What’s Your Daily Guilt Scale?

Are you perfect?  If so, you can stop reading now because you and I have nothing in common.

If you’re like the rest of us, then you probably go through your day feeling bouts of both goodness and guilt.  You may look in the mirror in the early morning, give yourself a wink of self-approval, and yet at lunch you catch a glimpse of yourself  in the bathroom mirror and you feel like an inner tube in a blouse.  Goodness can be replaced with guilt in a matter of minutes based on the decisions we make.  If you are like me,  then you may decide to skip the gym because you almost fell asleep while driving home.  Or perhaps you are staring at an empty bottle of wine when you planned on having only one glass.  Or a cigarette came out of nowhere and lit itself up in front of you.

When such things happen to me, the guilt takes over and I could spiral down quickly into misery–because instead of following the straight and narrow of a freak of nature that traipses the path laid out by perfect vegan yogis, nuns and healthy triathlete doctors and have no history of risky behavior, there’s me.  I admit–even to myself–that I 0ccasionally stumble off the path, trampling the posies and stepping on  fuzzy bunnies in my failure to follow the directions of those who want me to live to be 117 so that I can buy their products.

And although I am a proponent of a guilt-free life, I experience a sense of guilt every day; yet I have remodeled my guilty inclinations into a useful scale to moderate my behavior.  My scale is represented by numbers from 1 through 10, with 1 being the absolutely most guilt-ridden and miserable a person could be, and 10 being the happiest bliss-infused rainbow-riding earth spirit that lights up the room she enters.

Now I start my morning with a rating of 10 if I’ve gotten enough sleep and I remember my wrinkle lotion.
If I eat relatively healthy food and avoid inhaling an entire pizza, my Guilt Scale stays on the high side, although other factors such as being rude to a colleague, not carrying my load at work, or flipping someone off in traffic can drag the scale down as the  day goes by. If I go to the gym rather than crapping out, the scale remains steady, because by doing so, I have contributed to my own health and happiness by my own doing.  No one forces me to go, and if I decide one day that I just don’t feel like exercising, and mentally I am OK with that, then it’s not necessary for me to reduce the guilt scale.

The whole premise behind the Guilt Scale is that we are in charge of our own lives.  We make decisions about how to treat ourselves and others, and we can use the Guilt Scale to self-assess our behavior and how we feel about who we are right now.  If we progress through our day and loosely rate the feelings and emotions related to our actions, we can reflect on whether or not we are living according to our values.  And if we live according to our values, then we show integrity.

Please let me know if this is helpful to you.