Why You Should Stop Beating Yourself About Past Money Mistakes
Several years ago, I made a huge financial mistake . As a freelancer, I had not paid taxes for a year and ended up owing several thousand to the IRS in April. I was not only broke, but I felt like a fool. But the point is, if you punish yourself for those mistakes, you’re more likely to repeat them.
I don’t know about you, but I partly scold myself for mistakes, because I feel that if I’m hard enough on myself , I certainly won’t make the same mistake twice. Research shows the opposite. By punishing yourself in this way, you are more likely to screw up again.
In one study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers tested this effect on monkeys. They instructed them to look at two different images on a computer screen. The MIT editors report :
In one photograph, the animal was rewarded when it looked to the right; for another picture, he had to look to the left. The monkeys used trial and error to figure out which images signal which movements … ”. If the monkey had just received the correct answer, the signal remained in its brain: “You did the right thing.” Immediately after the correct answer, the neurons processed information more clearly and efficiently, and the monkey was more likely to receive the next correct answer, Miller said. – But after the error there was no improvement. In other words, it was only after successes, not after failures, that the brain processing and behavior of the monkeys improved. ”
As MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller said in Scientific American, “Success has a much larger effect on the brain than failure.”
But okay, we’re a little smarter than monkeys. However, another study like this article published by the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback found that failure causes us to lose focus and develop anxiety that interferes with future success. Another study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that when subjects were asked to recall past spending mistakes, they were more likely to run into debt on an imaginary trip to the mall.
None of this means that you shouldn’t learn from your financial mistakes. But when you do , it’s probably best to move on and stop punishing yourself.