The Journey of Emily Fan

  Why might we be so mean to ourselves? I like to think that I am accepting and forgiving of others , and that I make an effort to understand the challenges others face, yet my own inner critic is quite harsh. It seems to be a common experience, but why do we engage in such self-sabotage? My hypothesis is that my inner critic is driven by how I feel about how society judges me.   I see people be mean to each other on social media. I recall my parents’ harsh reprimandings in their attempts to make me a better person. I hear gossip. I falsely believed that the unkind statements, perhaps made by the person while they were in a bad mood, were how society was judging me. I was afraid of being “a bad person,” “lazy,” or the countless negative things others said. I believed that what others said about me was the scale that I would be weighed on. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted by society. Having been socially awkward and lonely for a large chunk of my life, the inner critic perhaps

  Who Would Find This Article Most Helpful Those who find going to bed at a reasonable hour a major bottleneck to getting enough sleep and maintaining a healthy sleep schedule Those interested in thinking more deeply about their mindset with respect to sleep and productivity TL;DR Things I’ve Tried Shortened Paying someone else $0.01 for every minute later I go to bed than my bedtime. (Perhaps next time I could use SPAR ). FocusMate while doing bedtime routine.  Posters reminding myself to sleep.  App/Website blockers.  Reading Why We Sleep . Making rough calculations on productivity loss. Things I am Currently Trying App/Website blockers.  Listing out the ways I fail to go to sleep earlier and strategizing ways to combat those failure modes. Mindset Shifts Framing staying up late to meet deadlines as a high-interest loan . Recognizing planning fallacy with variability in how we feel the next day while being sleep deprived.  Realizing that giving up sleep to be successful backfires