How I Overcame My Intense Feelings of Insecurity
We all have our own insecurities that relate to our looks.
Whether we find fault with our hair, skin, legs, or noses, these insecurities are rarely (if not never) grounded in actual shortcomings. But this perspective is hard to truly internalize, and it requires both time and effort to move past these perceptions and embrace a more neutral outlook on your appearances. There are, however, ways to go about it — ones that helped me from constantly grieving my own facial flaws and bodily imperfections to only occasionally (and barely) minding most of them.
These are those ways.
Keep this in mind as you read, however: overcoming your insecurity is not about never feeling insecure again. Rather, it is about aptly managing your insecurities whenever they arise, so that they no longer interfere with your day-to-day activities (much the same way my therapists worded the effects of my exposure therapy, which is often about conquering the anxieties that plague individuals with OCD). Thus, overcoming your insecurities is more like handling them in such a way that they no longer become a nuisance to you.
This article is an extension of a previous well-liked article of mine, “How I Became More Confident in My Appearance”, which covers several other points besides the ones below. Of course, it is not required of you to have read the original one first.
I stopped talking behind other people’s backs.
It does not only harm other people when you criticize or badmouth their appearances.
When you do this, you inadvertently give voice — and also link pleasure — to the practice of downgrading individuals (including yourself, even) on the basis of their looks. On the other hand, once you stop, you realize how trivial these criticisms are — and then, you might learn to give less attention to all the insignificant “flaws” around you. As I did so myself several years ago, I finally acknowledged how ridiculous and counterproductive it was to make fun of other people’s pimples and shirts; for how could I feel good about myself when there was so much to criticize about everyone else?
After all, by badmouthing, I would only be nurturing a culture that I myself was afraid of being condemned by too.
I made it a promise to myself to always be authentically me.
When I was younger, I made myself a promise to always be myself.
Based on one of my most significant values since childhood, this promise has been immensely helpful in recent years, during which I have been especially struggling with feelings of loneliness and ostracization. As I came to learn then, I would much prefer to be authentically me even if that meant having few or no friends, than to live in disguise among multiple satisfied peers. This stubborn resolve to be true to my own personality was what led to my meeting some of the dearest people in my life — and thus becoming more reliant on my own assessments of “fun” and “cool” rather than those of others.
This way, I valued my own authenticity (and self-assuredness) above others’ evaluations.
I remained positive when others were negative.
Insecurities have their roots in negative perceptions.
A harmless accident of yours may easily become a “super embarrassing” occurrence if you allow yourself to see it as such; and likewise, any small scar or mole or leg hair has the potential to become a crisis situation if you choose to look at it through your self-centered, magnifying lens. To end such cycles of insecurity, I trained myself to twist negative perceptions into neutral or positive ones. Whenever someone was laughing at me or another person, I chose to shrug indifferently or respond with a compliment or confident smile of my own.
Thus, situations that might have given way to insecurity gave way to resilience instead.
I challenged my fears and did things that scared me.
Because I used to be so insecure, there were many things I never dared to do.
I did not wear a shirt without first shaving my arms, nor did I go outside without covering my acne with concealer or wearing a jacket over the new dress I thought too stylish to suit me. Whilst attending exposure therapy with various skilled therapists, I came to learn that I could overcome these fears by stepping into my insecurities trustfully, without giving myself room to hesitate or ruminate. So, I stopped shaving my arms each time, and went outside fully aware that people might point or laugh, but that I would be safe regardless (and ironically, no one ever did).
Eventually, that continuous fear and embarrassment lost their strong hold on me.
I behaved as if I were, in fact, confident.
Confidence may be learned, not inherited.
Sure, one way is to give yourself the identity of a “confident person” which then becomes the label that shapes your actions forward (as James Clear would likely recommend based on his teachings on habit creation in Atomic Habits). But YouTuber Elizabeth Filips smartly points out another: you may become confident by simply behaving confidently (that is, making decisions that are rooted in courage or self-assuredness). I have tried both methods, and they work wonders.
If you behave like a confident person, no one can deny the confidence you are exhibiting.
I worked on my appearance in ways that mattered to me.
No one can satisfy each and every beauty standard, nor follow each and every trend.
Therefore, by chasing those ideals, you are merely seeking to reach the unreachable, which is an endeavor that ultimately makes you feel worse about yourself. To remedy this in my own life, I created my own ideals for my appearance (in terms of the types of clothes I would wear, and what hairstyles and makeup types I was comfortable with), partly based on various fashion and style theories. It was easy (and fun) to pursue these personal standards, and they made me look all the more cohesive and
confident in the end.
It is important to take care of your appearance and work to look your best — but what that “best” is to you is something that you can — and should — decide for yourself.
I let go of my insecure thoughts and feelings whenever they arose.
A therapist of mine from 2023 once gave me some brilliant homework.
She asked me to embed mindfulness into my everyday life: a helpful practice that involves noticing, acknowledging, and refocusing from the thoughts, feelings, and distractions that arise during a given moment. Essentially, she advised me to extend this habit to instances where my insecurities were activated. Whenever I saw someone with thinner legs or tanner skin or nicer hair, I would simply acknowledge the envy and insecurity that arose inside me and then (without force or suppression) turn my focus to other more important things, like where I was going or what I would like to read later on.
Gradually, this gave way to a more neutral state of mind to approach my surroundings with (and, thus, less room for incessant ruminations and pointless comparisons).
By doing this again and again, I managed to let more and more of my insecurities go.
