I remember one of my favorite professors in college gave an informative and hilarious lecture on stress and how people deal with it. He said that often times we can be our own stressors, putting pressure on ourselves to be perfect and mistakeless. Something that really had me tuned in was his discussion on our emotional reaction to stress and that’s when the truth came unraveling before my eyes. My ears popped open to the outpour of some new found knowledge, and if ever I learned anything in that class, it was the fact that we can all “musterbate” and “should on ourselves” sometimes. By the way, these are terms used by psychologists (for real).

Yes! Deny it all you want, but most of us “should on ourselves” by saying things like “I should get this done”, or “I should’ve done better”. It’s not exactly a negative thing to motivate or push yourself to achieve, but sometimes people tend to go too far with it. You know, like talking themselves down when they fail, or having some kind of emotional breakdown. Trust me, it’s quite an unpleasant sight when you walk by people on the street with their heads hanging down and slouching as if the world’s on their backs. You never truly know what someone’s going through until you hear them talking about it, with absolutely no one.

According to professionals, it’s healthy to have discussions with yourself in the mirror, or just doing it discretely overall is okay. However, I find it rather disturbing to see someone cursing themselves aloud in public, saying things like “I’m such an idiot”, “I’m a failure”, or “I should just die ‘cause I have no purpose.” They basically “should” on themselves because they’ve failed at something. This kind of breakdown is most likely as a result of them “musterbating” too much. In the beginning, they probably said something like “I must do this” or “I must pass that” and in realizing that things didn’t quite work out the way they wanted it to, its like all hell broke loose. So its all correlated; I “musterbated” now I’m “shoulding on myself.”

The best thing to do in dealing with failure is to get up and try again without being too hard on yourselves. It’s not the end of the world. I believe we’re all winners, and a loser is someone who gives up and stays down. We’re all imperfect human beings and we all make mistakes. Anyone who lives their life always trying to be perfect and having some kind of mental scare whenever they mess up is in dire need of therapy.

This is just my opinion. How about you? Do you “musterbate” or “should on yourselves?”