Stupid? Mistakes
Do you catch yourself making what you label stupid mistakes? That's the word you reach for. But there's a real gap between a situation that simply turned out differently than you expected and a situation where you chose the shortcut knowing better. In the first kind, nothing told you the trouble was coming. It came anyway, and now you carry the result. Calling yourself a dumb dodo might give you a target to pin the blame on, yet the honest description is just bad luck.
Take an example. You decide the interstate will be safer than the highway after a snowstorm, and it turns out it isn't. That one happened to me. I gripped the wheel for roughly sixty miles, crawling past semis that had slid into the ditches. If I'd known what was waiting, would I have gone a different way? Of course. My husband was asleep; we'd swapped drivers before getting on, figuring the rest of the trip would be the gentler stretch. Once he woke and the whole frightening ride had ended, he had the sense not to call me stupid. Give yourself the same courtesy.
Now the other kind. You know the feeling: you do the thing you knew you shouldn't, and the trouble arrives on schedule. Here's a second weather story, also behind the wheel. Heavy rain has water creeping across the road, the high water signs are posted, and you drive through anyway, because turning around means backtracking and then taking some longer detour to reach where you're headed. You didn't want the inconvenience. That is the version where a little self-criticism is actually earned.
You can take a lesson from both, but only one of them calls for being hard on yourself. The snowstorm wasn't your fault. The flooded road was a choice. You already know which situations tend to be yours, so plan around that pull toward the easy move when the easy move invites problems.
There's a reason this shows up more in some people than others. Teenagers and even younger adults lean into this kind of thing more often, because the part of the brain that reins in impulse, the part that lets you pass up the quick reward for a longer-term payoff, isn't finished developing until later.