Contents
This is what can happen to you if you demand too much of yourself
Psychology
We forget who we really are, and to know who we are and what we need, a quiet space and solitude are necessary for introspection and getting to know each other well.
Those who demand too much of themselves exceed their own limits. Have you heard yourself constantly saying “I must …”, “I have to …”, “I have to do …” and a long list of obligations that you feel you have to fulfill like a slave? Then you are a victim of the self-demand.
Surely your goals are very ambitious, you do not take time for leisure and you live in continuous dissatisfaction, like a cataract of emotions where deep and internal disappointment becomes a devastating voice that permanently reminds you that you have not reached 100% . Sometimes we want to do so many things that we constantly demand ourselves to be better professionals, more productive, achieve great success at an early age, reach everything and also make it perfect. We seek continuous motivation to try harder to reach our goal to a point where we come to compare ourselves with others and believe that we will only be happy if we achieve the goal imposed by a social role and not by ourselves.
Irene López Assor, psychologist and author of ‘ 10 obstacles that prevent you from being happy’, assures that this type of people raise their level of real and non-real obligations, believing that everything depends on them: «They believe that the happiness of others depends on their actions and they control all kinds of details and actions, as well as their consequences , when the biggest consequence of all this is the lack of connection with your emotions or your feelings».
Good part?
But although we have seen that self-demand It could be considered a personality defect, it also has its good part … It is self-demanding because we feel useful and this utility takes us somewhere correct, although most of the time it is to dissatisfaction: “Even if we reach the goal, it is never enough for us. In our rigid brain is the phrase: ‘What I do is not enough’ and, therefore, we are going to do many things to feel useful in the face of a society that we perceive as judicious, ”warns Irene López Assor (@irenelopezassor). So the demand is not always bad but the rigidity is because “we feel in a prison.”
The expert alerts that when we feel imprisoned, anxiety is triggered and we promote an internal death, the psychological one, the death of not doing what we need at all times, what we want to do or what we really want to transmit. We are at the service of the requirement, to the order of the norm, to the order of what our parents have demanded of us, what society has taught us or what others expect of us. We forget who we really are, and to know who we are and what we need, a quiet space and solitude are necessary for introspection and getting to know each other well.
To stop being
What we must do to stop being demanding of ourselves is be more flexible. And since we cannot start anything without a good self-knowledge, we must analyze well what part of the demand comes from us and what part of the environment: «It is very important to be clear about how our education has been in reference to the issue of demand and respond to the following questions: How did our parents raise us? How was education at school? How were we required as a child in relation to friends and the rest of society? ”Says Irene López Assor.
This analysis is to learn to separate the requirements into parts, so as not to put them all in the same bag. Remove and separate the demand from the environment and keep what is exclusively ours. Because, the first step is to meet us.
«I always suggest to start working on your self-demand to start with childhood: What did you want to be when you grew up? What were your dreams as a child? What is your identity Who you really are? It is also good to analyze: What have you achieved with your stiffness? Where has it taken you? With a very high probability, these last two questions have answers such as: frustration, burnout, lack of self-esteem, lack of recognition from others, sadness, etc. », he says.
Rigid thinking will automatically make us anticipate everything in a very negative way, because we think we know the result and we take it for granted. What has to be done? Make a list and put everything that has to be done, checking what are the priorities but remembering that there is a priority that we cannot ignore: the time of rest and of doing nothing, even half an hour. “If we put it on a list we will cross out what we are achieving, and we will realize how many things we do not do because we postpone them and we do not give the priority that they really have,” encourages the specialist.
To conclude, López Assor advises that you allow yourself to make mistakes because it is necessary in life: «With mistakes we learn to know where we do not have to go through again. The error has its utility, it is not an enemy, an ally, necessary to learn the correct path. Try to laugh at the trial and error process. If we fall, we get up and try again but adding some variable that was not entered in the first moment. If we do things always the same, the result will always be the same.