take everything to heart

LegacyUser

i take everything to heart every small comment goes around and around my head and i look at it from different angles how can i stop being like this?

tinkerbell

I'd suggest you speak to your GP about it and go see a counsellor.

ivytwine

Mindfulness- it's ideal for overthinking.

http://www.mindfulness.ie/

Best of luck, I know what it's like and it's exhausting!

J_E

Deep breaths and perspective. Avoid the impulse to snap back or assume something was a negative attack against your character. Be conscious of it and slowly you will be able to control it.

LegacyUser

when someone is criticizing me i feel as if they attacking or condemning me. i then get angry with myself or internally angry with them

Rubberchikken

if the things you're hearing are personal slights made directly to you, then that's horrible. no one should take their insecurity and nastiness out on someone else.
if sit's a case that someone is just saying something for the sake of it and you're reading too much into, then my advice would be to slowly tell yourself that it's not worth taking in. train yourself to ignore the comment/s and eventually it will become natural to you.

Berserker

I'm like you OP and I genuinely sympathise with you. Last week, my manager was generating a list of consequences to an on-going issue we, the team, are experiencing in our workplace. He called me into his office to ask me for any possible additions to his list. On reading, his list, he mentioned that members of the team would leave the company as a negative result of the current situation. However, he put another colleagues name ahead of mine on the list. As someone who takes things to heart, I took that as my manager saying that he rates my colleague ahead of me and his departure would be a bigger loss to the company. It bugged me for the days.

everythings personal

everythings personal wrote: »

i take everything to heart every small comment goes around and around my head and i look at it from different angles how can i stop being like this?

everythings personal wrote: »

when someone is criticizing me i feel as if they attacking or condemning me. i then get angry with myself or internally angry with them

Start by doing it to yourself. Find time to set aside and dwell on parts of yourself you are critical about or not entirely happy about. Including the one you started this thread about.

Mindfullness meditation is indeed useful for this - I recommend it - but it is not a requirement by any means.

Then in these sessions do two things:

1) Identify ways you might strive to improve the things you are not happy about and how you can implement them.

2) Ask yourself do you think any worse of yourself for these faults or do you still care about and love yourself? Then you might realise that critique of yourself - and by extension critique of others or of you BY others - does not necessarily mean they think any less of you or bad of you.

I remember a funny quote by - I think - Richard Dawkins. Or perhaps it was Dawkins who quoted someone else. But in it someone said "Why do you have to tell me my beliefs are wrong - why can you not just respect me?" to which the reply was "Sir - it is BECAUSE I respect you that I have to tell you your beliefs are wrong".

Put another way - sometimes when we critique others we do it because we actually care for - and - respect them. Not the opposite which is sometimes how it CAN feel.

LynnGrace

ivytwine wrote: »

Mindfulness- it's ideal for overthinking.

http://www.mindfulness.ie/

Best of luck, I know what it's like and it's exhausting!

I'd second this. It's a very useful way to calm the mind, in my experience.