How to Stop Being Guilty - Yolky Get in the habit of letting go of guilt.

How to Stop Being Guilty

We’re sure you have your fair share of feeling guilty. We all do, and it’s not a great feeling.

You did something bad. And now you feel terrible but the feeling just won’t go away. It bothers you. A lot. Even worse, it makes you feel like you’re a bad person.

It’s a feeling that makes you feel powerless. It’s not a productive state of mind, and it certainly isn’t a positive state of mind. In fact, when you feel guilty, you focus on all the negative thoughts. That makes it impossible to think positive thoughts while you’re feeling guilty. Can you see why it is important to lose the guilt?

Letting go of guilt isn’t an easy thing to do. There are some good strategies that have been working well for us whenever we find ourselves falling into the guilt trap.

Forgive Yourself and Move On

Try to see your mistake from someone else’s perspective. If your best friend or a family member is feeling guilty about a similar issue, would you want that person to internalize those same feelings? You’re probably being harder on yourself than anyone would expect or want, so give yourself the same benefit of the doubt that you’d allow anyone else.

One way to forgive yourself is to realize that the past is in the past and that you did the best you could at the time. If you feel that you could have done better, take it as a lesson learned and promise yourself to do better or try harder next time.

Focus on Something Related That You’re Good At

Let’s say you feel guilty because you didn’t cook a homemade meal for your family after a long day at the office. Shift your focus and appreciate the fact that you work hard and make good money so you can stop and grab some healthy takeout on the way home from work. Appreciate the fact that your kids are fed, healthy, and you have plenty of time to hang out with them before bedtime.

Stop the Blame Game

When something goes wrong, we naturally start looking for a person to blame—and that person is often ourselves. But feeling guilty won’t help the situation. Remember that the world is intricate, and often a whole series of events contributed to what went wrong. Don’t accept all the blame for the outcome, but accept those bad things happen, no matter how hard you try. You recognize that you have your fair share of shortcomings and slip-ups, and you permit yourself to be an imperfect person rather than beat up on yourself for it.

Resolve the Guilt

If you’ve been concealing feelings of guilt from wronging someone, especially to your parent say something. You’ll feel better if you get those feelings out in the open, rather than feeling regret when it’s too late. Love your parents, fellas!

Remind Yourself That There Are Things Beyond Your Control

You are just a person, and you weren’t meant to bear the world’s problems. Just do your best and be who you are, and realize that it isn’t your responsibility to fix every problem in society. Come on, even Superman can’t fix the world.

Get Someone Else’s Perspective

If you’re kicking yourself over a specific incident, bring it up with a friend or relative who was there. You might be remembering the situation wrongly, and a friend or loved one can help remind you of the context and rationalize your actions.

Correct Your Mistakes

Sometimes we beat ourselves up for our mistakes instead of making it right. If you feel bad that you ate too much at lunch, then try fasting at dinner.

Give these ideas a try, and get in the habit of letting go of guilt.

Time To Lose The Guilt

Let’s talk a little bit about guilt today. I’m sure you have your fair share of feeling guilty. We all do, and it’s not a great feeling. It’s a feeling that makes you feel powerless. It’s not a productive state of mind, and it certainly isn’t a positive state of mine. In fact, when you feel guilty, you focus on all the negative thoughts. That makes it impossible to think positive thoughts while you’re feeling guilty. Can you see why it is important to lose the guilt?

Guilt makes you feel powerless, and it takes away your confidence. Guilt makes you slow down and second guess yourself at everything you do. Guilt keeps you from taking action and making progress in all areas of your life.
Letting go of guilt isn’t an easy thing to do. There are two good strategies that have been working well for me whenever I find myself falling into the guilt trap. You can use one or the other depending on the scenario, or you can use both of them starting with the first one and then moving on to the second one.

Forgive Yourself And Move On

Often your best bet, when you feel guilty about doing or not doing something, is to acknowledge the feeling, forgive yourself, and then move on. We already talked about the fact that guilt isn’t a productive emotion. Why not make your peace and go get something done?
One way to forgive yourself is to realize that the past is in the past and that you did the best you could at the time. If you feel that you could have done better, take it as a lesson learned and promise yourself to do better or try harder next time.

Focus On Something Related That You’re Good At

Now that you’ve forgiven yourself, it’s time to switch gears and focus on something that you’re good at. Nothing resolves guilt like action and self-esteem. This works best if you can make it something that’s closely related to the thing you’re feeling guilty about.
Let’s say you feel guilty because you didn’t cook a homemade meal for your family after a long day at the office. Shift your focus and appreciate the fact that you work hard and make good money so you can stop and grab some healthy takeout on the way home from work. Appreciate the fact that your kids are fed, healthy, and you have plenty of time to hang out with them before bedtime.
Give these ideas a try, and get in the habit of letting go of guilt.

How Negative Thoughts Affects You

You’re doing fine, working, doing what you should be doing, and then you hear it—that voice.

You turn up your music, but it’s still there.

The voice that tells you that you can’t do this anymore, that there’s no way you’ll achieve your goals. That you are lost, and you will never find your way back anymore.

Yup, that voice.

If it sounds familiar that’s because it is…it’s the worst part of you, your ego, your thoughts…the negative thoughts that slows you down.

See, when you think negative thoughts a lot, those thoughts affect your emotions. Then, your emotions affect your behavior.

The unspoken words inside of our heads — the ones that make up our endless internal string of private thoughts, emotions, and attitudes — shape how we think about everything around us.

And when those words are negative, a danger arises, creating an array of psychological problems that work to reinforce themselves until they are embedded deep within our brains.

When your thoughts turn negative, they have just as much impact as positive ones. However, rather than helping you accomplish your goals; they slow you down and can even bring you to a complete standstill instead.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they do this. Going forward, I want you to start to pay more attention to how your thoughts and attitude affect you in both a positive and a negative way. Going forward, we’ll work on having more positive and less negative thoughts.

Negative Thoughts Undermine Your Confidence

When you think you can’t do something or convince yourself in your mind that you’re not going to succeed, you’re also hurting your confidence in yourself. Without that confidence, you don’t have the drive, energy, and desire to make progress. Your thoughts run more along the lines of “why bother, it’s not going to work anyway.”

As a result, you tackle things slowly, if at all. Your progress comes to a standstill all because of your negative thinking. Don’t let that happen. Some positive thinking and self-confidence will get you back on track and moving forward.

Negative Thoughts Make You Doubt and Second Guess Yourself

Along with this lack of self-confidence and your own abilities, negative thoughts also make you doubt yourself. You’re not sure if you’re on the right track or doing things the right way. What do you do when that happens, and you start to second guess yourself?

You stop, or at least slow way down, so you can reevaluate if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You get a second opinion. You try something else to see if it works better. In short, you slow down or even have what you’re working on come to a standstill.

Compare this to times when you’re thinking positively and know exactly what you are going to do. You breeze through those projects and get them done ahead of time. Don’t let negative thoughts rob you of that.

Negative Thoughts Take Something Fun and Turn It into A Chore

Think back on a time when you had to tackle a big project. Let’s take cleaning out your closet as an example. If you’ve just finished reading a great book on decluttering and refreshing your wardrobe, you’ll be excited to get in there and sort through all the clothes you own. It’s a positive job and something you are tackling with lots of positive energy.

If on the other hand, you go into it with a negative attitude and think it’s something you have to “get through,” then something that had the potential of being a positive and empowering task becomes a dreaded chore.

And, you’ve known since childhood that dreaded chores take a long time to complete. Don’t let that happen. When you find yourself dreading something you have to do, find something positive in it and turn it into a rewarding experience.

People think that “thinking positively” is the way to healing, but the quickest way is to first accept that the only reason you feel bad in the first place is that you’re listening to that voice, to the rubbish your mind is telling you.

You could try and figure out where your negative thoughts come from—but since they’re just based on broken beliefs, why not just try to ignore them?

Learning to ignore the voice inside our head telling us we’re not good enough, not worthy of love, and so on is what we’re here to do. Next time you have a thought that makes you feel uneasy, try this:

Notice your thought, as in: ah, hello, bad thoughts. I know you’re not real; you are just an imagination. Oh well, talk all you want, but I am awesome and I have amazing things to do today, so I’m just going to go ahead and do them and sparkle like I always do.

Then if you want to think a positive thought, go right ahead!