At some point, everyone gets behind on weekly tasks. It’s a common experience for us to have something that we need to get done and yet we keep finding ourselves not getting it done and shifting it around in our minds, to the point where we start to feel guilty that it isn’t done. And that guilt can then shift into one of those nasty judgmental thoughts about yourself. It is very easy to go from “I am struggling to find the time to do xyz task” to “What is wrong with me, why can’t I get this done?” to “I’m so lazy, people must be able to tell that I’m failing at this”. Right? It is easy to find space to judge ourselves and jump from one thought to a very extreme judgment faster than you realize.

And so this is your quick reminder to Find The Pause. When your automatic thought response goes from zero to sixty, or “I didn’t complete this” to “I’m an epic failure”, it is important to take a deep breath and find the space between those two thoughts. Maybe you aren’t doing well at whatever it is you are struggling with, or maybe you have too much going on right now. Maybe the task requires you to ask for assistance and that’s something you struggle with as well. Maybe the task is too complicated and you don’t know where to start. Or maybe the task is super boring and you just don’t want to do it; I’m looking at you, laundry pile.

So take this journaling moment, or maybe some time this week, to notice a moment when your automatic thought is very negative towards yourself. Often it takes the form of “I should”, “I always”, or “I can’t” and so it’s very noticeable. Take a deep breath after you find yourself thinking that way about yourself and try to find the space or the pause, and reframe that statement into a more realistic statement. Such as “I really wanted to send this journal prompt out on time, but I am one person with a lot of people counting on me moment to moment, and so this one task will have to wait until I make sure everyone is ok and I have a quiet moment to send it out”. Find that space between automatic thoughts and lets see if doing that also equates to being a little kinder to yourself.