How often do you disappoint yourself with the things that you do (or don’t do)? I know that sounds like a funny question to ask, but it’s a legitimate thing to be aware of. Feeling disappointed with your thoughts and actions is a normal, human thing and we all do it. But, most of the time those types of feelings are happening for a reason and those reasons are important for you to think about and understand. Taking the time to sort them out and making changes because of them is something that’s helped me out a lot emotionally and I wanted to tell you more about it.

If you’re anything like me you experience moments in your daily life where you think to yourself “Why did I do that?” or “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to anyway.” or “I hate when I do this to myself.” or even “I know what I should be doing but I’m not going to do it.”. These thoughts come into our head all the time and it’s important to recognize them and to understand why they’re happening. You can usually feel these in your mind but a lot of times you can also feel them physically in your gut. Most of the time they’re easy to recognize but hard to do something about and many of them happen over and over because we never do anything about them.

One of these things for me is getting enough sleep. I have a history of always staying up too late and then trying to get up early, which isn’t sustainable. When this happens I wake up feeling tired and then I go through the entire day trying to find energy any way I can. It’s harder for me to think, my head feels foggy and my mood is terrible, which makes me not want to talk to anyone. I can still make it through the day, but it’s a struggle and the worst part is that I know it’s all because of not getting the sleep I need.

This then leads me to being disappointed with myself for not getting enough sleep and knowing that if I had gotten more shut-eye I would feel so much better. But for some reason I never do anything about it and before you know it I’m doing the same thing all over again and the vicious cycle continues.

As I’m writing this out it sounds so ridiculous, but it’s what happens to me over and over and over and it’s not easy to stop. The good news is that I’ve always known how to make the change, I’ve just never done it. I’ve disappointed myself so many times even though I’ve always had a pretty good idea of how to make it stop. Is that crazy or what? Silly humans.

The good news is that starting this past month I started to make some changes. Even though I fumbled through the first couple of weeks with some disappointments here and there I’m now getting to where I need to be and it feels amazing. All it took was a little bit of thought, discipline and follow-through with a plan and some structure (and boundaries) that I set up for myself.

I can explain more about what my plan has been in another blog post, but I just wanted to let you know that making the plan, starting it and sticking with it is the most important (and hardest) part (another big thing is not letting your day to day emotions change your overall plan, which I can talk about later, too). Once you get through the grind of getting that started you’re almost guaranteed to say goodbye to some of those feelings of disappointment that we’re all sick of having.