A lot of times, people will say that they love themselves and that they’re doing great whenever someone asks them. You love yourself to the point where you feel like nothing is going to stop you. That nothing is going to bring you down.
Well, that simply isn’t true. Life always has it’s moments of ups and downs and can affect you greatly. What really matters is how you deal with those moments that truly define how happy you are and how much you love yourself.
Events That Make You Not Love Yourself
There are many events that happen in life that can bring our mood completely right out of the window. Picture someone in your family dies while you’re spending time with them.
That is a life-changing experience that will affect anyone that is a normal, functioning human being. However, when you take a look at things, you can see that some people handle life-changing events fairly well while others don’t.
The people that do not get affected by this so easily does not deal with negativity bias. The people that are affected greatly have a huge involvement with negativity bias.
Negativity Bias & Why We Adopt It
For those that have been living under a rock or have never taken a psychology class, let me explain what the negativity bias is.
Negativity bias is simply the event at which we interpret more negative moments in our life rather than more positive or neutral moments. This leads to the belief that we add more value to the negative things that happen to us while placing very little value on the positive things.
This explanation can be summed up using a quote from verywellmind that states, ” This bias toward the negative leads you to pay much more attention to the bad things that happen, making them seem much more important than they really are.”
How To Love Yourself
How can you love yourself if you’re constantly thinking about negative things that happen to you?
Well, there’s actually a simple answer to this… Don’t pay attention to the bad things that happen to you. It’s as simple as that. Don’t let those negative events control the way you feel about yourself. If you let those events control you, you will lose. You will go back to a depressed state and start feeling bad about yourself.
You ever see those people that are feeling good about themselves. They are feeling good and having a lot of happiness in their life. Those people are either faking it until they make it or they have mastered the art of not caring.
Take it how you want it: negative events are always going to happen in our lives no matter what. Most of those events are unfortunately out of our control, so what is the point of dwelling on it all the time.
People that dwell on life’s hardships end up dwelling their whole life and that’s because nothing changes no matter how hard you complain or get upset about something. The world keeps moving and evolving while you’re sitting in your house sad about something bad happening to you.
Acknowledge that something bad happened to you and move on.
The Key To Moving On
Moving on? How can people just do that without ever looking back?
Here’s the thing: people that don’t know how to deal with difficult events in life tend to internalize them. What I mean by this is that people take these bad events to heart, which greatly affects their mental wellbeing.
Take yourself outside of that event and look at it from the outside looking in. You will see that this kind of event happens to everyone and you can do nothing to reverse the result. There could have been always something you could do in order to prevent a bad event from happening, but you’ll never know what exactly it is.
It’s a huge risk if that was the case because you could be on your best behavior and the same result would occur. Just accept it as a transitional period in your life, learn from it, and not have it affect you.
Imagine a world where you did not care if something bad happened to you. Say you lost 1,000 dollars but didn’t panic or get paranoid by it. That 1,000 dollars was important to you and it’s all gone. With the negativity bias, you would dwell on it and talk bad about yourself.
- What’s wrong with me?
- How could I have done something so stupid to lose this money?
- Why does this always happen to me?
- Only I could do something like that.
- How am I going to get that money back?
For the people that do not follow this bias, they would think in this matter:
- I lost 1,000 dollars today, it sucks but what can I do about that?
- That 1,000 dollars is gone, I’ll get another 1,000 some other time
- It’s not the end of the world that I lost this money
- If I needed this 1,000 dollars to live off of, I would find a way to earn another 1,000
You see the difference here? In the second example, the person realizes that something bad has happened to them, but nothing made them feel bad. Just because something bad happens to you doesn’t mean that you have to feel bad either.
It all depends on the mindset you have about life and about yourself. If you love yourself and think highly of yourself, then bad events won’t really get to you. If you’re someone that doesn’t love yourself or have mental health problems, then even the slightest bad event will ruin your day.
Instead of internalizing the event to make yourself feel worse, try internalizing the outcome. When you internalize the outcome, you focus on what you learned from that situation. You learn that nothing is really good or bad that happens to you. You learn to look for the positives in every situation.
Next time something bad happens to you, try looking at it from this perspective. Look at what you can learn from this event. Maybe you made a mistake and that’s fine, just don’t let it affect who you are as a person. Don’t let it affect your mood and how you feel about yourself.
Remember, no event in life is good or bad, it’s how you perceive it that makes it good or bad.
William Shakespeare said it best: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
