It has been said many times before, and people will continue to say it: You’re a human being, so mistakes are inevitable.
It’s OK to make mistakes.
Even I have the equivalent of this statement on my Daily Reminders print.
It’s a logical statement, and it’s also true. We know on an intellectual level that there’s no escape from making mistakes, but the inner turmoil and self-criticism that ensues when it continues to happen suggest that although understood as true, this truth hasn’t been fully accepted.
We’re bound to feel bad when our mistakes cause harm to others, and it’s natural to feel a certain level of guilt. If anything, not feeling remorse would lead to raised eyebrows and concern that you lack certain essential human qualities.
In other words, it would be the same as beating yourself up over making mistakes and trying not to make any at all. You would be making yourself less human (and less of a decent person, where not feeling remorse is concerned).
Either way isn’t great.
Considering the difficulty of allowing the ‘mistakes are OK’ statement to permeate our being, perhaps we need a different explanation to help it sink in rather than hoping that it will eventually stick and magically work wonders for all who feel challenged by this notion.
A different perspective
This isn’t going to be about learning from your mistakes, nor am I going to talk about showing yourself self-compassion. Although both are important, we’re going to instead turn our focus towards our thoughts.
Wrong again! It’s not about ‘changing your mindset.’ Like learning from mistakes and self-compassion, it’s helpful when genuinely needed. Other than that, for many it’s not always as simple as flicking a switch and making a ‘simple’ mindset shift. This concerns our level of thinking at any given moment.
Take, for example, when you eat something that you know you shouldn’t. It could be 10 cookies in one sitting. After eating so many, you might think to yourself that you should know better than to gorge on cookies, especially when you’re not even hungry.
We all know how easy it is to get carried away with these kinds of foods. They’re intentionally made moreish, after all. If you’re susceptible to getting carried away once you eat even one cookie, then it’s easy to find yourself munching on cookie number 10 in a short space of time.
Something for you to consider
Consider this: We can only ever operate at our current level of thinking.
Bliss point aside, the manipulative process behind the moreish factor, our thoughts still play a role. Consider the following two scenarios:
Scenario 1: Person eats a few cookies - Hmm, these are sooo good, but I’m going to stop. If not, I’m in big trouble!
Scenario 2: The same person eats a few cookies - What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just be like everyone else and control myself?
Think of it as a higher level of thinking equalling more clarity, creativity, and rational thinking and, therefore, the likelihood of making better decisions. This then gives you the opportunity to take charge of your actions. Whereas, a lower level of thinking equals the opposite.
Where was the person’s level of thinking in each scenario? In the first, it was quite high because they can easily get carried away and munch needlessly, but they decided to stop themselves before things got out of control. In the second, the level may not have been rock bottom, but it certainly wasn’t as high as the first. This led the person down a different path that they weren’t happy to take.
But what about mindless eating?
Wansink offered two reasons why people eat mindlessly: Convenience and the environment.1 With the first, always having cookies readily available in your kitchen comes to mind. If they’re not available, you could rush out to buy some, but it’s more inconvenient to do so, which, depending on the circumstances, can deter you.
Regarding the environment, Wansink gave the size of your plate and the amount someone else eats as examples. Other reasons, such as boredom or eating food that lacks nutrition, could also play a role, but there are many other possible reasons.
Although the brain isn’t engaged, on my imaginary high-low scale of thinking, I would position the act of mindless eating lower on the scale because the reasons listed above are not unchangeable. If the only reason one eats mindlessly is due to their environment, and they have the ability and resources to change it, this gives them some control over the situation.
Alternatively, if you live with someone who always buys cookies and doesn't stop when you ask, you'll have little control over the environment and the convenience if you can't move out. In this instance, although it's not completely impossible to avoid temptation, there's a good chance you'll struggle to change anything whether your thoughts are high or low.
What does this all mean?
It’s easy to interpret this as meaning high means good and low means bad. Not at all. It’s my way of distinguishing between more calm, clarity, or ease and more confusion, discomfort, or difficulty, or a combination.
So if you find yourself getting annoyed or frustrated and thinking that you should've known better after doing something that you wish you hadn’t, in that specific moment, you didn't and you couldn't because your level of thinking wasn't 'high' enough. That's all.
It doesn’t matter about your age, your life experience, your educational background, or your level of common sense. Once your thoughts come into play, they will either keep you aligned with the four aforementioned factors, or they won’t. You can control this to a certain degree by implementing strategies, as in the case of changing your environment or the ease of convenience, but various issues like fatigue, illness, stress, and even being busy can still catch you out and thereby cloud your judgement.
Always expecting yourself to know better even when you’re not in the right frame of mind only suggests that there's something wrong with you when there is nothing wrong.
Everyone experiences high and low thinking and everything in between for different reasons.
This doesn’t mean that you’ll always make the right decision when you have high-level thinking. Wrong decisions can still be made even at that level. Note I stated earlier that it leads to the likelihood of making better decisions. It’s not guaranteed every time. You could make a decision at work believing it’s the right thing to do, but the result is instead concerning.
It could be because you were missing information that you didn’t realise you needed; you didn’t double-check something; you were feeling overconfident, or it was simply a rational decision that didn’t work out as expected.
Yes, all of this ultimately comes back to the ‘you’re human’ justification, but digging a little deeper beyond what can sometimes feel like an annoying cliché can make the difference between tuning out and constantly being hard on yourself and tuning in and genuinely giving yourself a break.
https://www.obssr.od.nih.gov/news-and-events/news/mindless-eating-why-we-eat-more-we-think