Psychology Today: How to Overcome Doubt and Chronic Insecurity

" Chronic insecurity, which is a problem we are seeing with increasing regularity in employees, couples, and single adults, can now even be observed as growing in children and adolescents.

Chronic insecurity cannot be called a form of "disease," but as a generalized perception, it becomes a disabling source of frustration, rendering us incapable to make decisions and take effective action.

Delay and Procrastination

With this problem, people feel constant uncertainty about decisions and find themselves unable to implement even basic actions. They are continually seeking certainty before they act.

The mechanism leading to the formation of such a deep-rooted distrust in their abilities is that they have a tendency to overanalyze things. While seeking certainty initially has the appearance of a person being careful or conscientious, it eventually leads to a detrimental effect of overestimating others' capabilities and underestimating their own capabilities. This further leads to a delay in taking action, creating more fear and increasing their state of physical anxiety.

The repetition of these tactics of postponing something increases their contempt for themselves, exacerbating further their feeling of impotence and incapability compared to others and their life generally.

Obsessive-Compulsive Insecurity and Doubt

There is also a variant of chronic insecurity that derives from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. This type of problem is known as pathological doubt. In this case, the dynamic that leads the person to delay action is not the tendency to underestimate themselves or to overestimate others’ abilities, but the obsessive need to evaluate all possibilities and potential negative consequences of taking a specific course of action.

The Practical Solution

They should be taught how to take very small risks and decisions at the start, progressively increasing to more and more complex situations and decisions until they reach confidence in their own resources and in building their self-confidence.

If the problem is more the obsessive-compulsive type with pathological doubt, then treatment will be very different: We will want to focus on short-circuiting their process of excessive reasoning and their "illusion" that we can reason perfectly.

We must maintain our intervention until the vicious circle between their provision of answers to their irrational or hyper-rational doubts is blocked and by doing this we completely dismantle their problem so that they can take effective action and liberate themselves from this common trap."

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#Insecurity #Doubt #Self-confidence