442. The psychology of insecurity

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spek and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. If you're 20s psychology of my 20s, today we are talking about the psychology of insecurity. Yeah, I'm just going to bite the bullet and say, truth is I am a very insecure person. I'm insecure about so many things from silly little things, from my childhood, like I don't know, my teeth straight enough that I was like teased about when I was a kid to big things, like am I a good friend? Am I doing well enough in my career? Being insecure, as you guys know, is a very lonely existence because the only way to truly process it is to often talk about it. But A, to insecure to do that, that's our problem in the first place. And B, you really want the other person to say the right thing because one wrong phrase, one miscommunication, one wrong wording quickly can very much feed the insecurity and make it worse. So it remains a very silent thing and therefore has a very strong influence over us. I know for a long time, my insecurities just dictated how I saw myself more than any other factor, no matter what external evidence I had, no matter what happened, beyond me, what validation I received, whatever it was, my brain always came back to one of my insecure about. I'm sure it's very similar for many of you, but I think it was only when I started almost looking into the ancestry and the origin point of my insecurity, as in I realized, you know, 90% of our thoughts are recycled. I was not inherently born insecure, and neither were you. I have been taught this self-consciousness, therefore it can be untought that I kind of started seeing my insecurities differently. And it's very core, how I see it now, is that insecurity is a protective mechanism that has outlived its psychological usefulness. This is how we're going to treat it today. And we're going to talk about where insecurity comes from, why a little bit of insecurity was perhaps useful for you, how it then goes on to transform into something that is definitely not useful over time, how to identify, you know, whose voice, whose influence, shape, gender, and security is the most, because that is an important part of this equation. And most importantly, how to start unlearning those recycled, those recycled thoughts, how to start unlearning the negative ways you feel about yourself. Because as I said before, if insecurity has been borrowed, it can be returned. There is so much cycle, I'll let you unpack. I'm literally not going to waste any more time with an intro for this episode. Let's just get straight into it. Stay with us. [MUSIC] Let me start by saying this. Show me someone who claims to have no insecurity, and I will show you a liar. At the very least, I'm going to show you someone who uses mechanisms of denial, displacement, projection, to cocoon themselves, because the existence of insecurity proves the existence of ego, which proves the existence of your soul and your own consciousness. To not have insecurity would be to not be conscious. Here's the thing we need to make very clear from the beginning of this episode, on some level, we are all insecure, and that insecurity does at times serve a very valuable psychological purpose. That self-consciousness we often hate is what allows us to approach life in a way that balances caution and courage, and it's what prevents us from slipping into what we call in psychology, but more specifically in psychiatry, delusions of grandeur. We definitely don't want to go there. There is a Goldilocks level of insecurity that's just right. That's what I'm getting at. If we're too insecure, our life becomes dictated by. Our life becomes dictated by the potential judgments of others. Equally, if we are overly confident, our life becomes dictated in another way, by an inability to take criticism, by an inability to hone our skills, because we don't think there's anything we're bad at, by an inability to experience humility, and most certainly to properly interpret opportunities that we are given every single day to be better. For example, there is research that was published in 2019 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found when people experience a mild level of what they call self-image threat, they are more likely to save, they're more likely to be financially prudent, and they make smart and financial decisions. So that's just one area you might be doing better out, if you're an insecure person like me. Further theories have also suspected that a healthy amount of insecurity keeps people, as I said, motivated to improve in relationships, at work, when it comes to their physical health, although that's definitely a great area, shaky area. It's also correlated with a greater openness to learning. If you're overly secure, again, you just simply don't think you need to improve, therefore you will not. This is a deep belief I have. I say this to my friends all the time. I truly believe every single person needs to know one thing about themselves that could be better, or that is a flaw in order to be a well-rounded human. Like, you have to have something that you know you are not good at if you want to claim that you are self-aware. There's also some evidence that it can drive greater social harmony as well. This is the evolutionary explanation for insecurity. Why we have insecurity, you know, the evolutionary explanation claims that if something exists, it has to be useful. Their opinion is that insecurity and being a socially harmonious person requires acknowledgement that other people have complex inner worlds that we form a part of, and that as we are a part of these complex inner worlds, we have poor judgments about us. Those judgments matter. Therefore, the insecurity we have around them is important because it leads us back to the group. It nudges us into being a good person. If there was somebody who existed who never felt any level of insecurity about their behavior or their actions, they would become a very dangerous thought force. They would have no reason to control their urges or their behavior. These theorists, these researchers believe that insecurity in this sense doesn't have a positive force, doesn't have a negative force. It has a neutral force in that it maintains a level of social order. Of course, when this self-questioning leads into crippling levels of doubt or self-scrutiny, we have a problem. That's an interesting question in itself. When does it get to that level? More importantly, what makes somebody more or less insecure? If we are all according to this evolutionary theory, born with a baseline level of insecurity, are we just born this way? Or are we shaped to be this way? What component is nature? What component is, I guess, nurture in a sense? Where does that equation land? Let's start with nature. Firstly, our inborn temperament naturally plays a big part. Just as all of us have different colored hair, eyes, so on, we all have different inbuilt temperaments. Temperaments are basically our natural state of being. Now, the four temperaments, according to something called proto-psychological theory, are melancholic, caloric, flamatic, and sanguine. This is not our personality. This is a layer below our personality, which everyone you are is said to correlate to how you naturally show up in situations, including how insecure or secure you are, how reactive or calm we are, how observant or judgmental we are. It's the building block for personality that comes before. If you have a melancholic temperament, you are more prone to deep-seed an insecurity. That is what the theory says. That is the basis of this self-consciousness you have. Researchers have gone a step further. They have long tried to measure just how much of our temperament and also our personality, including our level of insecurity, is actually hard, wide within the genome. Basically, can we tell how insecure somebody is going to be based on their genes? One way that they have done this is through a large genetic study in the UK from 2016. They had over 100,000 samples in this study. And they explored where the traits like anxiety and emotional instability packaged together, this is what cycle is called neuroticism, where that neuroticism can be traced back to our DNA. Research has had participants complete personality question is, measuring neuroticism and other factors, including insecurities, whilst they are not. They kind of analyzed their DNA. Literally there was billions of genetic variations. They wanted to look at them all, correlate them to these self-reports, see if there was any patterns. What the researchers found is that there isn't. There is not a simple insecurity gene. However, there are multiple genetic regions that play a small role in dictating whether you are going to be a more or less insecure person. These common genetic variants that they found accounted for around 15% of the differences in neuroticism between individuals on their own, holding for other things. So in other words, because I always find this confusing, in other words, about 15% of the variations between those of us who are insecure or not neurotic or not can be linked to a specific genetic difference that is perhaps influenced you in that direction. And this genetic difference was one that the researchers were able to measure. Importantly, because when we talk about genes, I feel like sometimes this can get confusing. Genes don't determine your destiny. They're just a blueprint. People can always build the house differently. Our environment, the way we are nurtured, these also shape whether some genes are more or less likely to emerge. Our choices also shape this later on. So your temperament, your genes, they're just the beginning. With that in mind, let's talk about some of those other ones. One of those, let's talk about the nurture component of this. How much of our insecurity is learned? Short answer, a whole lot of it. I think a lot of us can remember a time where there was one critical moment that turned us from somebody who didn't think that much about our appearance or our personality or how loud we were or whether people liked us into somebody who thought about that whole lot. What kind of events, one-off or repeated, trigger this? A bunch of them I want to talk to are a lack of unconditional or lack of conditional love and approval from parents, sibling comparison, judgment from adults, bullying, body image, social media to name a few that influence how insecurity shows up in us as individuals. And let's just start at the top. Let's just start with conditional love. Put simply, I also put rather sadly, but not everyone had the fairy tale childhood that we collectively deserve. One of the most common roots of insecurity is experiencing love, attention or approval as something that has to be earned rather than as something that is freely given as it should be. In other words, you learned that being accepted and supported is a luxury that does not have to be given to you all the time. This is what psychologists sometimes refer to as conditional regard or conditional positive regard. It was a concept first explored by the very famous humanistic psychologist Carl Rodgers, who we literally talk about in every second episode. But Rodgers believed children thrive when they receive unconditional positive regard. Love and acceptance is not dependent on achievement. It's not dependent on obedience or meeting certain expectations. When affection is only given in response to good grades, good behavior, sporting success, being an easy child, or being a child that looks a certain way, that is when we begin to internalize this belief that my worth is conditional. If I'm not receiving love, there is something I'm doing wrong. Therefore, there is something I should be insecure about. Rather than thinking, I'm loved because I exist. We learn I'm loved because of what I do for others and I'm loved because of how I perform. Research by the psychologist Edward Desi and Richard Ryan has shown that environments where approval is contingent on a certain level of performance or appearance undermines our level of intrinsic worth and autonomy. And over time, this creates what psychologists call contingent self-esteem. I know a lot of psychology terms in this part, but contingent self-esteem, self-esteem or self-worth rises and falls depending on external validation. Therefore, meaning that you are more likely to be insecure because external validation is fickle. The sad thing about these circumstances, and I think about this all the time, they also create these limiting beliefs that restrict whether somebody can challenge that initial belief or not. It restricts what they feel capable of for the rest of their life. It is so tragic, but I often get these comments of people being like, you know, that sounds nice, but that's not for somebody like me. Or I did this episode recently that was like, I want to do everything so I do nothing. And I was like, leave a comment down below of like, what is your big dream? What is the one thing you really want to do? And this person was like, I really want to, I'm not going to say the job because it will give it away. But it was like, I really want to do this, but like, people like me don't do that. And there's no way that I'll find success. And I was like, that is so sad to me. That is so tragic because, you know, you do have what it takes to succeed. But these early beliefs and these early words and these early feelings have put this restriction on you. And now you're out of the game. Like you have taken yourself out of the game or more specifically, somebody's voice in your head has taken you out of the game before you can even try. And now it is guaranteed that you will not be successful. And it's interesting how that limiting belief becomes reality just because you have been forced to think at time and time again about yourself. It becomes reality and we see it as, and as soon as it becomes reality, we're like, well, that was always destined to happen because of what these people told me because they told me I wasn't good enough. Another way out of bringing influences, our insecurity levels in a very similar way, but also a very different way is sibling rivalry and comparison, which we just did an episode on a few weeks ago. I feel like I do this all the time. I like to look into something and then it will like, just keep popping up time and time again in future episodes. So apologies if you were up to date. And if you already know what I'm going to talk about because you listened to that episode, but sibling comparison is a factor that like, I don't not see people talking about, hence why it deserves its part in this episode. It seems natural, it seems fairly common. It can be deeply damaging to some extent. Comparison between siblings occurs because we are different than people who are different compare. But consistently feeling that you are less worthy than a sibling who excels at things, who are celebrated by your parents, who are smarter than you, who are more fun, who are more loved, who are easier, can create an ingrained sense of inadequacy from childhood that leads into your life beyond childhood and beyond your family unit. This is particularly the case with parental favoritism. I just read a New York Times article about this. Parents favoring one child over the other. This New York Times article essentially said, there's been this back and forth around do parents have favorites? Do they not? And they looked at this 2001 study that wanted to investigate it once and for all, and it essentially found they absolutely do. The study was conducted at Purdue University, the researchers recruited 500 parents. Every one of these parents had to have two children or more. And they can't just outright say, like, do you have a favorite child? They ask them most sneaky questions. They ask them, which child do you spend more money on? Who do you feel emotionally closer to? Who do you think looks more like you? Who do you more disappointed in? And they ask these questions plus a bunch more over many, many years. They literally have been tracking some of these families for 25 years to the point where they're now looking at favoritism that passes on to the grandchildren. Do you want to guess how many of these parents had a favorite? Two thirds. Two thirds of these parents had a preferred child, although very few of them admitted it. And that favoritism lasted over decades. Knowing you aren't your parents favorite is shown to greatly contribute to a higher baseline level of insecurity, almost because the call is coming from inside the house. Like you get your initial sense of self worth from your parents. If you can tell they don't like you, how are you going to overcome that? If you've been compared and felt less than since you were a kid, explicitly, implicitly, obviously not obviously, that is going to really deeply influence how you see yourself. The very famous American author, John Bradshaw, has also spoken about how when that turns into judgment, and now having harsh or judgmental parents who really overcorrect you and really want to make you feel bad as a way of discipline, leads to an impoverished self image and what he calls a shame-based identity. A shame-based identity is one that is rooted in failure versus success. Essentially, because of our childhood, as adults, if we grew up with harsh parents, our primary reaction to any setback shortcoming, small mistake is to feel shit about ourselves, is to shrink and self blame, rather than look for opportunities or solutions to expand, because we're waiting for somebody to come down and be like, "bad, naughty." And you therefore, well, it's not you, your experience is put a stealing over your ability to grow. Now, unless we have a strong counterforce to this, such as a strong support system outside the family, or really great friends, or we tackle those early beliefs through therapy or similar, we just a left feeling that we are inherently unworthy, we inherently should feel insecure because the people who were meant to provide unconditional love and support couldn't. And what kind of parent can't love their child? Must be something wrong with us. When we're a kid, That's the other thing we can't understand that this has nothing to do with us and everything to do with them because we don't have that self-awareness. So again, it influences us deeply to our core. Let's talk about some contributors beyond the family system. Shall we? We're going to do that. After this short break, stay with us. I will talk about this every day until the cows come home, until people listen. If you were bullied as a child, even if you are over it, even if you don't see those people anymore, even if you don't think it was that serious, even if it was years ago, I am telling you right now, your baseline confidence level is already lower than the average person. The thing about bullying is that it often occurs when our self-concept is at its least stable and most vulnerable. If you think about our self-concept as a chart that kind of tracks alongside age, between the ages of 12 and 17, you're going to see a massive dip in our self-concept. There was a survey, I think it was reported in the Journal of Psychology and Aging in 2002. It questioned over 300,000 people aged 9 to 90, and the result showed that 9 to 12 years old is when we had our highest level of self-esteem, and then our self-esteem after 12 just plummets for an extended period of like five to 10 years. It's a very significant drop at the beginning of puberty. Both genders experienced equal drops in self-esteem. It was also when individuals were most likely to report memories of being bullied, and memories of bullying being at its highest intensity. That is when we get hit right at that point where we are at our lowest. It's a very slow recovery from there as we get older. In general, our self-esteem levels out. Well, it only fully recovers from that drop in our mid-50s to 60s. It takes 40 to 50 years to get back to how we felt as children, again, in adulthood. It is very clear in the study and from many other studies that there are certain points that we are most sensitive to even minor knocks to our internal sense of self. And it also is these points where any damage is magnified. Bullying is always going to be a terrible experience. It's psychologically very violent, very disarming, but especially as a child or teenager. It's harder to escape, first of all. It's also harder to rationalize. It's harder to counter-factualize as well, because we don't know who we are yet. We don't have that confident body guard to step in and be like, "I don't think that's true." It can take years to not have your bully's voice, be the first thing that pops into your mind whenever something goes wrong in your life or whenever something goes right. And that leaves a lingering impact obviously on insecurity. Then sometimes, to make it worse, the bully isn't even one person or two people or a group. It is a societal system. It is a societal system that endeavors to bully all of us to make us feel bad for profit. I'm talking about social media. Here is a not-so-fun fact. The earlier you are exposed to social media, the greater your chances of what we call pathological and maladaptive insecurity. That's a scary term. But it's true. Frequent social media usage increases a psychological phenomena known as self-objectification whereby we view ourselves as a physical object first, something to be looked at, something to be hopefully liked, and an emotional and psychologically complex individual second. When our thoughts about our physical form become negative or become inaccurate or the body-standard changes as it does so rapidly these days, if we have higher levels of self-objectification, we risk being completely mentally and emotionally derailed because our sense of self-esteem is once again conditional on something that isn't solid or stable and more specifically isn't internal. I think we associate body image issues with people who are in puberty, people who are in their late teens, but with social media becoming more ubiquitous nowadays, body image insecurities are showing up younger and younger. There was one review, I think, in 2016, that identified body to satisfaction in children under the age of six is increasing at a rapid rate because of social media exposure. There are heaps of estimates out there depending on what source you look at, but one study that measured body image in a group of 11 to 16-year-olds in the UK found that 79% thought that how they looked was incredibly important and over half of them worried about how they looked on a daily to weekly basis. That stuff, that insecurity, sticks because once you start thinking those thoughts of like, "Am I ugly? Should I lose some weight? Why don't I look like that person? How can I look like that person? Why does my nose look like that? Why do my clothes look like that?" There are a few days when you don't think of what like that, even quietly, perhaps even for the rest of your life. I think something else that's interesting is that different domains or categories of insecurity are going to not only impact people differently, the way body image impacts people differently, but are going to be more prevalent in certain groups based on how we are socially conditioned. It's probably something I should have addressed actually a lot earlier on. Probably at the beginning of the episode, so apologies, but insecurity is not just this one thing. Somebody can have deep financial insecurity, but amazing image insecurity. They can be really worried about money and whether they have enough but feel great about themselves. They can have terrible professional insecurity, amazing social and relationship security. To list some of the main categories of insecurity, we have social insecurity, image insecurity, relationship insecurity, professional insecurity, financial insecurity, intellectual insecurity, health insecurity. It's like a flavor of ice cream. It goes on and on and on. There are so many. Which type of insecurity you display most as an adult is highly revealing of what emotional battles you went through as a child or teenager. If you think about yourself, everything you know about yourself, which one is most prominent for you? And what does it trace back to? What was the origin point? What's the ancestry of your insecurity? More often than not, we can find a psychological, social or emotional origin to our primary insecurity. The death of a parent from an illness that increases health insecurity, not feeling like you had somebody who believed in you as a child or who was a role model, increases career insecurity, being relentlessly teased about a certain physical feature, image insecurity. Honestly, with the hindsight of adulthood, you'll be surprised how many epiphanies you start having. Of like, wow, of course I am the way I am. How could I not be? How could I not be this person when that was my past? That was my conditioning. I was made to feel bad about this. Since like the day I could think about myself as a human. So what is the cost of insecurity? Next question, you can say we're moving through this quickly. Strangely, it's not always what you think. I think there's this typical idea that someone who is insecure will perhaps be very reclusive. They'll shrink away. Very silent, vaggy clothes, very softly spoken. That's definitely one way it presents in a kind of silent self-sabotage of just a silence. But the mind and the ego find many creative ways to protect us. And one of those ways is counterintuitively through artificial overconfidence. Sometimes the loudest person in the room, the one you're like most afraid of, is deep down the one who's most afraid themselves. They are most afraid that they will be found out. They are equally convinced that one day everybody's going to realize why they hate themselves and that they should hate them for the same reasons. They mask this deep insecurity and sadness with provider. It's what we call a compensatory defense mechanism. And one, 2013 study found that it's deeply correlated to self-doubt, not actual confidence as we would think it was. Like it's not arrogance itself doubt. Now as to why some people use overconfidence to mask insecurity and others don't, we actually don't really know yet. But researchers do have a theory that it has to do with social signaling. So we want to send out as many positive signals about our skills as we can, especially if we're insecure about them. And we kind of hope that if we send out heaps of signals, heaps of positive messaging, heaps of arrogant messaging, more people will believe that that's who we are and we will be able to believe it ourselves. It's almost like it is fake it to you make it on a mass scale. And the instinct to fake it to we make it is coming from this place of deep insecurity. But because we aren't doing this from an organic natural place, we kind of don't know what the correct level that is natural confidence would look like. And we don't know where to turn it off. And then so eventually it doesn't look that great from the outside because we're not doing it in a normal way. Of course, this protection mechanism doesn't work. Bravado arrogance over confidence, there will always be cracks. There's always going to be the need for further compensatory behavior. to help you keep up this facade because deep down we don't have a well of positive regard or a well of positive thoughts or feelings about ourselves to draw from. We just don't have it. It can also start to develop into using others to feel better in nasty ways like putting them down like gossiping about them like not helping them when we know we should. For fear that others shining very brightly will make us personally look worse. That's one of the worst forms that insecurity can take. It's still understandable but it can be difficult to deal with on both sides. It's a particular form of validation seeking link to social comparison theory but also a very specific kind of anxiety called status anxiety. There was a study from 2005 that looked at the nature of status insecurity. They basically define it as whether somebody does or doesn't doubt their level of respect or admiration in a group. Across 17 studies they looked at all these different ways that status anxiety shows up in society. Literally one of the ways they did this was that they randomly analyzed the final speeches from the reality show survivor. Such a weird experimental method. They did some more serious stuff like they did a bunch of observational studies that did a bunch of experimental work as well looking into status insecurity. What they found was that when people are status insecure they tend to believe that status is zero some game or a zero some resource whereby if Sally was to receive a boost. Okay Sally's a friend of mine. I'll use a different name if Billy was to receive a boost in status you would lose out. Gemma would lose out. And so we become protective, reactive. We become reluctant to celebrate or champion other people because we think they're gain is our loss. And it makes us very not aggressive, not insecure, but just very alert. Ironically what the study also showed was that the more people clamor for status the more they want status the more they perform behaviors that typically make people like them less. Therefore making them even more insecure. There is a terrible cycle going on here that we can recognize. In contrast people who were more secure in these studies they gave credit to other people status they said Billy's doing a great job. Billy is such a great team player. They saw status is less important. They believed that everybody could win. And that in turn actually made them more popular made their status greater and also made them more confident because of that organic social validation. It just goes to show how insecurity like it just twists our reality to be something that it's not both in terms of our thoughts about ourselves and that we're these bad people but also in terms of it convinces us to do things that actually don't help us. They don't make us more popular. They don't make us happier. They don't make us successful. They don't make us feel more secure. I think this is a deeply important takeaway from this episode both in terms of calling out our own behavior at times but also being aware of why others act the way they do towards you. When you're doing well when you feel like you're achieving arrogance is rarely pure of origin. It's often masking something a lot harder to understand and work through and that is fear and that is disappointment in ourselves. So overconfidence, bravado, they are coping mechanisms. They are for sides. They're actually they have a specific scientific name that I should use. They're called overactive or exaggerated defense mechanisms. We can also have underactive avoidant mechanisms in response to our insecurity. The biggest one you may know of in response to feeling insecure, we become people pleases whereby we further downgrade our own desires, our own needs, our own sense of self in an attempt to gain external validation and in an attempt to plug an emotional hole that tells us we're not good enough. I think we all know what people pleasing looks like these days but for a little bit of a revision, you know, it's overcommitting to plan so people you don't like. It's agreeing with people when you deeply know you don't agree with them and that's okay but you just can't bring yourself to do it. Always going out of your way to do things for people even though it's a deeply inconvenient for you, you know they're not going to do it back. Even just small, I say small, not so small things like constantly apologizing, constantly paying for things, constantly taking the blame for others, for things that just like aren't your fault, workplace things, friendship things, relationship things. Once again, people pleasing is rooted not in manipulation. It's not even rooted in kindness. It's rooted in something, I guess it's straight down the middle fear. Fear that somebody won't like you. Fear that they will abandon you. Fear that all your fears about yourself will come true. All your deep insecurities will come true. If you cannot get this person's positive opinion of you, it also stems from this belief once more that love is not only conditional, love is also an exchange. People liking you and giving you approval is an exchange. If the other person doesn't feel like they're getting something from you or your relationship, it's not going to be worthwhile for them because your worth is only what you can provide. You do not have worth intrinsically. It is only what you can give other people. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnercott theorized that this behavior is rooted in infancy to begin with and it's rooted specifically in linked to the development of what he called the false self. We talked about this in an episode recently, but according to this Guardian article on this, Winnercott thought that the false self emerges when a baby intuitively senses that their carer does not have the capacity to manage their true feelings, their hunger, their needs, their rage, their love, their pain. And so the false self takes over and fills up that space where the true sense of self might grow through obligation and through the need to take care of ourselves. And this child then becomes an adolescent who then becomes an adult who realizes that nobody can fulfill my needs. I have to fulfill them myself. I have to not just fulfill my needs, but I have to prove to other people that I'm worthy of loving because I didn't get that when I was a kid. And therefore, it exists two versions of us. If you've been through this process, the version of us that would make us happy and that would be supported by others and a version of us that makes others happy, we choose that second version to exist because we know we can rely on ourselves. We don't know that we can rely on other people, but also because it means more external validation, which is something that we feel is more valuable than internal validation. As we continue to make that choice, we choose the false self, we choose the other self, we choose them again and again and again, the true self slowly dies and disappears. And it is one of the greatest cost of insecurity in our efforts to become more likable, more loved. We just don't know who we are anymore. We don't know what it is that they even see in us. So how do we begin to unravel and address our insecurity? Next question for the episode, next big question for the episode, we're going to talk about that and so much more after this short break. So stay with us. So how do we address insecurity when it sits at the deepest levels of our personhood? It's a pretty big question. We're basically asking, yeah, we're basically asking, how do I love myself after 20 years of thinking that I shouldn't maybe longer? How do I turn back time? How do I re-structure myself concept my identity, the things that I never think about because they naturally came up with me? Hopefully goes with that saying, podcast episode is a nice place to start. It can't take you all the way there. There's a lot of work that needs to be done individually and with a therapist. However, we can begin by questioning why everyone else can make mistakes. Everyone else can have imperfections and we can like them for their imperfections. Everyone else can be complex, but you can't. Why do you get to be the exception to the rule? Why are you so uniquely unlikable? I think it's almost like playing Unau Reversa now insecurity. As in, why do you think we're so special that we can't be like everyone else deeply for imperfect and still worthwhile? Why are we above self-acceptance? I think this creates a bit of an internal system era. How can we have these two opposing truths be correct at the same time? I'm worthless. I'm not special. I'm insecure to the point where I have nothing good about me, but I'm also worth so much that I'm the only person who could possibly be perfect. Like those two things can't exist at the same time. It's a contradiction. That is step one, slowly revealing the lies that insecurity is so great at selling you. That one included. It's so important to realize the irony and the contradictions of insecurity because once you start realizing it doesn't make a logical sense, it becomes harder to just like willingly obey. The thing that really fuels insecurity is this false belief that if you were to fix this thing about yourself, then the next thing and then the next thing and then the next thing, you will finally reach an end point where you don't need to change it all and you will finally be happy. It's what drives people to surgery addictions. It's what drives people to to greed. You know, you will only be worthy when there's nothing left to criticize and you can get to that level by just consuming it. and claiming and just going as far as you can. This is a false destination. You're never gonna get there. It is a psychological mirage that you can be 100% happy with yourself all the time. And it keeps you trapped in this mindset of self hatred that you implicitly think is protecting you. There's another paradox at the heart of insecurity, which is that the more time we spend thinking about ourselves in our attempts to outsmart our insecurity or in our attempts to find contradictory evidence, the more insecure we become. This has a name, it's called the self-absorption paradox the more time he's been thinking about yourself, the more critical you become of yourself is what the theory says. And what research is investigating this phenomena often talk about is that sometimes the only way to tackle insecurity is just to think about yourself less. And to just focus more on the outside world is to just be like, I'm really not that important, which is ironic because insecurity would already have us feel that way. Think it a little bit more. This isn't a belittle our experiences of insecurity, being insecure is crippling. It's terrible. Thinking about it less doesn't always work. It's tough, but sometimes the best way to challenge our insecurities is to demote their mental relevance and importance by giving our mind all this other stuff to just think about and consider and to be occupied by. If you're feeling insecure about your body, it's a lot harder to feel insecure about your body. I think if you are outside spending time in nature with your friends doing things, moving, using your body in a way that is beyond just its appearance based value. If you're feeling bummed out by social media, it's a lot harder to feel insecure about your online presence or feel insecure about whether or not you're left out. If you are active in your community, if you're volunteering, if you're picking up rubbish at your local beach, if you're finding new ways to connect to your need to belong that is beyond a screen. I hope you kind of see my point. Getting outside of your own small, tiny world and your own small, tiny mental ecosystem and emotional ecosystem allows you to see your problems in the grand scheme of things and your insecurities in the grand schemes of things. I think instead of constantly searching for evidence that your insecurities are incorrect, just stop thinking about them as making a valid enough point to begin with that you'd have to go searching for evidence against it for it. You don't want to mean like, demote it. It's not even important enough to try and gather arguments for or against. Your insecurities, you do not even need to consider them as facts in the way that evidence needs to be gathered. I feel like I've said the same sentence like seven times, but I just think that that's something that you need to honor in yourself. Thinking about your insecurities also involves thinking about how you're going to disprove them and by doing that, they just get further entrenched. Thinking about anything else, anything besides that, preoccupying and filling your mind with other things is one of many antidotes. I believe you also deserve to interrogate, yes, where your insecurities came from, like we were speaking about before and they're autobiographical digging, but you need to interrogate who benefits from you being insecure. This is what I always ask myself. Me feeling bad about myself. Who does this serve? Who wins from my sense of loss or my sense of deficiency? Because it isn't me. I'm not winning from feeling insecure. Somebody is gaining from me not feeling good, whether it is economically by the fact I go out and try and buy things to make myself feel better, whether it's through opportunities that I turn down that somebody else gets to get, whether it's through love and romance where somebody benefits from me not feeling good enough so that they can treat me worse. Somebody is always benefiting from your lack of self-worth and the fact that you don't feel like you're enough. This isn't to say that every insecurity has been deliberately imposed on you. Every insecurity, somebody is puppeteering it. It's just that many have originated in a way that, by people trying to correct your behavior early on through rejection, criticism, comparison, they've been trying to get you to behave in a certain way that makes their life more comfortable. And once those insecurities exist, even when they're no longer useful for their person who originally implanted it in you, they become useful for other institutions. They become useful at work for your boss, not needing to give you anything more because you don't ask for it. They become useful, again, in romance, people are not having to treat you well. They become useful to big companies and to friendships who benefit from you feeling like, they're doing you a service by hanging out with you. They're that you need to buy their product. If my insecurity is costing me, it must be paying somebody else. Therefore, there is something to be gained from my own unconditional self-love. There is something that they are gaining that I get to take back. More freedom, more time, more money, more openness, to experiences, more opportunities, more risks. I want those things for myself, but that means I have to be okay and I have to be fully ready to accept parts of myself that I don't think you're ready to love yet. Like that is the exchange, that is the price that I will probably have to pay. I have to be ready to part with the idea that my insecurities are in any way helpful or in any way protecting me. Once again, it's another irrational lie that your insecurities are helping you. How can something that limits me be helpful in a world that rewards people who feel limitless, who take risks, who just like say, fuck it and try? The degree to which I limit myself is the degree to which somebody else gains from my sense of limitation. That is a quote that I think of all the time, all the time. Finally, finally, I know it's been a long episode. You guys have made it. Congratulations. The ultimate off switch for any momentary, pesky feeling of insecurity is just realizing how little it's gonna matter in the long run. One of the only benefits I've been able to identify to my own existential fears or my own fears around mortality and death. And genuinely it's one of the only ones is that it's an incredible antidote to feeling bad about myself. If I think I look ugly in that dress and my stomach is poking out, who cares, I'm gonna be dead one day. Immediately I feel better. If I feel cringe for posting my work online or being seen to try too hard for an outlander's dream, literally nobody is gonna remember me or you or anybody. If I'm feeling silly or embarrassed over literally anything, I just have to remind myself my time on earth is short. Why am I wasting it on this? And genuinely the existential approach to insecurity, I guess not one you can have all the time because we still wanna connect with the fact that life has meaning. But if your insecurity is blocking you in the moment from enjoying the time that you are in, if it's blocking you from taking your risk or a choice that you know is needed to get to the next phase or stage of life, it is, if it's stopping you from pursuing love or pursuing something that is truly worthwhile. Having that little existential moment of like, nobody's gonna remember me is an amazing fix. With that in mind, let's wrap up this episode for good. Let's finish out conversations around insecurity for the day. I really hope that you enjoyed it. I really hope that it's been a kind of a doorway into analyzing like where did your insecurities come from. I feel like once I started doing this, it's a road you can't come back from. But it's so useful because when I hear these negative thoughts about myself and my own mind, I know where they came from and I can assign them a voice that is not my own and that has been so useful. It's also just given me so much more audacity and courage to realize that once again, I benefit in no way from being small, only other people do. And it's given me a lot more, a lot more bravado, but not in the toxic way as we spoke about. I wanna thank our research, Lucy Davidson, for her help with this episode. If you did enjoy this episode, leave a five-star review wherever you are listening, leave a little comment down below as well. What was your favorite takeaway from this episode? Have you ever made it this far? Show me that you're a loyalist, show me that you're somebody who has a great attention span and makes it to the end of podcast episodes because that's a rare thing these days. You can also follow us on Substack if you wanna read this episode. I know read this episode in written form, rather than just listen to it. If you wanna go back to it, take away some notes. You can watch the podcast on Netflix. If you are not already doing so, please give it a go. Instagram, further resources, there is so much in the episode description. So go there for all your inquisitive needs, your curious click needs, that everything's downstairs, I was gonna say, everything's in the description. And again, I hope you enjoyed the episode. I really enjoyed making it. So until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon. (gentle music) This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.