7 Psychological Reasons You Don’t Trust Yourself

Culturally, we tend to put emotions up on a pedestal and romanticize them. But in reality, they are just one of many aspects of the human experience—not any more special or authoritative than any other mental capacity like sensation, perception, or logical thinking.

Remember:

Your emotions will lead you astray just as often as they will help you.

Perfectionism isn’t about doing perfect, it’s about feeling perfect.

Most perfectionists will freely admit that their excessive standards for achievement are totally unrealistic. But they keep holding themselves to them… Why?

Because deep down perfectionism is less about being afraid of failure itself and more about having a low tolerance for feeling like a failure.

Worry is fundamentally different than effective planning and problem-solving.

By definition, worry is unhelpful thinking about negatives in the future. Planning and problem-solving can be difficult because they’re negative, but they lead to results—they’re productive and generative.

Worry gives us the illusion of control.

But ultimately it’s a trap: You can’t control nearly as much as you would like.

If you want to trust yourself more, learn to identify the habits in your life that are interfering with self-trust and work to eliminate them:

• Dwelling on the past
• Worrying about the future
• Trusting your emotions
• Perfectionism
• Procrastination
• Reassurance-seeking
• Ignoring your curiosity

Reassurance-seeking is essentially outsourcing the hard work of managing difficult emotions to someone else.

If you habitually shirk the responsibility of managing your own painful emotions, you’re telling your brain that you can’t handle them yourself.

I mean, why would your brain trust you if that’s the message it’s getting all the time?

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with leaning on other people for emotional support sometimes. But if you do it to the exclusion of working through things yourself, it’s a setup for low self-trust.