Lately I've made it a point in my daily life to catch myself when I start to stew over a failure. I've always had a tendency of being self critical--at times it can be helpful in correcting a legitimate error, but other times it can cause me a great deal of wasted time and energy stewing over something I fucked up. When I see others experience a similar failure, they seem a lot less stressed out about it than I am, which leads me to believe I just need to adjust my perceptions.

The biggest trend I've noticed is when I fail, I tend to take that failure very personally. Basically boiling down to: I failed, therefore I must be a failure, and therefore a shitty human being.

How did you teach yourself to view failures objectively? Is there a rule of thumb you use to measure the severity of your failures against the 'big picture' context?