Welcome to the Very Well Mind podcast. We've interviewed over 100 authors, experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and others to help you learn strategies to care for your mental health.

This episode is hosted by psychotherapist and bestselling author Amy Morin. Now let's get into the episode.

Okay. You're listening to the Friday fix.

Every Friday, I share a quick mental strength strategy that can help fix the thoughts,

feelings, and actions that can hold you back in life.

Today I'm talking about how to be less judgmental. Right about now, you might be thinking, well, why should I be less judgmental?

If other people weren't so terrible, I wouldn't have to judge them so harshly. Well, the idea that

everyone else is bad is actually harmful for you. Believing that your coworkers are lazy or that your friends are

incompetent will increase your stress level. It will also cause you to be more judgmental of

yourself. And no one feels better when they're judging themselves harshly. That's not to say that

some people are judgy and some people aren't. The truth is that we all judge sometimes. Learning how to recognize when

you're being judgmental is the first step. Then we can shift our thinking. This is a core

component of many skills in mental health treatments like dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT,

and mindfulness. It's an issue that we often address in the therapy office. Here's an example.

I once worked with a man who came in to see me because he needed help managing his anger.

He was a supervisor at a call center. He felt frustrated at work most of the time, and sometimes

he yelled to get out his anger. He didn't have an anger problem in other areas of his life, though. And he said that he wasn't really even bothered by the fact that he sometimes yelled at work. He said, the problem isn't that I yell sometimes. I guess the problem is that it doesn't work. And some of those people I yell at, go to HR and complain about me.

Though more that we talked about his frustrations with work, the clearer it became why he was so frustrated.

He was 100% convinced that all the people the company hired were incompetent and ineffective.

He said at times he felt like he was more of a babysitter than a manager, and he was angry that so many people seemed to carry around their personal problems into work. Like this woman who once

asked to go home early because she was crying at her desk, she'd just gone through a really tough

breakup. She couldn't concentrate on her job. The minute, though, that he walked into his office every

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