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We each have our own personal, anxiety-driven mantras that go round and round like an automatic tape. These repetitive thoughts often center on the experience of being mistreated or done in.
Your mantra might be: "My sister cheated me out of Dad's money," or "I can't stand my brother's drinking" or "My ex is turning the kids against me."
Whether you are right or not is beside the point. Such anxiety-generated thinking is totally non-productive, flushing your valuable time and energy down the tubes. Ditto for anxiety-generated thinking that takes the form of judging yourself and your future in a negative, doom and gloom way.
If you pay attention to your body and observe your thoughts, you can begin to distinguish thinking that comes from a calm center and leads to problem solving from an anxious, ruminative overfocus on a person or problem that goes nowhere.
Good self-esteem rests, first and foremost, on having an objective, balanced perspective on our strengths and weaknesses. We all have plenty of both. But anxiety can push us to extremes, so we may feel like an emotional basket case on the one hand, or present ourselves as having no needs, problems or loose ends on the other.
Anxiety, by its very nature, will lead you to lose objectivity about the complex, wonderful, flawed, ever-changing person you are. When you can't see yourself objectively, you won't see anyone else objectively, either.
Good self-esteem also requires that we view our vulnerabilities and limitations with curiosity, patience and humor. Nobody is perfect and we can all benefit from working on ourselves. But the process of self-observation, reflection and change is basically a self-loving task. It will not flourish in an atmosphere of terminal seriousness, self-flagellation or self-blame.
Unless you are a saint or a highly evolved Buddhist, you will partake in a fair amount of anxiety-driven judgmentalness of both yourself and others. Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental-toward yourself or another person-is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are.
Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.
