I think having a control on your emotions is a huge part of this healthy living journey. If any of you have ever felt like you are not worth it, don’t deserve someone or something in your life or have other niggly self-doubts pop up, you are NOT alone.
I have always been the type of person not to let what other people think of me get in the way, at least not on the outside where everybody can see it. Whether you are happy with your body or not these self-doubts can creep in unexpectedly. Even when you have lost weight or changed whatever it is that you were not happy about.
There is often this self-inflicted expectation that we put upon ourselves to always become better than we were and often we don’t stop to smell the roses and see how far we have come on our journey.
I don’t think those self-doubts will ever completely go away, at least not for me – they have been ingrained in me for as long as I can remember and whilst they hardly ever rare their ugly head enough for it to be an issue they still do sometimes pop up.
Don’t get me wrong 99% of the time I am a very positive person and believe that everybody can do anything they put their mind to. In fact I believe the mind is a lot more powerful that people would believe; the saying mind over matter is one of the truest sayings I’ve ever heard.
As soon as you allow your mind to say you can’t do something, failure often creeps in as you have said that you can’t do it. Your body takes A LOT of notice to what your mind says. Not that I think failure (it sounds like such a harsh word, which I don’t think!) is necessarily a bad thing, so long as you learn something from it and make an effort to progress past it.
The timing of self-doubt striking will play a huge role in how much it will affect you at that given point in time – if we are feeling 100% and positive we often automatically squash those self-doubts and tell ourselves to pull our head in and sort our shit out. However if we are only running at 80% or have had a bad day we sometimes let those self-doubts in just enough to cause us to feel angry or upset.
I think recognising that these self-doubts to exist and sometimes will pop up unexpectedly and catch you off-guard is a huge first step, second I believe we need to put in place rebuttals to these self-doubts.
Another thing which helps reduce the self-doubt is to surround yourself with people who are positive and support you. If you don’t have someone close to you that will support you find an online group or send me an e-mail or a comment. Find anyone who will help you see the positive and how far you have come on your journey. Sometimes all you need is for someone else to point out the good things and to have a bit of time to think about and reflect on these comments before you realise that they are in fact right and you are AWESOME.
Remember never judge yourself based on someone else, you don’t know how far they have come, how long it has taken them to get there or any of the other situations in their life which has lead them to this point.
Never judge anyone else – you have no idea what their journey is about or how far they have come or anything else that is going on in their life.
Live YOUR life!
Do you ever find self-doubt creeping in?
How do you squash it?
What do you do if you feel as though you can’t squash it?
Great post! My last blog post was about my self doubt attacking me – while I was making the Little Mister’s birthday cake of all things! I’m always working on improving myself and not letting those doubts beat me (for long anyhow haha). What you say about not comparing yourself to others (or judging them) is so true. You just don’t know what a person has been through xx