Trusting Yourself: What does it have to do with Anxiety?
Underneath a lot of inner criticism, anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder is often an underlying lack of trust in yourself, your decision making and your ability to cope if things go wrong.
This means you can be particularly vulnerable to the opinions of judgemental people around you and straying from your authentic self.
Nurturing your self trust is one of the most important tools of self-compassion and resilience in life.
So how do you build self trust? Here are six tips:
1) Establish your internal reality vs your external persona. What are your real preference and opinions in every situation you encounter (even if you don’t feel safe enough to speak up yet)? This is vital to building up a strong self of self.
2) What do you feel? Your emotions in quite concrete ways are constantly communicating to you how you feel about every situation you encounter, and also tell you what you need. Sometimes you may have multiple conflicting feelings at once, which can feel confusing (e.g. envious of your friends new job and also really genuinely happy for them).
3) When your mind gets caught up in ‘what if’ thinking it means you’re getting drawn into your imagination. Focus on reality sensing. Whatever ‘what if’ scenario you’re thinking of is possible, BUT it is irrelevant to the current situation and the here and now.
4) Trust your ability to cope when things go wrong. This is something that gets easier the more you go through in life. Of course, we all hope we will go through as minimal hardship as possible in life, but no one avoids difficult situations completely. You have coped with so much in life, and will cope with whatever is thrown at you.
5) Trust your decision making. Look at the thousands of decisions you make every year…from big decisions about where to live and where to work, to small decisions like what to have for dinner or what to wear. You are constantly making decisions, the majority of which are helpful.
6) Remove people who instill self-doubt chronically in you. You’ll know the people. You’ll feel unease around them, negative or defensive when you think about being vulnerable around them.
Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash