It doesn’t help.
But it seems so necessary! If you don’t criticize yourself, beat yourself up, then you won’t make a change. You have to be hard on yourself to do the hard things! You have to remain vigilant.
That’s how we are taught to make changes. We have seen our parents, teachers and coaches all point out our mistakes to teach us how to do better.
But that just doesn’t work with ourselves. Let me tell you why.
- It doesn’t lead to understanding. To make changes, any changes, we need to figure out why we do what we do first. If we don’t know that, we can’t build a plan to be successful.
This is true because everyone is unique. You have specific obstacles to your success, that are just yours. Until you see what they are, you can’t overcome them. Spending time beating yourself up is a waste and it makes you shrink away from examining the problem to see how you can triumph. - It erodes your self-esteem, so you are less willing to try again. You are a capable person, but you are learning this skill of giving up sugar. If your self-talk is mean and only points out how you can’t do it, calls you names like weak-willed and stupid, it turns the act of giving up sugar into a judgement on your worthiness. We are not good or bad because we eat sugar. We are worthy human beings that are trying something new.
It will be a challenge. We are 100% capable of overcoming this challenge, but even when we overcome it, we won’t be better people. We will just have learned this valuable skill. And we will continue being the people we are. - In the most basic way, beating ourselves up leads us to eat more unhealthy foods. When you beat yourself up, you feel bad. And when you feel bad, you try to escape those emotions by eating. Creating more negative emotions will only exacerbate the problem by urging you to escape that discomfort.
You often eat sugar when you are experiencing emotions you don’t want, and so creating more emotions you don’t want will drive you to eat more sugar.
So, what other option do you have beside berating yourself for your slip up? You can’t just congratulate yourself for doing something you wish you hadn’t done, right?
Here’s the key – you must get compassionate with yourself. You would never tell a 4 year old how dumb and stupid they are for not knowing their letters yet.
You aren’t telling the 4 year old they are great for not knowing their letters. But you do understand that they haven’t developed that skill yet.
If you want to get better and make progress, you have to get curious about why you aren’t there yet. Ask yourself “What lead to this incident?” “What was I thinking, what was I feeling?” “How can I think about this differently?”
One powerful tool you can use is to visualize yourself in the future when you don’t want sugar anymore. How would you think about yourself? What would eating that sugar mean to you then?
In the future, when you don’t feel strong cravings anymore and you aren’t fighting it, a situation where you have some sugar would mean nothing. You wouldn’t make it mean that you failed or weren’t doing it right. You would just have the experience and not let it mean anything about you.
Ask yourself how you would handle this situation after you’ve kicked the habit of sugar, and take small steps to become that person now. The first step to take is to not beat yourself up about eating sugar. That is who you want to be. That future you isn’t worried about it because they don’t worry it will lead to a downward spiral or a mental beating.