations. Please feel free to book in a time for a 30 minute introductory chat https://calendly.com/healthmentors/30min
Grab a copy of our “My Health Plan - dial in your health and improve your performance in the midst of a chaotic world” e-book. Simply send me a message and I’ll fire it through to you.
Listen to “Uncomfortable is OK” a mental wellbeing and performance podcast helping us get better at navigating challenge https://uncomfortable-is-ok.castos.com/
