This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 2742, Why Am I Always So Hard On Myself by Kate Hess of nourishnestbreathe.com and I'm just a molecular personal narrator reading to you every single day of the year with permission from the authors and to share a popular allegory at the end of this article after the reading so the commentary will be a little longer than normal but without let's get right to it as we optimize your life. Why Am I Always So Hard On Myself by Kate Hess of nourishnestbreathe.com? In order to be hard on yourself, you have to start with the belief that you're falling short somehow, falling short of your expectations for yourself, of others' expectations for you, of what you believe society expects you to be and do. The core of this self-criticism is our beliefs.
The beliefs often aren't true and just as often, we aren't even aware of them as they run in our subconscious. Think of them like malicious software running in your computers unnoticed until it starts to cause major problems. Let's start with what a belief is. Your beliefs are stories you tell yourself often unconsciously that aren't actually true.
I'm sorry to refer to our beliefs as myths using the non-alligorical definition of a commonly held but false belief or idea. Our beliefs are like code running in our subconscious, influencing many of our thoughts, actions, inactions, and emotions. And when your beliefs are actually myths, they can negatively impact many aspects of your life. The myths feel your to-do list with things you don't actually care about cause you to be hard on yourself when you don't meet expectations for yourself you don't actually want to meet and swing your ideas about how you should be spending your time by gilting you into interactions out of alignment with what's actually important to you.
And all of that results in feelings of frustration, guilt, shame, self-doubt, self-blame, overwhelm, and burnout. Think of it like trying to swim against the current. If you just turned in the other direction, everything would be so much easier. Where do our beliefs come from?
We acquire beliefs through a number of different sources. Number one, our family. These are things we learn either from what our family says or doesn't say, or by watching the way they act and interact with us and others. Number two, culture and society.
Beliefs in this category are picked up from people you know personally as well as the media you consume, your social feed, television and movies, the news, magazines, advertising, etc. Beliefs are conveyed both through what's actually said, as well as what you observe. Number three, correlation without causation. This source of beliefs falls along the lines of Plato's cave.
If every time you got out of bed on the left side, it was sunny, and every time you got out of bed on the right side, it was cloudy, you might believe you control the weather. Perhaps in reality, the morning sun shining in the window on the right side of the bed causes you to roll over toward the left before waking up. Then you naturally climb out of bed on the left side. On cloudy days, nothing causes you to roll over so you get out on the right, the side you naturally sleep on.
While this is a low-cost example, there are plenty of places where we believe our thoughts or actions have caused the result to manifest, even though the two were not actually related the way we believe. Understanding your beliefs, the nesting doll analogy. Usually when I talk about uncovering and understanding your beliefs, I use the analogy of a head of lettuce or cabbage, a densely packed ball with a layer upon layer to peel back. But in my own self-work, I've started to use the analogy of nesting dolls.
I'm sure you can picture what I'm talking about, the sweet little bowling pin shaped dolls that split open around the waist and have a slightly smaller, similar but not identical version of themselves inside. What do nesting dolls have to do with beliefs? Well, the first step in changing our subconscious beliefs is recognizing them. Think about it like this.
In order to clean your house, you first need to see the dirt, dust, and cobwebs. If you can't see what needs to be cleaned, how will you clean it? As you dive into this type of self-work, the first belief you land on is often a symptom of a deeper belief. And to discover that deeper root belief, you need to open the dolls to uncover what's under that first shell.
Here's an example of what this might look like in practice, and note that all of these are beliefs. I need to clean my house every other day. Why? I'm afraid if I don't keep the house clean, my husband will stop loving me.
Why? Because it's what a wife is supposed to do. And if you don't, then people will think less of me. And I don't want people to think less of me.
Why? Because then they might not want to spend time with me. Because people only want to be with me or spend time with me if I'm doing something for them. I picture each of those beliefs as a nesting doll, as you open each one you find another belief nested within.
And when you reach that last belief, that's what I call a root belief, it's the foundation that other beliefs are based on. If you believe people only wanted to be with you or spend time with you if you were doing something for them, think of how many things it would cause you to put on your to-do list beyond cleaning the house every other day. When you get that gut punch feeling, you probably hit a root belief. It's like the last tumbler falling into place in a lock, and suddenly all sorts of stories you've told yourself make sense.
And you realize that maybe, just maybe, they're all built on a myth. Uncovering your beliefs. I've got a great exercise to help you dig in and uncover your subconscious beliefs, which are actually myths. As you work through the questions, consider if the belief you've identified is a symptom belief or a root belief.
If it's a symptom, ask yourself why it matters or what might happen if you didn't align with the belief. Let's get back to the nesting dolls. Sometimes in the process of cracking open a root belief to recognize and release it, you discover that nesting doll was actually hiding yet another doll inside or behind it. What that means is, even after you've identified and addressed a root belief, it's not uncommon to discover in future work another root belief, hiding well below the original, which couldn't be seen until the first was removed.
This happened to me recently. I realized a belief I worked hard to release and rewrite was gone, and in its place sprung up a deeper adjacent belief. Once I brought awareness to this new belief, I took time to both celebrate the work I put into releasing the first belief, and then create a plan to begin weaning out this newly discovered belief. The process of self-discovery is a journey, not a destination.
There won't be a time where I'll be able to say, yes, I've finally discovered and addressed all of my subconscious beliefs. Instead, I'll keep bringing awareness one by one to them and working to release and rewrite the beliefs to bring them into alignment with my unique values. You just listened to the post titled, Why Am I Always So Hard on Myself? By Kate Hess of NourishNestBreathe.com I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on.
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A little more difficult to read than a typical blog on Eric here, but I still think it's worth it. I was first introduced to it in college, I think, from my anthropology professor, and I end up never forgetting it, so I'll give you the gist of it. It's basically about beliefs versus the truth or knowledge, and it's Plato writing a conversation between his brother and Socrates. Socrates paints this picture of prisoners who have lived their entire lives from birth, chained inside a cave.
And from what I remember, they're facing walls, behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets and other things. So basically, if you imagine a fire, then puppets and objects, and then a wall, or multiple walls, you can imagine that there'd be shadows cast onto the walls, and the prisoners could see them, but not the fire or anything else, really. All the prisoners can really do is watch the shadows, and that makes up their reality. That's all they know in this world.
So now if you imagine a prisoner becoming free, they would see the fire and realize that the moving shadows are just that, shadows, not actually real things per se. They would see the fire and understand that the shadows were projections. This prisoner could also escape and see the entire world outside of the cave, now believing that that world is what's real. So the obvious thing to do here would be to free everyone else.
But coming back, the prisoners become blind because their eyes had never seen the sun before, and when the prisoners learn that you now can't see whether temporarily or not, the prisoners that are still chained believe they will be harmed if they try to leave the cave, and would even defend themselves to not be released, because the cave is all they truly know. So it's a powerful message that I think applies even without the blindness. It can be really difficult to explain to someone what you've experienced, and just as difficult to try to get them to see it for themselves. We often choose to stay in our bubbles, where we're quote unquote, comfortable.
But there's a ton of beauty missed with that way of thinking and knowledge. Again, a powerful message to remember, so thank you for taking the time to listen to this in the commentary. Hopefully you enjoyed that. But I'll do it for today and another episode of OLT.
Have a great rest of your day, and I'll be back tomorrow, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait.