How to get rid of guilt
Guilt feelings are one of the most powerful and destructive feelings that can rob you of a happy future, undermine your physical and mental health, and ruin your relationships with people around you.
It doesn’t matter why you experience it: due to rare communication with your parents, constant interruption of meetings with friends, inability to allocate time for yourself, or lack of resources to achieve an important goal – you should try to get rid of this unconstructive feeling. We have compiled a list of effective ways that will help you with this.
Think how reasonable it is
Feelings of guilt can arise out of nowhere. More often than not, someone else makes us feel guilty. For example, when you refuse to help someone, the person may condemn you, criticize your behavior and appeal to your conscience to change your mind. But you cannot help people if you don’t have the resources to do it.
Don’t assume that you are the last person to provide much-needed support to someone else. Feelings of guilt are completely unfounded if you do not have the opportunity to help. Try to explain it to the person. If he does not understand or continues to condemn you, these will be his problems. You don’t owe anything to anyone.
Don’t leave unresolved a situation that made you feel guilty
The worst thing you can do is postpone solving the problem until later, hoping that it will somehow be solved on its own. Without your participation, nothing will change, and you will continue to live in constant discomfort, tormented by feelings of guilt.
Whatever the reason you feel guilty, you need to do one simple thing – analyze the situation to understand what you can do right now. For example, if you misbehave towards someone and you regret it, apologize.
There is no need to dissuade yourself from this and convince yourself that your apology will not be accepted or considered an attempt to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of other people. A sincere apology is enough to get rid of guilt and to forgive you for your misdeeds. So why not make life easier for yourself and others?
Admit that all people are in some way selfish
All people are selfish in some way, and this is completely normal. If we do not think about ourselves, how to satisfy our needs and make our lives more comfortable, no one else will take care of this.
Stop berating yourself for trying to take care of yourself first. Continue in the same spirit, and honestly tell all the dissatisfied that you are in the first place. Those who are mainly dissatisfied with this situation and want to continue using you and your help will be outraged.
Learn to rest
The ability to relax makes life better. Without rest, you cannot restore resources, work normally, and maintain physical and emotional health. There are many more arguments for, but most of them are powerless before the thought of how productively you could spend the time allotted to rest.
As good as you are, you can suffer from an overwhelming sense of guilt and, as a result, not even feel refreshed
Do not lie on the couch, where you are tempted to do something useful instead of relaxing: make appointments with friends, travel, walk more, get new emotions and new interesting experiences.
Work on mistakes
The time you wasted on self-flagellation, you could devote to working on mistakes. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, try to make your time more productive and start analyzing what and where you did wrong and how to fix it.
This helps solve two problems at once: get rid of guilt feelings and gain valuable experience that will help you avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Learn to forgive yourself
Everyone tells us that forgiveness is necessary and that keeping evil on others is bad for our health. But keeping evil on yourself is the most dangerous thing. Understand: everyone has the right to make a mistake because everyone can have a bad day, a limited amount of time, not enough knowledge, experience, strength.
If you love, appreciate and respect yourself, you are unlikely to blame yourself for a mistake. Just take it for granted: it has already happened, and now you need to think about how to fix it. And the feeling of guilt can hardly help you with this.
Don’t discount your achievements
Feelings of guilt often arise when you achieve the success that you don’t think you deserve. You convince yourself and others that you have invested too little knowledge, experience, time, and effort into your work.
You forget about all those difficulties you have successfully overcome; about those difficult decisions that he made; about all the hardships that he went through for the desired result. Remember this, review your work, and stop letting your feelings of guilt devalue your accomplishments.
Don’t let the people around you make yourself guilty
Feelings of guilt are a great basis for manipulation. It is very difficult to recognize it, but it is almost impossible to get out of this influence even if you admit the thought that they are trying to control you. Do not rush to cut valuable connections for you, suspect your loved ones of selfish plans, and in other ways exacerbate an already difficult situation.
First, give yourself time for a break and analyze everything: see who and how is trying to control you and your actions. If you realize that someone is pressuring you, forcing you to make certain decisions because of a feeling of guilt, talk about it with the person and explain that you will no longer allow yourself to be made guilty.
Stop looking for someone to blame
When something does not go according to plan in your life, you immediately start looking for someone to blame. Unfortunately or fortunately, in most cases, such a person is yourself. And when you realize this, your guilt grows exponentially.
It is important to realize in time that guilt will not help you correct the current situation. It will only make it worse by making you doubt yourself, self-flagellate, and consistently harm your health.
Whatever one may say, there are many external factors that you cannot influence and on which the result of your work depends. Admit it and get rid of the habit of looking for blame all the time.
Don’t be silent about your feelings
Keeping everything to yourself is extremely difficult, especially if feelings of guilt torment you. If you understand that you are feeling guilty and do not know what to do with this feeling, first of all, share your emotions with someone you trust.
The person can share with you their opinion of the situation, give useful advice, or listen. You will be surprised how differently you can evaluate the same words and deeds. It can help you get rid of your guilt.
