So I’m on the bus and I do a sudoku puzzle. I finish in eleven minutes and four seconds. I notice to myself that for me, this is a very good score. Better than usual, not my nine minute best, but an above average performance. I feel pleased with myself.
And immediately, my brain tells me, “You know, not all these puzzles are the same in difficulty. Maybe this puzzle was just an easier one.”
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, BRAIN?!! I can’t even enjoy a small victory such as this without you immediately coming up with a reason why it’s not that big a deal? You can’t resist telling me why me doing well at something is probably just a fluke? That I shouldn’t just enjoy feeling pleased with myself?
Why??? Are you afraid I’ll get a swelled head? Are you terrified that I’ll turn to the person in the bus seat next to me and start boring them to death with stories about how great I am at sudoku???
This has been going on my whole fucking life and I’m sick of it.
Although I think I understand the point of your post, I believe this is healthy cognitive behavior. If you want your mind to continue to be aware of the nuances of reality, I don’t think you should expect to be able to turn it off sometimes in order to pat yourself on the back about something. You still deserve credit for your performance, you just don’t know exactly how much credit.
I’m also glad to see that you are comparing yourself to yourself, and not to other people, or worse, how you imagine other people are doing.
For myself, I do online acrostics in an app that includes a graph at the end about solution times for everyone who has finished the puzzle. I wish they didn’t do that, at least for those of us who have not joined and aren’t interested in competing.
FWIW, I use a sudoku app where you can choose the degree of difficulty, so it levels your personal playing field. But I kinda know what you mean. I want a bit of a challenge - not a gift.
I’m not really convinced about having imposter syndrome because I don’t really doubt my intellectual powers, and I never really have compared my intellectual abilities with what others can do.
The thing is, I know that I am smart and talented. My problem is that I don’t enjoy any evidence of being this way. I feel like I should be wary of enjoying my intellect and talents because doing so would make me a stuck-up bitch. No matter how small the accomplishment is, I should never acknowledge it, even to myself, because that is arrogance. Even if I never breathe a word to anyone about it, it’s still arrogant to feel good about something I’ve done.
I do the exact same thing, but I think it is just logical, if my average time is 10 min and I hit one at 4 minutes, I assume it was easier even if it was rated as being harder. It was the same thing for me when I was breaking records in archery distance shooting. I knew they were not great shots in reality, simply because there was not enough competition.
We’re wired to notice more emphatically any missing information in a pattern, disruptions in a pattern, uncompleted actions, and negative emotions. It’s a good survival tool.
You’ve noticed your negative self-talk. Maybe see if you can start breaking the automatic negative cycle by asking yourself questions rather than letting your thought slide immediately to more self-criticism (“Why do I do this? I hate this!”). Questions like, “Is what I just said to myself true? How could I test it? Do I tend to notice thids type of event and make this type of comment to myself under all circumstances, or only under some? How can I keep getting better at noticing what starts this cascade?” Challenge the self-talk: Dispute it, bring counter-examples, bring alternate explanations, tell it it’s not in charge.
Did you have a parent growing up that downplayed all your achievements? Offering to others or yourself “excuses” for why you succeeded? Either by jealousy or an inherent need to enforce a sense of humbleness on you.
It’s amazing the stuff we drag into adulthood from our formative years.
So let me suggest focusing on challenging the negative thoughts and not worrying about where they came from. It’s useful to know their origins, but in the moment, it doesn’t help you develop new behavior and can easily turn into a spiral of more negative emotion. /retired therapist
I’ve met people who were divorced from their brains; they’re typically called ‘idjits’ & they are what this website is all about. Please, please, please try some counseling before throwing in the towel & calling a divorce lawyer.
To clarify, I don’t see this, by itself, as a negative thought. Maybe there are other thoughts that come after this that are negative, but if so, you didn’t share them with us. This, to me, is just something that is true but not that important.
You have to have lived with my brain as long as I have to recognize what it is implying.
For further clarification, the sudoku puzzle I was doing was classified as “Hard”, not just a random puzzle. On my usual sudoku website, “Hard” is the level just below “Evil” in difficulty. I don’t do puzzles from the “Evil” tier because it forces you to guess number placement too often, and I don’t like that. You could get to the end of the puzzle that way, and find out it’s all wrong. I don’t have that much time on my commute to untangle puzzles like that.
The thing is, I had a good result with today’s puzzle, and I was feeling good about it. The split second that I felt good, my brain gave me that thought, negative or not, to imply that the puzzle may just have been easier than usual. This is the usual thing with my brain. Anytime I feel good, (and I don’t feel good very often about anything) up my brain jumps with a reason why maybe I don’t have a reason to feel good about this thing. Especially if it’s about doing something well.
Don’t feel bad about not knowing all the details, Roderick. It’s true I didn’t post them. I just am really sick of the way my brain treats me sometimes.
I’m sorry about this, and can relate. I was recently asked to evaluate my own negative self-talk and found that I spend an alarming amount of time calling myself stupid.
My therapist asked me to start a daily practice of writing down things that are good about me. I call it the self-gratitude list. You may want to give it a shot. For example today on my list, I’d get credit for talking to people at a stupid event I had to attend, reinforcing my son’s good behavior, and more broadly, caring about people. You could focus specifically on the kinds of negative thoughts you have. Just a little cognitive exercise but it might help to shift your default more toward positivity.
