First Encounter#
Pick up your phone, post a Weibo or Moments, the whole process may take less than 3 minutes, but for the next 3 hours or even a day, you may be in anxiety. Every like hits your chest, every comment is an adventure. If you post a highly personal dynamic, the experience mentioned above may be even more vivid.
Why is this so? In daily life, you have to accept various judgments, scores, performance, even height and weight are standards. On social networking sites, the frequency of judgment is greatly increased and the threshold is greatly reduced. Judgments from life are projected, leading to anxiety. But looking back later, nothing terrible happened. We may receive a few meaningless praises, friendly likes, or even nothing at all. The dynamic you posted becomes a tiny wave in the waterfall, flashing by in front of others.
So, can you not post? If you have the desire to showcase or share, and are also troubled by the above-mentioned issues, you should overcome the latter rather than cancel the former. Because the problems brought by the latter will spread to every corner of life, both online and offline.
Seeing Through#
The core of internal judgment is "internal", which means that there is no external information to judge you as a person. In most cases, judgments from others have not actually occurred. Perhaps it is more about not caring. Most of them "die" shortly after they occur. How long did you laugh at a classmate who cracked their voice during a school party? Did you immediately think, "They're quite brave, aren't they?"
If you experience making pastries at a cake shop, you probably won't be so anxious because you know it doesn't have to be perfect. But if it's your first time cooking at your partner's parents' house, the situation will be very different, even if you know that making mistakes the first time can be forgiven. The difference is obvious. Do you feel that you should do it perfectly? When you feel that you must do it perfectly, internal judgment will come as expected.
Even if everything has passed, your last post was half a month ago, and you may have received goodwill, but when you open it again and find a typo or a stupid comment, the familiar feeling comes back. You may invest excessive energy in these details and fall into long-term anxiety. When you enter online or offline social occasions next time, these details will pounce on you and devour you, affecting your performance. Post-processing is also one of the characteristics of internal judgment.
The opposite of anxiety is certainty, and this sentence is also appropriate here. When you are internally judging, you don't actually know where the specific problem is. You just feel a vague shadow entangling you. You don't know where it will attack from, you just helplessly wait for that blow.
Decisive Victory#
Based on the characteristics of internal judgment, we can sound the horn of victory: describe the possible consequences in the way of reporting news.
Let's go back to the previous example. If you really made a few typos today, wrote a few stupid comments, or cooked for the first time at your partner's parents' house, how would you describe the possible consequences? Strangers on the Internet mocking and refuting you; your partner's parents feeling somewhat dissatisfied... It seems terrible, but in reality, an important step has been taken: you have started to face it, treating it as an event to talk about, rather than a vague imagination.
Next, we need to clarify causality, which is important because what you are really afraid of is that a post or a difficult-to-swallow dish will lower your social evaluation. Would you think that a person's cultural level is low or that they have mental problems because of a few typos or stupid comments? Strangers may, but they don't actually enter your life. Would you refuse to let your child associate with someone because of a dish? Think about these questions, estimate the probabilities that may arise, you don't need to be as rigorous as a statistician, just estimate based on common sense.
Finally, imagine solutions, even if they are difficult. For example, if your partner's parents really fight because of this, you can show sincerity, learn for a while before trying again, or admit that you don't have talent and make up for it in other ways... You should try to ensure the practicality of the solution, but you don't have to force yourself. After all, the ultimate goal is to give yourself the confidence to face those situations that make you anxious.
By using the above methods, you can alleviate the suffocating feeling brought by internal judgment and face challenges with a clear mind. In addition, you can practice the ability to face internal judgment by adopting the following methods:
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Observe your thoughts or experiences instead of immersing yourself in them. Keep a distance from your internal judgment. For example, instead of saying "I'm not good at saying no," change it to "My thought is that I'm not good at saying no."
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Have a friendly self-dialogue. When facing the questioning of internal judgment, don't deny it directly, but admit that the problem does exist. However, consider it from a perspective that helps yourself. The way internal judgment helps us is by preventing us from trying, which is the safest way. But self-dialogue guides us in the right direction, rather than indulging ourselves.