Me to myself (feeling shitty): “This is on me, I should have known better.”
My coworker to me: “I am sorry about this, yaar. I should have known better. I was so confident I was right, I didn’t think of checking again.”
Me to my coworker: “It’s alright. You didn’t mess up intentionally. You’re only human”
My coworker to me: “You are too kind!”
Me to myself: “How could you mess things up like that?”

“Huh?” something stopped my brain cold.

I have been working on myself lately and something felt off. Why was I reacting differently to different people for the exact same reaction, which cause the exact same situation?

I’d never tell my coworker or a friend or a family member:
‘You should have known better.’
‘You always mess things up.’
‘What were you even thinking?’

But I have said every single one of those things to myself.

Why?

That made me pause.

I searched up the why and landed in a place where I could get answers in various things – my upbringing, conditioning and so on. Things in the past, things which were beyond my control and still are. I didn’t find it helped me.

But then I took a pivot, a forward facing one – and that led to an eye opener. I asked myself “What effect did my response to my mistakes have on myself?”

Here’s what I learned:

When you make a mistake and immediately beat yourself up, your brain mistakenly treats an emotional stumble as a physical threat. Your amygdala, the ancient survival center, sounds a frantic alarm that floods your body with stress hormones, leaving you feeling exposed, panicked, and trapped in fight-or-flight mode. At the very same time, a loop called the default mode network takes over your internal monologue, endlessly replaying the mistake like a painful movie and making you feel like you are the problem, rather than just the thing that went wrong. It is an exhausting, heavy place to be, and it physically locks your brain out of the creativity and clarity you need to heal.

But when you choose to meet that same mistake with a breath of grace, your brain undergoes a beautiful, comforting shift. Your prefrontal cortex, the wise and gentle regulator, steps in to quiet the amygdala’s panic, wrapping your nervous system in a sense of safety. This mental calm allows your brain’s error-monitoring center, the anterior cingulate cortex, to softly look at what happened as gentle data—a lesson to learn from rather than a verdict on your worth. By choosing kindness, your brain releases soothing chemicals like oxytocin, opening up the pathways of neuroplasticity so you can naturally protect your high standards, mend the mistake, and move forward with your head held high.

In conclusion: The standard you hold for your friends — the grace, the gentleness, the ‘it’s okay, you’re human’ — that standard belongs to you too.

Not as toxic positivity.

Not as excusing everything.

But as basic human decency — extended inward.

You are not the exception to kindness. 💚

Brené Brown and other authors like her were so wise, when they said, ‘Talk to yourself like someone you love.’ The gap between how we speak to others and how we speak to ourselves is where so much quiet suffering lives. And in all honesty, that suffering is completely unnecessary and counter productive.

Think of a mistake or struggle you are currently being hard on yourself about. Now write a short note to a close friend — as if THEY were the one going through this exact situation. Read it back. What do you notice? What would change if you let yourself receive those same words?

For tonight, write down one harsh thing your inner critic has said to you recently. Then rewrite it — word for word — the way you would say it to a friend you deeply care about. Keep that rewrite somewhere visible today.

And going forward, let “Would you say it to a good friend?” be the gate that you have to cross before accepting the tirade of words from your brain.

Drop a comment with your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you. 🤍 💙

Hugs!
~Varada