What Causes Self-Doubt (and 5 Steps To Undo It)
It’s been my experience that most everyone at some point in their lives will experience self-doubt. Most often we experience this occurrence when we’re attempting to make an important decision for ourselves that doesn’t have a guaranteed outcome either way. Where it takes us into those sticky places where both options sound equally good, equally bad, or looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.
For some, however, self-doubt isn’t just a random event. It can be all encompassing, debilitating, and a deeply entrenched habit of relating to the self that interferes with a multitude of decisions.
Attachment Theory May Play A Role
Attachment styles, or the way children adapt to their caregivers, may account for the development of self-doubt in an individual.
Take for instance a child with an anxious and insecure attachment. They adapted to an unpredictable caregiver who may have been available in some instances, but gone in another; Emotionally present in the morning, but cold and withholding in the night.
This child learned that their caregivers would likely be unreliable and so healthy needs of dependency, separation, emotional closeness (basically all of the components of a vibrant sense of self) were placed on hold.
When children adapt to caregivers who are inconsistent, so too becomes their relationship to themselves.
Self-doubt is the hallmark of an unreliable, untrusting relationship to oneself. Our emotions are very much like an internal compass. Always occurring, always changing, and never wrong. If you are suffering from self-doubt, it is likely that you are not registering or listening to your emotions because they quickly get clouded over by anxiety and rumination. This anxiety perpetuates a sense of not knowing and exacerbates a belief system that formed as an adaptation to an inconsistent caregiver (and it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to remember this either for it to “count”).
It’s All About Trust
Growing up with an inconsistent framework means that what you feel gets filtered through a lens of “maybe yes, maybe no”. From big decisions like career changes to smaller ones such as deciding what to wear all become obstacles without clear cut solutions.
Essentially, self-doubt is an inability to trust oneself and that is likely the result of an inability to identify and register what one feels. When we cannot register important cues that our emotions and bodies are giving us, we won’t be able to hear our inner truth. But more than that, if you are hearing and registering what you feel and still you’re suffering with self-doubt, it’s likely that your mind is trying to rationalize away your feelings and this is where self-doubt begins to creep in like a fog.
Our brains are brilliant. They can take information from our environments and quickly label, code, and interpret stimuli, while filtering it through our unique values system, memories, cultural and social norms, and a whole host of everything else.
Yes, our brains are brilliant, but our minds, the consciousness “part” (it’s not technically a physical part) of the brain, can also be the source of great pain and bewilderment.
Since our minds tend to jump in with assumptions, judgments, and prejudices, listening to what we feel through that lens becomes a labyrinth of confusion.
Have you ever had that intuitive, “knowing” sense of what you need to do, but were immediately assaulted by “what if’s” and “I don’t knows”? That intuition, backed by your emotions, was actually likely the answer you actually needed to hear, but your mind jumped in with all sorts of barriers.
A Mind-Body-Confusion
When you suffer from self-doubt, you’ll get that feeling in your body and your mind will start to ask questions and attempt to come up with “answers”, yet those answers never feel quite right. Here are some sample questions your mind may start to ask:
“Well how do I know that to be true?”
“What if I’m just overreacting?”
“Maybe I should come back to this later.”
“I can’t possibly do that.”
Now, a caveat. There’s nothing wrong with needing to question and make sense of big decisions. In fact, it’s probably the right move. But with self-doubt, what we need to be on the lookout for is when you consistently get a recurring feeling and sense of what needs to be done and your mind begins to jump in with its song and dance.
When that is happening, it’s likely that you already know what it is you need to do, you’re just afraid to do it. That’s normal. Fear is one of those emotions that can serve us tremendously in the face a real danger. You want fear operating then. When you’re not in actual life or death danger, fear will inhibit you greatly. In this case, fear becomes anxiety where you end up ruminating about the future and not actually living now or making choices based on what is best for you.
So, what can you do about this doubting mechanism that lurks in every corner of your mind?
Here are five steps.
1. Start with the tiniest of choices.
What to have for breakfast, for instance. Or whether or not to have coffee or tea in the afternoon. This will be an exercise in letting your senses dictate and have some say in what you do. Listen. What is your body (not your mind) telling you it would like? If every morning you dutifully have a bowl of oatmeal out of habit, ask your body what it needs. If nothing comes, nothing comes and stick to the oatmeal.
However, if you notice a niggling sense that you want a plate of eggs, a smoothie, nothing, coffee, etc., see about honoring it. What you’re essentially doing in this exercise is training yourself to allow your body some room to speak and interrupting your mind from telling you what you “should” be doing or second guessing your choice.
2. Ask yourself, “what is my feeling trying to tell me?”
And without rationalizing it away or attempting to interpret with intellect, allow the feeling to tell you what it has to say.
Usually the answer is quite simple. An example: The answer to “What is my anger trying to tell me right now?” may sound something like, “it’s telling me I don’t like this” or “it’s telling me that I need to honor my boundaries”.
You’ll know you’re rationalizing if you register the anger and begin to say things like, “well I shouldn’t really feel angry at my mom. She didn’t mean it”. That places your feeling on hold and does not really allow you any room to hear the truth of what you need, what you want, or how you’d like to navigate your relationships.
3. Practice letting go of the “shoulds”.
Instead of saying, “oh I shouldn’t be doing that” or “I should want this”, notice that “a should is influencing your decision” (quoted by Meghan Currie). If you were not dictated by a should, and had total freedom to live by what you need and what would best serve you in this moment, how might your thought process shift? An example of how this might look: “I shouldn’t want this” could be reframed as “I’m afraid of what I want”. This then opens up more of an exploratory relationship to what is.
4. Notice your projections.
What story is your mind telling you about what other people think? So often with self-doubt, our mind is mired in a terrible story about someone else. At one point, you may have been shown that people can be mean, cruel, or stuck in their own judgments, so it’s natural that your mind would jump to that conclusion.
But that was then. What about right now?
At the end of the day we truly have no idea what someone thinks of us, so we really have to be conscious of our mind pretending to “know” something that is really unknowable. Also, what would it mean if someone was judgmental over your choices?
I find it heartbreakingly sad that so many of us live our lives based off of the mind of someone else. It’s important to register that people will have separate minds from us, guaranteed, but that’s what’s so beautiful about existence. That despite someone else’s values or opinions, you are still entitled to your own and it is your birthright to be able to live by them.
5. When you’re stuck in doubt, take a calming deep breath and just sit.
What is it that you are most afraid of that is causing this doubt? Is it the uncertainty? The idea that you won’t know how to cope if the thing happens? Using a sprinkle of rational thinking, take a look at all the ways that you actually could cope and what you would do to make the change a little easier, a little less crunchy.
Ask your mind, “Is this completely true? Can I know this to be true?” and see what unfolds from that point. If a yes occurs, then you may have a more solid answer after all.
However, if it’s a no, which it usually is, check out where your mind is telling you a story based off of fear and anxiety. You can usually tell when this is operating by simply noticing the language of the thoughts.
Words and language that depict black and white scenarios, hopelessness, guilt (i.e. “should”), and catastrophes, would let you know that your operating from a place of anxiety. To clear the fog a bit, ask your mind: “if anxiety and self-doubt weren’t a problem for me right now, how might I show up in this scenario differently?” You could allow yourself a moment to imagine a version of your most healthy, vibrant, and boundary-intact self to step forward and show you how it would like to proceed.
In Conclusion
Self-doubt is a real challenge. Even the most skilled of us will find ourselves stuck in the mud of anxious thoughts that branch off into more anxious thoughts, more uncertainty, more guilt, etc. There really is no such thing as “mastering” self-doubt all the time. I personally am not a huge fan of those kinds of claims anyway.
What I hope to offer you here is a new way of relating to the self-doubt. Of seeing it as a signal that anxiety or guilt has stepped forward and is running the show.
Self-doubt becomes chronic when we repeatedly ignore our instincts, needs, and feelings. Because all three of those things cannot be wrong, you can learn to trust what they have to tell you. It does not mean you have to listen all the time or that you cannot use rational thinking to make a decision, but recognize that they are coming from an inherently wise place from inside your body. Your biology even!
So. For now, I wish you peace, clarity, compassion for yourself and courage to continue this process of evolution and growth. Let yourself go just a little beyond your comfort zone, knowing that you can always return home to yourself whenever you want.