 While it might be easy to feel negative about yourself, it can also be difficult to pinpoint exactly when, where, or how things went wrong. The truth is everyone has their own set of flaws and areas of growth, but it's still not fair to let these insecurities ruin your life. So with that said, here are six things you are doing that are ruining your life. Trying to be perfect at anything. Perfect is the golden standard. While it's desirable to reach for the highest possible quality in what you're doing, it's also inefficient, mentally taxing, and in most cases, impossible. Research from Tornblum and others, with the Karolinska Institute, states that up to 70% of suicides in young people are those who are described as perfectionists. Maintaining this high standard of achievement is detrimental to your well-being and can be counterproductive, as it slows the amount of work you can do to focus on getting one particular task done right. An article from Medical News Today further explains that the unrealistic expectations placed upon yourself can also pave the way for illnesses like depression, anxiety, and even bipolar disorder. Working to build more self-compassion and celebrating growth over results can help, but takes effort to achieve. Getting stuck in relationships. It's no secret that our relationships play a crucial role in our lives, but building and maintaining healthy relationships is difficult and also gets harder over time. Relationships themselves are complex. People change over time and relationships that once worked before may not now. Some find that staying in a dysfunctional relationship is better than being alone, while others find that they've put far too much time into it to abandon it. Research from Rito and others calls this the sunk cost fallacy. One in which people justify failing relationships based on the time put into it, despite the high unlikeliness that anything will change. Having unhealthy relationships, whether it's friendships, family, or a significant other can limit what you can do and pull down your quality of life, while this is difficult. Finding ways to get involved with others that support and uplift you can make a difference. Your work environment. Work plays a monumental role in our lives, where many there are sense of purposes defined by their career, where others' career success is the end goal. At the end of the day, work is crucial to surviving in our world. That being said, an unhealthy environment can be detrimental to you. First hand, a business resource and consulting company states that issues like job security, being over or underworked and underpayment are just a couple of ways that your work can add stress to your life. Combine this with burnout, toxic coworkers, or even working a job that you don't enjoy can make this part of your life miserable. First hand, further states that taking steps to change your situation, such as consulting HR, may help improve your situation. Other times, finding and building towards a career change in an area you enjoy can improve your quality of life. Work and life balance can be difficult, and often takes time and self-advocacy to achieve. Maintaining a fixed mindset over a growth mindset. The way you perceive the world is heavily influenced by your mindset. The idea between a growth and fixed mindset can make a difference in how you rate your capabilities and what you can achieve. These two mindsets are your perceptions of intelligence. With a fixed mindset, you may find yourself believing that your intelligence and ability to improve are fixed, thinking that you are granted particular strengths and weaknesses and that they will stay that way. A growth mindset, on the other hand, allows you to improve yourself and your situation. Your success is through hard work and improvement versus something set in stone. Research from Jeremy Blanchett-Sarrassen and others promotes the idea of a growth mindset through neuroplasticity. The concept is that your brain is constantly changing throughout your life and experiences. The research has shown that students who are taught about a growth mindset will achieve higher scores in a given subject versus students taught about a fixed mindset. Adopting a growth mindset encourages you to keep learning and if you're struggling with developing a skill, in time you will be able to conquer it. Spending excessive amounts of time alone. Research has extensively documented correlation between mental health and loneliness. As people, we are social creatures that depend on one another. According to psychology writer Ashley Welch from Healthline, there are significant health effects. There's a correlation between solitude and mental health disorders like depression and anxiety as well as physical consequences. When looking at older patients who self-described as lonely, there was an increased rate of severe conditions like dementia, high blood pressure, and overall chronic conditions. While current events can contribute to increasing isolation, some aspects of our daily lives influence this as well and are sneaky about it. Social media, despite its name, can further contribute to increasing isolation. Therapist Sherry Emma Tenstein states that social media, while having the ability to connect you to anyone in the world, can also lead you down a dangerous path where you compare yourself to others. Scrolling through posts more than having conversations can feel less like connecting and more like a spotlight on your shortcomings. And finally, not changing. The biggest roadblock to your growth is keeping everything the same. Problems usually do not resolve themselves and take time and effort to create a plan to overcome them. Taking time to figure out what's preventing you from progressing in life is the first step. It may be looking at what you can do for your physical health, like changing your diet or on an emotional level, like removing a toxic person from your life. These changes are crucial, but also hard. The American Psychiatric Association suggests making detailed goals on what you want to change. This includes starting one at a time and also finding a support system of people to encourage you to keep at your goals. Part of this can include talking with a mental health professional, to focus on your thoughts, feelings and mindset, to come up with strategies to help you in other areas of your life while dealing with tough situations. Changing a growth mindset here can aid tremendously in moving on. Life is difficult. There are many hardships, but on the other hand, many areas to look forward to with beautiful memories to be made. Changing is difficult, but can be what you need to do to improve your situation to a more fulfilling and rewarding one. Asking yourself what you want to change is often the first step, to which you can then seek the proper support and develop actionable steps to making a different, whether it's developing a new daily routine, working towards a new goal or seeking mental health counseling. There are several small ways you can get started. Creating one goal to focus on before moving to the next can break a large task down into small, manageable pieces. Thanks so much for watching this video, and if you enjoyed it, please give it a like and share it with someone who you think will benefit from it. Let us know your thoughts on it in the comment section. Remember to subscribe to Psych2Go to keep up with our uploads. 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