Meditations on self-doubt
In the past few days, I caught myself thinking that I would benefit from a no-information diet. Not a fan of diets, but this one has been very appealing as I went down the mindless scrolling rabbit hole at the end of multiple days in a row. Why may you ask.
Well, my self-doubt has been loud these days with occasional residual guilt for feeling like “I don’t know what I am doing” in my adult life. So when self-doubt is loud, my imprinted autopilot response is to seek information in the external world – cues for “am I doing this thing called life right?!” In other words, I seek reassurance in the external world and perhaps some hope for finding the “rightest” way that is out there to live a life.
I guess I don’t have to tell you how much information there is out there, how many opinions, how many 5 steps to miraculously feel regulated and in control of your life (in a healthy gentle non-forcing way of course), etc. So naturally, soon after my scrolling endeavors have started, I felt overwhelmed by the mere amount of available information – my brain felt fried and wired at the same time – congrats, I have successfully reached overstimulation.
In this process, on my worst days, I am not a neutral observer who is wisely evaluating what of this information has actual value for me. I am non-selectively measuring and comparing myself and my life to all those others out there and what they say is the “rightest” way to live life. All of which further feeds into my self-doubt and the only thing it accomplishes is to evoke my feelings of inadequacy for not living my life already in the “rightest” way, whatever that may be. So let’s recap the sequence to find the way out of this vicious cycle of self-doubt and disappointment.
(1) I doubt if the way I approach life is right – e.g., how much I put on my proverbial plate, if I am doing a good job at anything and everything throughout a day of time, if I am moving in the right direction with the choices I make, and so forth.
(2) I engage in scrolling to seek reassurance and validation for the way I already am living my life – like “can some info out there just tell me that I am doing fine; Can someone just like give me a grade for how well/unwell I am doing?! Some feedback but mostly reassurance that I am a decent life liver in the school of life.” Another thing I seek in this effort is compassion and acknowledgment for how living life can be at times, at least the not so bright parts of it – difficult, challenging, messy, tiring, unpredictable, full of obstacles, lonely. Perhaps these not so bright impressions of life are the very triggers for my self-doubt – things are not going as smoothly and effortlessly as I would want them to – “I must be doing something wrong" - on the worst days, I go onto the trampoline of cognitive errors and make the biggest jump to a dysfunctional belief one can make – “I must be wrong.”
(3) I endlessly and at times frantically scroll on social media trying to collect as much information as it takes to soothe my self-doubt. It is not a conscious mindful act, it is my autopilot going wild. And the result? I successfully deplete my dopamine receptors, craving even more instant gratification and overwhelm myself with information that pulls me into a multitude of directions being even less “sure” what is right but ever more so confirming that there is all the more reason to doubt myself. After all, I am not doing daily meditations, or making all my food from scratch for anti-inflammatory reasons, I am not spending time in nature every day, nor following the most optimally balanced training plan between cardio, strength and stretching at my age (34), my ferritin might be lower than ideal and I am not eating black sesame or basil or whatever other seeds that magically recover one’s ferritin levels(?), and my life is not whimsical enough to sip lattes all day under a pumpkin patterned blanked while reading fantasy novels or to learn yet another new crafty hobby. And yes, on the very bad days, it truly gets to me, all of it. The bad days seem to erase the protective invisible membrane around my personhood, the one that on the better days radiates away anything remotely harmful to my self-esteem, and on the more average days humbly engage in selective filtering of what is allowed to permeate the membrane and what stays out. I am going off on a tangent here, but you get the gist of it.
(4) The result of my effort to reassure myself and alleviate my self-doubt is more and even louder self-doubt, some self-judgment for not being more self-assured and, as a result, secondary guilt. Wow, confronted much?! Alright, time to practice some acceptance – my coping strategy is instead of helping me, making things worse and kicking off the vicious cycle of self-doubt and disappointment.
Describing the sequence like this begs for a different coping strategy. How to get there though? Throughout this process of reflection, I touched upon some important personal needs I was trying to fulfill through ineffective ways: my needs for reassurance, normalization, validation, and compassion. My intuition tells me, if previously I was seeking these externally and it did not work, perhaps turning inwards might just be the way.
I guess I can give these things to myself. For once, writing this sequence out and sharing it with others already feels normalizing and validating, it somehow becomes less part of my isolating feelings of inadequacy and becomes part of universal human experience. And there is a bonus here. I am not only normalizing and validating my own experiences but by doing so I intend and hope to normalize and validate similar experiences of others who dare to read this lengthy account of my thoughts. Reconnecting to and honoring what is important to me gives way to a special form of gratification and self-assuredness that I’ve been longing for.
Next, I can give myself compassion – when I lay the sequence out like this, it helps me distance and separate myself from the experience and look at it through more neutral and curious eyes – and my instant reaction to it is: “Wow, this must be so hard! Brava for the effort and intention – it came from a place of wanting to help yourself. Must be disappointing, at the very least, to want to seek out one thing to alleviate something else and as a result of one’s own actions ending up unintentionally reinforcing the very thing that needed to be alleviated.” There is also a part about accepting and acknowledging that life can be challenging at times, that there is no manual for it, that it can twist and wiggle in front of our eyes in unpredictable ways, that a lot of emotion can come with all that requiring proper space for holding it all. But that none of that means that something is utterly wrong, just that at times (read most of the times), it requires some heightened resilience, willingness to accept what we cannot change, and determination to persevere in enacting and embodying our values in areas we have control over in face of the challenges and obstacles life may unexpectedly reveal.
And lastly, I can give myself reassurance – no one else is living my life, no one else knows all the details of it, how it feels, what are all the bits and pieces to the puzzle that constitute a subjective experience of a day in my life, no one experienced the exact same personal history and the blueprint of it that I still carry with myself, no one embodies an identical personality, nor level of capacity nor situational circumstances as me. Hence, no one else can possibly know better what the “rightest” way is to live another’s life. That knowledge already lives within each and everyone of us, we just need to create the right conditions for accessing and hearing it.
For me personally, the right conditions are space in my day for unstructured time that allows for quiet reflection, contemplation, tapping into my feelings and needs. Although “unstructured time" makes it sound effortless, the effortful part is to block that time in busy agendas, to intentionally stop myself from reaching for my phone and distracting myself with scrolling (and making things worse), quieting and soothing the inner noise that self-doubt can create by reassuring it that everything will feel alright again, and that the way to that "alright" is through the quiet, through the encouragement to go inwards, through the cultivation of hope that we do, indeed, hold the very wisdom we are in need of.
What are the conditions that you need to access your authentic inner voice?