How to redefine your internal rules to feel good about yourself

An essential part of personal development is reviewing how you have learned to feel good about yourself.

Often, without realizing it, you are governed by very demanding internal standards that make it difficult to experience well-being.

Learning to identify and modify these criteria is a transformative step toward a healthier relationship with yourself.

Identify your automatic conditioning

People often establish internal rules without knowing it. These rules define when you “deserve” to feel affection, confidence, or peace of mind.

The problem is that they are often so rigid or demanding that they become a constant emotional barrier.

For example, you may have become accustomed to thinking that you are only valuable when others publicly recognize you, which leaves you at the mercy of external factors.

Becoming aware of these rules is the first step.

Asking yourself honestly what conditions must be met for you to feel peaceful, valued, or loved will help you discover how accessible—or unattainable—your own emotional standards are.

Reformulate your emotional conditions

Once you recognize your current criteria, you can question and redesign them.

Start with your core values—for example, connection, freedom, personal growth—and ask yourself: What would have to happen for me to feel consistent with this value?

If the answer involves relying on ideal situations or other people's behavior, it's time to adjust.

You can replace that condition with something that depends on you, such as, “I connect with myself when I am honest about how I feel.”

This gives you more real opportunities to experience that positive emotion.

Facilitate access to well-being

Many people live with emotional rules that make it very difficult to feel good, but very easy to feel bad.

A critical comment or an uncomfortable situation is enough to trigger discomfort, while feeling calm or secure requires almost impossible conditions. This can change.

The key is to design rules that allow you to experience well-being through personal action, not through external judgment.

For example, you could define that you feel calm when you take at least five minutes for yourself each day, or that you feel valuable when you act with integrity, regardless of the outcome.

Create new emotional habits

These new rules are not internalized overnight. Just as old patterns were established through repetition, new ones also require consistency.

By consciously applying your new criteria—day after day—they begin to become part of your usual way of interpreting life.

Over time, you will notice that it becomes more natural to recognize your value, manage internal judgment better, and respond with more compassion.

Adjusting your internal rules does not mean ignoring discomfort, but rather creating the internal conditions that help you get through it without losing yourself.

Rewriting your internal rules is an act of self-respect and a concrete way to build well-being from within.