In our spot on the site where we chat about mental health and general wellbeing, a few thoughts on, well, just being a little bit nicer to ourselves.
Hello and welcome to the spot on the site where we like to have a little natter about wellbeing, about mental health, about simply being human. There’s nothing massively radical to the conversations we’re having. It really is as simple as humans wanting other humans to be okay. And acknowledging that sometimes, it really is okay not to be okay.
One thing that I’ve wanted to talk about for a little while then is the human habit of pulling the trap door on ourselves a little bit. Of selling ourselves a little short, and not actually giving ourselves genuine self-worth.
I trip on this a lot myself. I’m one of those people who’ll tell you how rubbish I am at something, and that others are better and such like. And you know what? It might be true. Heck, very often I pretty much guarantee it. But also I have a habit of coming into that as my absolute default position and I don’t think that’s always a good thing.
Sure, there’s a degree of comfort blanket to it – reduce people’s expectations and they won’t be disappointed when I don’t measure up – but still I’m not utterly convinced it’s a good thing to do.
And I see it around a lot. Those little digs we make about ourselves (‘I’m a terrible person’, ‘it’s just a draft’, ‘I know it’s not great’, ‘I’m not as good as you’ etc), that have a habit of leading to apologising for ourselves. Yet I rarely see the corresponding credit given too. When we do tell ourselves that, you know what, we’re pretty decent? That we’ve done a good job, that we’ve succeeded at something, that we’re not terrible?
Appreciating there’s a line between being nice to ourselves and telling ourselves the occasional good thing and at the other end of the spectrum, outright arrogance, I think it’s fair to say that the majority of us get nowhere near the latter. And I think, not least having come through the year that we all have, how about we just have a moment to declare that we’re not rubbish? That everything we do doesn’t suck? That what we put into the world might just have a little bit of merit to it?
It’s small things, granted, but I think it matters. For instance, I see people commenting on these articles each week, writing wonderfully and just being human. By doing so, by talking and sharing, they put small kindnesses into the world. I bet they don’t even realise it. I think there’s a lot more of that about than is sometimes reported or talked about. And I think we might all just be a little bit better than we tend to give ourselves credit for.
You all take care and stay safe.
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