My Feedback Thoughts

My Feedback Thoughts

Article 1 - How to Tame Your Inner Critic: A Simple Habit to Rewire Your Brain

(Source for this Article-"https://tinybuddha.com/blog/simple-5-second-habit-rewire-harshly-self-critical-brain/")

In this article, I learned a number of things about how to be positive about my work. Joel Almeida explains in this article that 

"It’s easy to feel stressed and to slip into harsh self-criticism. Especially when I hold myself to unrealistic perfectionism or get swept away by impatience. Or when I start comparing myself to others who seem to be in a better space."

(Source:https://www.cedars-sinai.org/blog/hidden-symptoms-of-stress.html)

In relation to my work, it's easy for me to get carried away with my own idea's. Trying to polish them to unrealistic standards that I just cannot achieve yet, which is a lesson I learned from another speaker in another blog post. My personal problem is that I'm always going ahead with things that I cannot do because the time is not yet.

Joel Almeida says "Stress and negativity do remarkable things to your brain. When stress overwhelms you enough to keep your mood constantly low, your brain starts to gradually change. The core component of your brain, the grey matter, grows less dense in some helpful parts of your brain. But it grows denser in some self-critical parts."

This statement is entirely true for me, as I'm a person that can get stressed out by my own expectations of myself without really realising it until I'm to the point where I need a mental break. I become overly critical of myself and my abilities and it begins to tear me down and my work down. Luckily I've been able to manage the workload we have now with ease and it's been fun to do so far. But I have to be careful to catch myself being negative about my work in the future when the real work begins. 

Article 2 - Why rejection hurts so much — and what to do about it

(Source:https://ideas.ted.com/why-rejection-hurts-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/)

In this TED post, Guy Winch talks about how to soothe rejection and why our brains think with rejection in mind. 

(Source: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/a30719895/how-to-deal-with-rejection/)

Guy Winch says that "The answer is — our brains are wired to respond that way. When scientists placed people in functional MRI machines and asked them to recall a recent rejection, they discovered something amazing. The same areas of our brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. That’s why even small rejections hurt more than we think they should because they elicit literal (albeit, emotional) pain."

This is interesting as it means that the reason why rejection is so hard to take is due to an emotional trigger that causes brain receptors to experience pain as if it was physical. Along with this, I've heard the same thing be said about depression and stress. Winch explains that this is due to our primordial nature of rejection in tribes, as groupings were necessary to survive.

With this in mind, it's important for us to understand that rejection can be both a rational and an irrational feeling. It helps stop us from making huge mistakes sometimes and other times it can be way off base.