How To Deal With Disappointment As An Over-thinker

Relatability 

When talking about disappointment, I think this word rarely exists on its own. I think there are two specific things that usually go along with it, and those things would be overthinking and expectations. 

For me, I have been able to think myself into disappointment. By either comparing myself to others, thinking about dreams I haven’t achieved yet, or being harsh on myself for where I am at in life. In the same breath, I think creating unreachable expectations can create disappointment as well. 

In overthinking I have found that I used to get on a rumination cycle of dragging myself down, and a lot of that did tie in with my very high expectations of what I wanted out of myself. I hadn’t thought much about why I was continuously disappointed with myself, until I thought about the expectations I held for myself. 

Being disappointed quite literally means displeasure caused by the un-fulfillment of one’s expectations. Which tells me, if I create expectations within reason, that are more in tune with who I am and not what I think I should be, then the disappointment can be lessened. 

Reflection 

When I started peeling back the layers of my disappointment, it started with being able to acknowledge that I was more often disappointed with myself than not. There were few moments I was proud of what I had done, and many moments of the opposite. When I started working on my self compassion this was something that I had to accept that I did in order to change it. 

Underneath the disappointment, I found extremely high expectations. When I would write out the expectations I had for myself, it would be things that 1 human being was not capable of doing in a day. I remember making my to do lists for the day and at one time there would be about 25 items to complete on that list. 

When I really thought about that, I was setting myself up to fail and therefore setting myself up to be disappointed without really thinking about it. I had this voice in my head constantly telling me I needed to do this, and this, and this, and this and if I didn’t I was a failure.

So I then discovered under the disappointment and the expectations was a very loud voice of perfectionism. (which I have a whole article for planned soon). This heavy weight of all of these things in my head pushing all my gas with no brakes and really no direction gave me no room to win. 

I discovered I was really zoned in on the goals I needed to reach, and I was really neglecting the journey of building those goals. By only focusing on and overthinking what I wanted myself to achieve, I dismissed a lot of self development in those moments that you gain when you are working towards reaching a goal. 

I was ultimately trying to force myself into the person at the end of the goal without putting in any work or time to develop into that person which was very confusing and only kept me stagnant. I really wanted to reflect on why I had these insane expectations, and what my new expectations could really be, so that is what I did. 

Reinvention 

I wanted to decrease the chances of me disappointing myself, and set myself up to be proud of myself more often. This started by letting go of all of my insane expectations I had for myself and just letting myself be at ease more. Putting myself in full drive wasn’t working for me, and I wanted the foundation of this expectations for myself to be in kindness. 

After letting go of expectations of myself, I focused on my values and what aligned with myself. The values I align with are logic, kindness, calm, strength, accountability, creativity, sensitivity, and truth. Having something to build the expectations and standards you have for yourself make it easy to build on top of. 

Once I had my foundation, I found myself letting my days be easier and really leaning into building instead of rushing to the finish line. I read a book called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson that was about getting 1% better each day, and I practiced that too. When I would decide what I wanted my day to look like I set 1 intention to follow and I would only let myself put 3 things on my to do list instead of 20 things. 

After having a foundation and some structure to my days and reaching my goals, I felt lighter and like I was setting myself up to win and cheer myself on instead of tear myself down. This feeling of cheering myself on led to a much better inner voice too, the overthinking turned into solution based thinking. 

Sometimes in disappointment it’s hard to get out of it because there is some unknown territory that comes with the feeling of being disappointed. What’s next? What can I do now? Why didn’t this workout? When you have a good foundation of your sense of self and your direction, it makes these unknown feelings a little lighter. Life will always work itself out even in the midst of feeling disappointed. And most of the time there is something much better than what you expected on the other side of disappointment.