How to Get Over Petty Resentments

"As a child, if I sat around feeling sorry for myself, my mother would gently rap her knuckles on the top of my head and admonish me. "So selfish," she would say. "Go clean toilet." To Mom, who was born and raised in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of China, a person should not nurture neurotic thinking or dwell on the tiny things that are wrong in life. This would allow catastrophizing and overgeneralizing to take control."

"I would not admit it back then, but my mother was right. Ruminating over petty resentments isn't at all helpful. Extended cogitating over minor gripes can lead to pessimism and mood disorders. Certainly, bad things do happen-say, a death in the family or losing a job-but that doesn't mean we need to fall into a negative cycle of self-talk set on phrases such as, "I am so terrible, I lost that job." "I am a failure.""

"Many of us focus on the self, but not on how we should-as in self-care, like getting proper sleep. Instead, we focus on negative deliberations that can actually shorten our lives. A paper in the journal Neurobiology of Aging showed that highly anxious and worried older adults had brains with much less gray matter. Essentially, anxiety can lead to shorter telomeres-structures of DNA sequences and proteins at the end of chromosomes. Telomeres shorten when cells divide. In effect, they get shorter as we age. When telomeres are too short, they cannot div"

Ruminating over petty resentments fosters catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, pessimism, and mood disorders. Persistent negative self-talk can produce beliefs such as "I am a failure" after setbacks like job loss or bereavement. Extreme exaggeration of negative scenarios is termed "awfulizing." Regulating emotions through perspective shifts, including third-person thinking, can create psychological distance and promote more even-keeled reflection. Chronic anxiety correlates with reduced gray matter in older adults and can accelerate telomere shortening, linking worry to cellular aging. Practical self-care, such as proper sleep, supports emotional regulation and counters neurotic rumination.

Read at Psychology Today