How to Stop Judging Yourself With These Five New Mindsets

Things You Can Apply to Escape Habit of Judgment

5 min readSep 25, 2018

Learning how to stop judging ourselves is a valuable thing we can do for our emotional and mental well-being.

Judgment is a toxic or dangerous habit. We’ve been conditioned to judge others based on religion, race, gender, culture, biases, personal preferences and interests in life.

We tend to judge ourselves more than we judge others. This often comes down to our level of self-esteem and self-confidence. The more we judge ourselves, the more we will judge others, because human behaviour suggests that whatever is going on inside us, will be expressed externally in some way.

The Costs of Judgment

Every time we judge ourselves, we will:

Decrease our level of self trust.
Erode our confidence.
Lower our motivation to do things.
Affect our effectiveness and productivity.
Not be in a positive frame of mind.

Judgment is a habit that does not serve, therefore we have to adopt some new mindsets in order to free ourselves from it.

Whenever we’re judging ourselves, we always have a choice to respond differently.

Five New Mindsets to Escape the Self-Judgment Trap

These five mindsets can be used as mantras to turn around any self-judging thoughts or beliefs we may have.

The more I resist my judgments, the more power they’ll have over me. The truth is it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever free ourselves of self-judgment. We must learn to be more aware of the type of thoughts we have about ourselves and be able to take the power out of our negative thoughts.
A judgment I make about myself is an invitation to set a new intention. As our awareness of our judgments increases, we can use it shift our focus from what’s not right to something positive. A statement we can say when a thought of judgment comes up is, “I acknowledge this self-judging thought and I can choose again. What do I want to feel and experience now?”
My judgments don’t define who I truly am. As we become the best version of ourselves, we should aim to let go of old patterns, habits and behaviours that do not serve us. This also includes our judgments as they are part of who we were, not who we want to become. We can always choose to respond differently.
As my awareness of my judgments increases, they’ll have less power over me. The more awareness we have of our judgments, the less attached we’ll be to them because we know we can always make a new choice. As we start labelling our judgments by saying, “Oh, that’s a judgment,” they won’t have as much intensity as they originally had.
Nothing is good or bad until I relate it to something. Judgments often arise because we label ourselves, another person or something as either good or bad. According to the law of relativity, nothing is good or bad until we relate it to something. Our aim should be to relate how we respond to things to who the type of person we want to be.

When we start noticing thoughts of self-judgment, which can be in the form of self-criticism, disappointment or sadness, rather than resist those thoughts, it’s better to acknowledge them, and turn them around by choosing a better-feeling thought.

Conclusion

The less we judge ourselves, the less we’ll judge others. To be able to turn around habits of self-judgment, we have to adopt new mindsets or mantras that will help us deal with them better.

As we start pay more attention to our self-judgments, we’ll be able to take the power out of them quicker so that we can be in a positive mental state more often.

Action Step: Next time you notice any self-judging thoughts, allow yourself to pause, then revisit these mindsets. A practical action you can take is to appreciate something good about yourself whenever you have a self-judging thought.

Question: What is another mindset we can adopt that will help us stop judging ourselves as often?

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