Everyone feels insecure from time to time, you probably do too. But some people suffer so much from insecurity that it affects their daily life. If you feel insecure, you may, for example, have doubts about whether you’re doing things right or whether you are good enough. Insecurity is a broad concept and can be expressed in different ways. You can be insecure about your performance at work, about your appearance, about your social skills, about certain purchases and so on. Some people are better at disguising it than others, but the fact is that everyone is insecure at some point, and that takes a lot of tension and energy. How can you best deal with feelings of insecurity and make sure they do not get in the way of your happiness?

Invisible insecurity

You probably know the standard image of someone who is insecure, namely the type who literally and figuratively keeps themselves in the background. The interesting thing is that someone who is in the foreground and throws their knowledge and skills into the fray can be just as insecure! So someone can appear to be dominant, and at the same time be insecure. Many people have a certain urge to prove themselves in order to get approval from other people. The urge for approval from others often comes from a place of insecurity.

Allow insecurity

It may sound strange and vague, but your insecurity is allowed to be there. You don’t have to suppress, deny or ignore these feelings. If you resist your feelings, they will only take up more space. Rather, stand still for a moment and think about how you feel and observe what is happening inside of you. What are you thinking, what do you feel and where in your body do you feel that? By paying attention to this, instead of suppressing it, it will start to consume you less. By dwelling on it for a moment, you hit the pause button, so to speak, and you are less likely to get caught up in a negative stream of thoughts.

Normalise

If you feel insecure, it can be helpful to remember that everyone in the world knows how you feel. You are not alone in this, even though it can sometimes feel that way. To find out that you are not alone, the following experiment can be fun to do:

Ask your friends/partner/family members if they have ever felt insecure and if so, about what. Ask everyone to name different situations in which they have felt insecure and reflect on what they are currently feeling insecure about. By talking openly with each other about this, insecurity will be normalized and you will eventually value it less. You will realize that you are not alone and that everyone suffers from this from time to time. This way there is more compassion and understanding for others and yourself!

Your experiences have a big impact on who you are as a person, how you react and how you interpret situations. As a result of your experiences, you sometimes unconsciously create certain rules for yourself to help you navigate similar future situations more easily. However, it is important to consider whether your life rules are helping or hindering you in your daily life. In this blog, I will explain a bit more about how these life rules are constructed and the effect they can have on you.

Life rules

‘Life rules’ or ‘underlying assumptions’ are behavioural or cognitive changes that you make and that guide the way you interact with the world. These rules guide the way you think, feel and behave in certain situations. Life rules often emerge to help you cope with negative experiences that take place during your childhood.

An example of a life rule or underlying assumption could be: “If I don’t show my emotions, people will think I am a strong person.“.

Helpful versus unhelpful life rules

We make all kinds of (unconscious) assumptions about ourselves, others and the world around us. Our brains work like this to help us understand and react to the world more easily. Therefore, these assumptions or life rules can be helpful in various situations and probably have helped you to cope in the past during difficult situations. However, some assumptions or life rules can bring about more harm than good. For example, life rules which are inflexible, not working anymore or lead to unhelpful behaviour or thoughts. That’s why it’s so important to distinguish the life rules that are beneficial for our well-being from the ones that hold us back or cause negative emotions.

Let’s take an example:

Rose is a young woman who is currently struggling with stress at her new job. She grew up in a family that values hard work and put pressure on her to achieve good grades at school. Rose would receive appreciation and affirmation from her family when she was top of her class. As a result of her experience, she (unconsciously) created the life rule: 

“If I don’t work hard and I’m not successful in what I do, then I’m not a valuable person“.

This life rule has had benefits in the past: it got her appreciation from her parents and teachers, and it has helped her to stay motivated at university and get a new job. However, this life rule means that Rose places very high expectations on herself. As a result, Rose often feels disappointed when she does not meet her (difficult to reach) expectations. This has led to Rose overworking and burning herself out at work to impress her new colleagues. 

Flexible and helpful alternative rules

Unhelpful life rules are often self-defeating, unrealistic or lead to an unhelpful coping mechanism. For example, it’s not possible to be successful in everything you do. When you don’t meet your high expectations it can lead to negative feelings, significantly impact your self-esteem or lead to you overworking yourself to cope. When life rules cause more harm than good, it’s important that we try to come up with more realistic, flexible and helpful alternatives. It is about keeping the parts that work and changing the bad parts!

Below you’ll find a list of a few example life rules. Do you recognize yourself in any of these?

• “I must do my work perfectly, otherwise, people will think I am stupid”.
• “If I eat vegetables every day, I will be healthy”
• “If I prioritise myself, then I am selfish”.
• “If I don’t help someone, they won’t like me”. 
• “If I ask for help then I am a weak person”.
• “If I ask too many questions, I will look stupid”.
• “I must be prepared for everything, or things will go wrong”. 
• “If I don’t get close to people, then I won’t get hurt”.
• “I must always look good, otherwise, people won’t like me.”
• “If I don’t show my emotions, it means I am strong”.
• “I should exercise every day to be healthy”.
• “I need to react angrily, otherwise, people won’t listen to me”.
•  “If I don’t work hard and I am not successful in what I do, then I am not a valuable person”.

You can try to come up with some more realistic and flexible life rules! Guidelines can help us navigate through our everyday life, but try not to let these rules determine who you are or bring you down. 

You know you should have been asleep by now, but you can’t help but watch another episode of that show. You couldn’t say no to your boss, even though your agenda is already too full. You go for another drink, whilst knowing you have to get up early tomorrow. Everyone probably recognizes this, but why do we do things that we secretly know aren’t good for us? All behaviour has a function and I would like to explain that to you! 

Benefit

No matter how crazy something may sound, there’s always a reason someone does it. Whether consciously or unconsciously; you are always driven by a potential advantage. You run away from a dog, so there’s no chance that you might get bitten. You stay on the couch and avoid responsibilities, so you can maintain your energy or mood. You go beyond your limits for your boss, to maintain a good reputation. You stay awake when your kids are out at night, so you can respond more quickly to a potential emergency. You drink alcohol before going to bed so that you don’t spend so much time in bed worrying. And so on.

Stress

The benefit you gain from such behaviour is always linked to stress. Your behaviour has two functions: preventing stress or reducing stress. That stress can be, for example, the fear of a dog, possible energy loss, the reputation with your boss, your functioning as a parent or your (in)tolerance to worry. Whenever you can interpret anything as a particular threat, it will grab your attention and excite your stress response. And because stress feels unpleasant,  your body demands a reaction.

Reaction

Although you neutralize the threat with your reaction, for example by running away from a dog or going over your limits for your boss, you increase the impact the threat can have on you. You teach yourself that it is ‘rewarding’ to exhibit this type of behaviour. It feels good at that moment because you reduce your stress. But the pitfall lies in the attractiveness of the “rewarding” behaviour; the more often you engage in that behaviour, the less attractive the opposite becomes. In other words, the more often you run away from a dog, the scarier it gets to be around dogs. This means that your behaviour can strengthen or weaken the unpleasant feelings in the long run.

Action

Now that you know behaviour determines how you feel, you can take action yourself! Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to towards all scary dogs like a maniac; your original behaviour was indeed helpful. However, your judgment might have become somewhat clouded. You have to experience when it is and when isn’t useful to perform special behaviour. For example, you will have to experience what happens if you say no to your boss, or go to bed without having a glass of wine. It may be really scary, but act on it anyway! Such a behaviour change isn’t permanent, but you do learn more about your behaviour and feelings. And if you don’t like the outcome, you always have the choice to go back to your old habits. You can only become better from this!

What is racism?

The belief, assumption or idea that there are differences between human races and that people can be categorized according to this. This can lead to discriminatory systems in which one “race” is treated differently by another “race”.

Racism can manifest itself in several ways: this can be with overt forms of racism where someone is verbally abused, physically attacked or even killed because of their ethnicity. It can also be in the form of subtle belittling (consciously or subconsciously), which causes a certain group to be disadvantaged. For example, by assuming that a certain group of people are inferior, or by being surprised when someone with a different skin color other than yourself speaks good Dutch. Other examples can be when someone makes animal noises at someone from another race, individuals not being accepted on the basis of their ethnicity, a bystander holding his bag close to him due to fear for someone from another race or being followed by security while shopping because they don’t trust certain ethnicities: there are many different forms of racism. From very clear to subtle, and from conscious to subconscious.

Discrimination and Depression

A number of studies show that racism has a long-term negative impact on mental health. A study by Umar Ikram showed that ethnic minorities in the Netherlands experience a lot of discrimination based on their ethnicity and also have a higher risk of experiencing psychological complaints. The most common statements they identified with for example were: “People behave as if they are better than me,” or “People act as if they are smarter than me.” This perceived discrimination also promoted the feeling that “Society does not want me”. Therefore, these feelings not only arise with clear and obvious discrimination, but also with more subtle and subconscious racism. Ikram’s research showed that there was a clear relationship between perceived discrimination and feelings of depression.

It is important to further investigate the exact link between discrimination and depression; American studies have also shown that discrimination based on ethnicity often preceded depression. Racism can have a profound effect causing people to withdraw from society and become isolated.

Self Fulfilling Prophecy

A Self Fulfilling Prophecy is when a behavior is predicted or expected, which in turn, ultimately leads to the predicted / expected behavior happening. Psychologist Rosenthal, for example, gave children intelligence tests and falsified the results. The children who were given a good grade (chosen at random) in turn also achieved better school results. This was because teachers (subconsciously) paid more attention to the smart students, judging them as more positive and, as a result, the children also performed better.

The Self Fulfilling Prophecy and Racism

Racism can therefore be expressed very clearly, but also very subtly in everyday life. Dylan Glover conducted research using data from a large supermarket chain in France. It compared the productivity of two groups of supermarket employees: minorities versus non-minorities.

Less productive in this case could mean being slower at scanning products, taking more time between customers, being late to work, or finishing early. It also looked at the manager’s bias score. By bias score we mean to what extent a manager associates minorities with less productivity, and vice versa. A higher score meant that they were more inclined to associate less productivity with minorities. A bias in this case is a prejudice.

With the help of a psychological task (Implicit Association Task) these scores were decreased. For example, do you associate the word “lazy” with certain ethnicities? Thus, with this task these associations were investigated. This study found that minorities were less productive when led by a manager with a high bias score. This is where the Self Fulfilling Prophecy comes into play: because of their bias, they were expected to be less productive. As a result, these managers spent less time on this group of supermarket employees: they were given different tasks, less attention, and less trust, and consequently they were ultimately less productive.

How you are treated determines your behavior

What happened was that “biased” managers had less interaction with minorities, less attention to the efforts of these employees, and assigned less customer-oriented tasks to them. This is also called aversive racism: racism without conscious intention. Ethnic minorities were more productive with managers with a low bias score, who treated ethnic minorities and non-minorities equally.

All in all, discrimination or racism affects how you feel and how you behave: when you are discriminated against, you behave differently, whether discrimination takes place consciously or subconsciously.

Would you like to learn more about this subject? With the help of this blog you will get more tools and ideas on how to familiarize yourself with the complex subject of racism.

Discrimination and racism therefore have an effect on people’s (mental) health. It is also important to remember that talking about your experiences can help. Would you like to do this with a professional? Go to your doctor for a referral or get in touch with the NiceDay Team, we are happy to help you.