Sometimes you might unconsciously turn a minor problem into a massive disaster. What are the signs you make life complicated when it’s unnacessary, and how to deal with it?
You like to dramatize
Raising the bar incomprehensibly high and complicating everything is a great way to add tragedy to your life. Perfectionism has become something neutral or even positive, but usually, this idealization turns against us – we dramatize things that are not worth it.
By regularly making things more complicated, one might develop a toxic perception, and as a result, a personality disorder. This happens when drama becomes a maladaptive strategy for stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, repressed anger, and powerless despair. It’s important to adequately assess the reality of the situation and apply a planned solution to the problem, pre-dividing it and maintaining a positive reassessment.
But why is dramatization so harmful? It destroys your life as a whole. You set yourself an everyday task, but then it turns into torture for you, which gets more and more complicated in your head with each new step. The slightest deviation from the plan and new inputs eliminates all your efforts and artificially complicates the task. As a result of adopting such a scheme, one begins to realize the pointlessness of the first step. In other words, the person recognizes their defeat even before the struggle begins.
You are playing games with your mind
In case you often feel that nobody loves you because of your appearance, financial situation, age, or other factors. In that case, you are probably projecting your own negative thoughts on others. Think about it twice. Is there absolutely no one in the whole world who could love you? That’s impossible! The real reason could be that you don’t love and accept yourself, and it has nothing to do with either your appearance or success at work – every time you lack something to live in harmony with yourself.
To solve this issue, identify the reasons for your insecurities and complexes, and talk to a psychologist about them or work them through on your own.
You criticize a lot (both yourself and others)
Even if you’ve coped with some task flawlessly, you are still dissatisfied with something – you think you could do better, faster, better. And this applies not only to the work sphere but also to everyone else – you criticize your behavior, the way you communicate with others, your appearance, the way you behave in public.
As for the people around you, you treat them in the same way. Being a prisoner of negative thoughts, you repeatedly criticize your colleagues, friends, boss, relatives, children, and all the other people in your environment (and beyond it). Such a behavioral strategy makes your life complicated. In the end, you’re not satisfied with the reality around you, and your faithful companions are laziness, procrastination, apathy, and depression.
How to stop dramatizing and making life complicated?
These simple examples illustrate a leading principle underlying possible psychological help because your feelings result from your own “messages” to yourself. In other words, your thoughts reflect how you feel, not what’s really going on in your life. In this case, almost any reason for your lousy mood turns you into a victim. You believe that these factors are beyond your control. However, giving up the habit of making your life more complicating and learning to take responsibility for your life is real – here are three basic steps to help in this matter.
- Focus on the negative thoughts and try to write them down the moment they overwhelm you – “catch” them by putting them down on paper.
- Reread your list of thought distortions. Analyze how you exaggerate the problem (and how real the issue is).
- Try to gradually replace the negativity with reality – “pull yourself back” in moments of dramatization, criticism, and “playing” with your own mind. This way, your self-esteem will grow, and the feeling of hopelessness and desire to make things complicated will eventually disappear.
