Dealing with failure is a skill set. Like all skill sets, it requires practice to get good at it. If you never really fuck something up, you don’t get the practice.
I’m in medical school. This is one of the most high-pressure environments out there. It is specifically designed to repeatedly make you feel like you’ve fucked everything up. If I hadn’t had experience with specifically academic failure starting in college, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it now.
I was the kind of student who made it through high school without really having to study. Then in college I walked right into the brick wall of Honors Chemistry. My test scores went like this: 45%, 33%, and I calculated my potential score on the final while I was taking it based on getting every single question I had written down an answer for right, and I couldn’t have gotten better than a 35%. I started planning my English major during that test. I left, got high, and spent the night throwing up. (I got high mixing Bad Drugs to mix.)
That was one of the worst days of my life. But I got through it (badly!) and I learned, and I failed at many more things in many ways, and I ended up in medical school anyway.
The term for when your brain convinces you that THIS particular fuck-up is the End Of All Things is catastrophization. It’s a cognitive distortion. Very few things in life are actual catastrophes, but our brains are programmed by billions of years of evolution to look for catastrophes and worry about them. So we trip the trigger way early on it.
Recognizing that our brains aren’t always RIGHT was helpful for me. I don’t know if it’s helpful for you, but as someone who spent many years studying people, behavior, and brains, let me assure you: if you imagine your brain as a belligerent drunk weirdo driving a really expensive car, you’re not far off.
So practice failure. When your brain tells you you’re an idiot, gently remind it that your brain thinks eating an entire bag of marshmallows at once is a good idea and maybe it doesn’t get to be the judge of you.
Then eat the bag of marshmallows anyway because if you’re going to feel like shit might as well earn it.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2sMF1ob