People Make the Same Mistakes Over Again

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Information technology's easy to get frustrated and self-critical when you lot repeat mistakes. You might recollect you lot're the only one who does this, but you're not. Each person'southward specific patterns might differ, just we tin can all relate to the general concept. The tips in this mail service apply to a wide range of these types of recurrent mistakes, including:

• Overeating
• Ignoring your instinct to say no or speak up (and so regretting it)
• Prioritizing the wrong things
• Buying things you don't need, considering they're on sale
• Getting irritated with your kids, considering you lot're stressed out most work

Note: To identify your self-sabotaging habits, check out this list of 30 types. Once you lot know what you want to work on, consider these points.

ane. Vowing to never brand a item fault again is the incorrect approach.

Afterward you stuff yourself at Thanksgiving, yous say "I'one thousand non going to do that again. I feel terrible. It wasn't worth it." Nevertheless, next yr rolls effectually, and when you lot first notice you're overeating again, yous completely give up and go back for 2 more slices of pie. Sound familiar?

Paradoxically, to change recurrent patterns, information technology's often best to assume you will make the same error once more. When you exercise this, y'all can change your focus to developing practical strategies that will help you make less severe mistakes, less oft. This tends to be a more successful approach overall.

2. Develop strategies for prevention.

Lets say you know y'all finish upwardly overeating when you've become overly hungry. What strategies do you need to put in place to preclude becoming and so ravenous yous scarf four staff of life rolls that are hanging around in your intermission room at piece of work?

Let'due south accept a deep dive into how you might solve this trouble. Peradventure yous know you should stop for lunch at one p.m., merely you often stop up not stopping until 1:30 or even 2 p.m. You recognize that if you first new activities in the thirty minutes earlier you program to take your tiffin, it increases the chances you'll get distracted and not go to lunch on fourth dimension. Therefore, yous need to plan activities for the 12:30-1 p.1000. period each day that won't run over time and cause the problem of going to lunch tardily. If yous have some control over your schedule, what would be the types of work that would be predictable, not prone to running over time, and well-suited to your energy levels at that fourth dimension of the day?

Hopefully you can come across from this example how personalized your strategies need to be. Yous demand to take a problem-solving approach that's tailored to your exact circumstances, one that's actually achievable rather than aspirational. Your strategies should feel similar a reflection of yourself and be things you'll want to do, rather than seeming unappealing.

iii. Put bated time and mental energy.

I know the example strategy I've given above seems uncomplicated, simply this is deceptive. Improving your patterns doesn't just happen. Success requires all of the post-obit: thinking most what strategies you lot could use, making a decision about what to try, implementing your ideas, and, often, troubleshooting aspects of your strategies that aren't working.

All of that requires mental energy. It isn't the blazon of thing y'all'll merely do while you're on the run at work, or you lot'll squeeze into your twenty-four hour period at 10 p.g. when you're tired, tapped out, and you'd ordinarily be clicking around the internet.

The reality of life is that nosotros don't e'er have the fourth dimension or mental space available to mindfully address self-sabotaging habits. That'due south normal, but until you take that energy available, yous probably won't do annihilation to turn effectually your patterns. What times during your day/week practise you have enough cerebral energy bachelor for cocky-strategizing?

four. Develop strategies for harm minimization.

Even the best prevention strategies are likely to fail at to the lowest degree occasionally. Therefore, you need a programme for what's known as impairment minimization. This is the aforementioned principle that's backside the idea that it'southward better for drug addicts to utilise clean needles than dirty ones.

Let's think back to the problem of binging when overly hungry. Perchance your strategy for when this happens might be to start your lunch past eating some fruit, salad, or something else where it'southward hard to quickly stuff yourself with a big amount of calories.

Harm minimization is about having a rubber net, and who wouldn't want to arrange that for themselves?

Consider making backup plans for when y'all've forgotten something. For example, I keep $twenty in the glove compartment of my car in example I forget my purse or get defenseless out by a store that'due south "cash merely."

5. Empathize your "Seemingly Irrelevant Decisions."

A concept I cover in my book, The Healthy Mind Toolkit, is what'south known as "Seemingly Irrelevant Decisions." I'll give a quick overview of this concept here. Seemingly Irrelevant Decisions are decisions that set you down the path towards a cocky-regulation failure, even though the decisions seem relatively innocuous. For example, you're currently cutting back on overeating. You plan to host a party, and although yous don't intend to overindulge at your upshot, yous realistically know from past experience that whenever you host a gathering, information technology always results in overeating leftover food. Or you sign your child up for a class that'due south beyond town on the busiest 24-hour interval of your workweek, knowing that if you accept to boxing traffic at the finish of a long solar day, yous're likely to be very cranky and irritable. If yous make a Seemingly Irrelevant Decision and and then later realize information technology was cocky-sabotaging, you need to be prepared to walk dorsum that determination or put additional applied strategies in place. Don't think you can only rely on your willpower to non repeat mistakes.

Summing Up

If you focus on completely eliminating all mistakes from your life, this will feel incredibly overwhelming. If yous instead aim to amend, there are lots of practical solutions yous tin can try, and y'all'll likely experience much more success. Addressing your patterns tin even be enjoyable if you accept a non-judgmental, problem-solving approach.

Notation that I intend this post to apply to ordinary mistakes, and not things similar committing crimes!

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201809/5-tips-how-stop-repeating-the-same-mistakes

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