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Oh, how we beat ourselves up sometimes. I know I sure did yesterday. The end of the day left me feeling so exhausted and so down on myself because I couldn’t do what I needed to.
In this case, I seriously just used my other rest day because of how many projects I have due. TWO REST DAYS IN A ROW! That aren’t on a weekend? Yeah, I felt like a failure yesterday.
It’s easy to get caught up in what you should/want to do and get unnecessarily hard on yourself when you can’t actually meet your standards. But what good does beating up on yourself do? Make you feel worse? Discourage you? Let’s be honest, there’s nothing motivating about you getting frustrated with slipping up, especially if you couldn’t help it.
When I got home at 9:30 pm, I had a lot of work to do. The student in me agreed it would be irresponsible of me not to make school work priority number one, causing me to miss my workout.
At first I was really angry at myself and the situation with being too busy to exercise, but then I just realized I had to step back for a moment and consider the following:
- Would missing one workout really ruin my new healthy lifestyle? Probably not.
- Was I just being lazy and choosing not to exercise? Definitely no.
- Would I gain a bazillion pounds by doing homework? Don’t be silly.
- Am I eating extra while not exercising? Nope. Yay, willpower.
Then why was I angry at myself? For being a student? For being busy? Yes, I know I’ll be busy forever, but sometimes other things take priority. That doesn’t mean I can just shrug off my workout whenever I’m feeling stressed though. Now I realize that maybe, I could have worked out that morning before going to work at 10 a.m. Maybe I could have planned better and done more school work over the weekend?
Rather than beating yourself up for not doing what you know you need to do, first realize that life happens and then look for ways to prevent another disappointing situation from happening.
Nothing good ever comes from being hard on yourself. It usually ends in more discouragement to prevent you from getting back on track.
So join me in chucking negativity, accepting the things that are out of my control and changing the things that are within my ability to improve.
At a time like this, we need encouragement. This is one of the reasons why I love the daily emails from SELF.com with tips and words of wisdom. It truly brightens my day.
We’re making life changes here, people. It’s not going to be easy, but you should be proud of your effort no matter what.