Do anxiety and low self-confidence feed each other?
Over time, anxiety can erode your sense of self-confidence. If you’re always worried that something bad is about to happen to you, it can be difficult to have the confidence to move forward because you’re already convinced that things aren’t going to work out for you. This also works in reverse: low self-confidence can lead you to feeling more anxious in whatever situation you’re in, whether it’s a social situation, a job interview or something else.
How does that affect finding your direction in life?
I recently worked with a client, who grew up with an extremely critical parent who always found fault with the most insignificant things she did. My client grew up always feeling like she was in danger of doing something wrong. Because she was spending all of her mental and emotional energy trying to keep from doing the wrong thing, she had tremendous difficulty thinking about what she actually wanted to do with her life. As soon as she got an idea, she would decide that it must be wrong. She became paralyzed with anxiety and couldn’t find a way forward.In order to find your life path, you really have to be able to locate what matters to you. Persistent anxiety makes that very difficult to do. It’s as if all of your mental space is being taken up by worrying about all the mistakes you might make. There’s no mental space left to actually figure out what you want to do with your life.
How can you stop questioning yourself or thinking you’re always doing something wrong?
Different things work for different people. For some people, it’s really important to understand where their anxiety is coming from. In the case of my client, it really helped her to recognize that her mother’s criticisms had much more to do with the mother’s insecurities, than with anything my client was doing. She could see that her low self-esteem was largely a product of her mother’s anxieties that had very little to do with her. As she was able to recognize this, she felt free to focus on what she wanted in her life, instead of on what she was doing wrong.A second way out of the morass of anxiety and low self-esteem is to try to focus less on what you’re afraid of, and more on what you actually want. Of course, as soon as you start to focus on what you want, you may become anxious that it’s not going to happen—that, for example, you’re not going to find the relationship or the career that you want. This is where therapy can be really helpful. Therapy can help you to learn to stay focused on what you want, and to pay less attention to the anxieties that threaten to undermine you.
If you’re worried about finding your passion, how can you start thinking about which direction in life to choose?
Sometimes it’s important to let yourself fantasize about what you would do if you weren’t worried about anything—about money, about failure, about what other people think about you. What would you do if none of those things were an issue for you? Of course, in real life all kinds of things are issues for us. We have to think about how much money we need to make, whether we’re actually good at what we want to do, etc. But sometimes, these reality considerations become a source of so much anxiety, they get in the way of figuring out what you really want to do.So if someone is really stuck, and can’t figure out what direction in life they want to go in, I often encourage them to think about what they would want to do, if none of these reality constraints existed. That can be a really useful way of starting to discover what you really care about. Once you’re in touch with that, you’re more likely to have the kind of passion and motivation that will allow you to think about how to deal with the actual obstacles in your path. Click to learn more about anxiety treatment with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.