Practicing A Healthy Self-demand Is Key To Your Well-being
Inside each one of us lives a kind of little voice known more commonly as an internal critic. He is dedicated to evaluating, questioning and reflecting on everything we do. Its mission is to help us progress and continue growing, the problem is when to achieve its goal it becomes very demanding and instead of encouraging us to progress, it keeps us imprisoned in our comfort zone. Did you ever happened? Have you felt that you are so demanding of yourself that instead of improving you stagnate and damage your self-esteem?
If the answer is yes, in this article you will find practical tips to keep your critic at bay and thus practice healthy self-enforcement. Broadly speaking, it is about knowing yourself better to be able to demand yourself perform more and better without the emotional drain that strict control of perfection demands. Let’s go deeper.
Learn to tolerate frustration to cultivate healthy self-demand
The first step to practicing healthy self-enforcement is working on your frustration tolerance level. This implies that you accept that changes are normal and happen every day. That something does not turn out as you wanted or thought does not mean that “everything goes wrong” even if you feel that way. In other words, to be more tolerant of frustration you have to combat emotional reasoning (think based on how you feel without correctly analyzing reality).
Likewise, if you want to improve your tolerance for frustration, you need to change the language and words you choose to shape your feelings. It is about transforming your thoughts and using a more flexible language, for example, you can replace the words that are defeatist, dramatic and catastrophic with others that help you to relativize. With this exercise you will use the power of language to your advantage.
Practice empathy
One of the best ways to practice a healthy self-demand is to start applying it with the people in your closest environment. To do this, you have to reflect on your degree of demand with others, if you encourage them to improve themselves or, on the other hand, you punish them if they do not measure up. That is why it is so important to balance what you ask of others, since pushing them out of their comfort zone is fine as long as you do not force them to reach their panic or fear zone.
On the other hand, it is important that you stop labeling others based on whether or not they meet your expectations. Doing this exercise will stop you using labels with you.
In this sense, empathy is a fundamental skill to practice a healthy demand both with yourself and with others. Think how others feel when they do not achieve their goals, think about how you feel when things do not go the way you wanted. Right that with their feelings they already have enough? Don’t get hooked, learn to pause before creating a difficulty out of thin air.
Balance your interests, well-being and needs
Always remember why and why you demand yourself. Above all, ask yourself: what are the consequences of my demands? If your level of self-demand causes you discomfort, conflicts with your family, coworkers or partner, it is time to be more flexible and set goals.
In the long run, it won’t pay off for you to be so demanding of yourself. Therefore, to be able to practice a healthy self-demand you have to balance in your day to day moments of well-being, pleasure and relaxation. Not everything can be work, obligations and perfection.
Therefore, your priorities should include moments of disconnection. Whether or not you fulfill all your obligations, you have to have those moments of “care” for yourself. Thus, a good exercise to lower your demand and make it healthy is to take mental breaks. This means that at least every hour you move, drink water, take your attention away from your activities and direct it towards your personal needs. Self-demand has to be a means, not an end.
Remember that self-demand has to help you take steps beyond your comfort zone, if it keeps you within your limits and does not let you advance for fear of failure, it is not healthy. It is in your hands to put a brake on it, accept yourself a little more and be more flexible.
If you are trying to change your level of demand and you are not able to do it alone: ask for help. There is a world of highly trained psychology professionals to help you be a healthy and excellent version of yourself.
