Self-Judgment: How We Get It Wrong and How It Hurts Us |
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Our self-judgments are typically distorted and usually in the negative direction.
Negative experiences and beliefs carry more weight in the brain than positive ones.
You can retrain automatic negative self-assessments through cognitive reappraisal and emotional tolerance.
The other day I got upset at how negatively I was judging myself. Since I had been doing it for a while, I finally decided not to accept that from myself anymore. As I deconstructed my process of self-evaluation, I then imagined that what I was judging about myself was projected onto someone else. And I immediately realized that I would make an entirely different evaluation if someone else had that characteristic (this could also be a behavior).
Actually, I realized that for someone else in that situation, there would be no judgment. With someone else, it would not be something I would take note of—an indication that I wouldn’t give it the same negative interpretation.
I was surprised that I could be so negatively biased towards myself. But in fact, research has consistently found that our opinions of ourselves are consistently distorted and usually in the negative direction.
This distortion colors how we see ourselves and thus how we create our identity. And then how the negative view creates an underlying and ongoing nudge towards harm to our psychological and physiological health. It is as if we are wearing a sensory filter that magnifies our faults while minimizing our gifts.
This is an evolutionary development
In my work in resilience, I talk about the evolutionary mismatch between the environment in which our stress and survival response developed—around 50,000 to 100,000-plus years ago—and our present environment. We mobilize........