Modern day living is a multifaceted compendium of evolving technology and social media. However, in today’s busy and fast growing society, we often tend to struggle with these Mental Barriers in our daily life which is the so- called Self-Doubt! It comes with plenty of downsides, which are raising insecurities, a depressed mood, poor work and social performance and so much more. Nevertheless, in all spectrum it’s the overall fear that accompanies within oneself, preventing us from embracing our one true selves. It is the mental habit of questioning your own judgement or worth. Self-doubt is something that will never leave our side no matter how much we progressed. Self-doubts play a critical part when it comes to building a negative mindset. Furthermore, in later days it only ends up destroying our decision-making capability too. So now the question arises what we need to do to make the necessary changes that will help us to sustain our peace of mind and our growth. Just like there are many factors that cause and maintain the habit of self-doubt, there are quite a few strategies that can be effective in undoing it. Such are as follows:
1) Finding Validation Within. Since self-doubt thrives on a lack of validation, remembering/better understanding who you are as an individual (beliefs, values, strengths, etc.) and improving your relationship with yourself is a good way to overcome self-doubt.
2) Journal Writing. Writing down how you feel and what is happening to you can be a good way to identify positive and negative patterns. It can also be therapeutic to journal about and reflect on our successes.
3) Grounding oneself. When you are dealing with self-doubt, it’s easy to go into a spiral of all the things you are struggling with or feel you cannot do. So It’s important to find ways to ground oneself, making sure you stimulate all the senses. Grounding yourself can be physical, mental, or a combination of both.
4) Taking time to practise gratitude while we are all imperfect and making mistakes, practising gratitude and believing that as humans we’re allowed to mess up can empower us to feel motivated to do better, grow, and learn from our mistakes.
5) Remembering one’s Achievements. Taking time to take inventory of all your accomplishments is a great way to minimise feelings of self-doubt. It can be hard to remember all of our accolades when we’re highly self-critical, but remembering what we’ve gone through and achieved is powerful. It can give us the motivation and empowerment we need to keep moving.
6) Identifying Personal Opportunities For Growth. Self-doubt can serve as a mirror that shows us what to work on and opportunities for growth. It can be really helpful to use doubts as data to create action items to improve.
7) Limit Social Media. Social media is riddled with images that leave you feeling badly about oneself. Remember, social media is like a highlight reel of people’s lives. It isn’t representative of everything they go through. When you are really struggling with self-doubt, staying off social media will help you keep a clear head.
8) Don’t Compare Yourself with others. Self-doubt often causes us to compare ourselves to others. The goal may be to make us feel better, but it usually just leads to feeling worse. It’s likely everyone has feelings of self-doubt, so keeping in mind that your observation isn’t necessarily a fact is important.
9) Positive Self-talk. We tend to be hard on ourselves and use negative self-talk. It may seem harmless, but if you’re speaking poorly to yourself, it sets up the space to allow that kind of criticism from others. Everyone wants to feel appreciated and loved, so take time to remind yourself that you’re worthy.
We all deal with feelings of self doubt from time to time; however, there are many ways to manage, cope, and heal from these feelings. Your specific feelings of self-doubt are unique to you, but you are certainly not alone. But equipping oneself with the knowledge available, can help you learn more about where self-doubt comes from and how to overcome it. At the end of the day, self-doubt is a habit-nothing more, nothing less. And regardless of where it came from, you can work to free yourself from chronic self-doubt by building better habits. Bidding off with an old proverb which says- “Decide that you want it more, than you are afraid of it”.
Limatemjen Longchar
Immanuel College,
Lengrijan Dimapur
Nagaland Post Launch on 30 Dec 1990 is the first and fore-most english daily newspaper of Nagaland.
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