Think of a time when something didn’t go as well as you had hoped — a time, for example, when you made a mistake, did poorly on a test or were cut from a team.
Faced with disappointment, did you treat yourself with kindness and compassion? Or did you beat yourself up about it?
In general, do you live with unrealistically high expectations when in comes to your grades, popularity, appearance, performance in sports, extracurricular activities or anything else? Do you ever wish you could be a little easier on yourself?
. . .
Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, explains one way to keep your inner critic in check:
Distancing is a way of zooming out on our inner chatter to engage with it differently. If you’re agonizing over something in the middle of the night, for example, that’s a cue to “jump into the mental time-travel machine,” he said.
