The Ancient Power of Self-Doubt
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes (or listen at the bottom of the page).
What you will learn: The physiological power of self-doubt and how it supports your optimal alignment.
Understanding Self-Doubt
Self-doubt is a common human experience that can be painful and hard to overcome.
And as you face the world around you, self-doubt can sneak up on you in many ways, affecting your thoughts, emotions, behaviors and physical sensations, and sabotaging your ability to successfully navigate your tasks and challenges.
Maybe you struggle with persistent worry, negative self-talk, ruminating on weaknesses, overlooking strengths and feeling like you're not enough.
Maybe you feel guilty, frustrated, angry, fearful or sad when self-doubt arises, hindering your progress toward your goals and the stability of your connections.
When self-doubt arises, maybe you find yourself lashing out at others, the world or yourself; withdrawing, avoiding and giving up, or feeling stagnant, paralyzed and stuck.
Maybe you experience self-doubt over small, everyday tasks, big life changes or positive successes and accomplishments.
Maybe self-doubt comes with annoying physical symptoms like headaches, lethargy, chest tightness, racing heart or muscle tension.
And maybe you've tried common methods for managing self-doubt like cognitive reframing, positive affirmations, mindfulness, meditation, changing limiting beliefs or raising your vibration but it's just a matter of time before spirals of self-doubt resurface.
Whatever you experience, you're certainly not alone. And struggling with self-doubt can leave you feeling weak, confused and helpless, like your mind and body are working against you, sabotaging your efforts.
But your brain-body system is an amazing creation full of powerful physiological mechanisms designed to help you overcome, succeed and win.
And your system communicates with you constantly, giving you feedback, direction and guidance on how you can take action to successfully navigate your challenges, adapt to your environment and maintain your optimal range (a process we will refer to as being in youstate). But since your system can’t send you an email, letter or text, it speaks to you via the language of difficult sensations instead.
Difficult sensations get a bad rap as sources of chaos, sabotage and distress, but the physiological mechanisms of the stress response, fight, flight or freeze and difficult thoughts, emotions, behaviors and sensations, all lie on a wide but misunderstood spectrum of physiological feedback and guidance.
And these mechanisms are core parts of human design that date back to primitive days, that still play a powerful but misunderstood role in helping you to successfully navigate the challenges of the modern landscape.
The Youstate Approach™ is all about exploring the incredible physiological mechanisms of your system and how the ancient wisdom of your system guides and supports you today.
And to better understand the physiological power of difficult sensations and the important role that self-doubt plays, first let's explore the ancient power of difficult sensations and how they helped you to successfully navigate the primitive landscape.
The Ancient Power of Difficult Sensations
In primitive days, life revolved around navigating the physical, primitive landscape: taking action to face physical tasks and challenges, adapt to your physical environment and maintain your optimal physical range.
And difficult sensations like heat, cold, hunger and thirst would give you the drive to carry out necessary physical activities for maintaining your optimal range, like hunting for food, gathering water, building shelter and exploring new terrain.
Then, when you encountered a challenge that you needed to face, like a river that you needed to get across or a boulder blocking your pathway, the changes of the stress response, the effects of fight, flight or freeze, and the energy of difficult thoughts, emotions, behaviors and sensations would help you to take action to successfully navigate whatever you were up against.
As you approached the river or boulder, your system would activate, causing your breathing and heart rate to quicken, your muscles to tense, and your mental activity to increase, giving you the energy, drive, power and strength to take action in three ways.
The energy of fight would help you to take action to progress: to move toward the challenge so you could swim, hike, lift, build, climb, jump, push or pull as you navigated whatever you were up against.
The energy of flight would help you to take action to rest: to move away from the challenge so you could recharge, reorient, repair, refuel, reassess and recover before moving forward again.
And the energy of freeze would help you to take action to observe: to stay still in the face of the challenge so you could survey your environment and resources and how best to progress and rest as you moved forward.
Then, as you took action to progress, rest and observe™, difficult thoughts and emotions would play a unique role in helping you to successfully navigate your challenges and adapt to your environment.
The energy of negative focus would help you to identify and mitigate pitfalls that you might face, like noticing sharp rocks or hidden crevices in your pathway. And the energy of tunnel vision would help you to stay focused on challenges in your environment and nearby resources to help you manage them, like zooming in on finding a pathway through unfamiliar terrain.
The energy of self-doubt would help you to survey and assess your challenges, resources and environment, so you could mitigate weaknesses and leverage strengths, like crafting tools to move aside obstacles that exceeded your strength. And the energy of fear of the future would help you to overcome future challenges by preparing to face them in the present, like noticing bad weather approaching and gathering food and water to ride it out before moving forward again.
The elevated energy of fear, anger and frustration would help you to carry out intense physical feats, like building faster to finish shelter or hiking over obstacles in unfamiliar territories.
And the subdued energy of sadness and guilt would help you to carry out less intense physical activities, like slowing down to assess your resources, so you could leverage them effectively and sustainably.
Ancient Power and the Modern Landscape
Fast forward to modern day and when you encounter a task or challenge that interrupts your optimal range, your system still activates, whether the challenge that you’re facing is big, small, negative, neutral, positive, safe or unsafe, creating the changes of the stress response, the effects of fight, flight or freeze and the energy of difficult sensations.
And the energy of self-doubt still plays an important role in helping you to successfully navigate whatever you face.
But instead of facing the physical, visible, tangible challenges of the primitive landscape, you’re more likely to face non-physical, invisible, intangible challenges, like dealing with a passive-aggressive co-worker, moving on after a breakup or managing your finances.
And since your system is originally designed for the physical challenges of primitive days, when you’re facing non-physical challenges that you can’t see, hear, smell, touch or taste, you can struggle to understand the energy of your system, and how you can channel it into the everyday tasks and challenges that you face.
When you ignore, overlook, misunderstand or misplace the energy of your system, the energy of self-doubt backs up and escalates, manifesting as self-sabotage, instability, and chronic, reoccurring anxiety, overwhelm and stress.
But when you recognize and understand the energy of self-doubt and channel it in the right way for the unique challenges and environments that you face, the energy of your system flows as it was designed and intended, helping you to create and maintain your optimal range.
And instead of feeling like nuisances or saboteurs that block your progress, the energy of difficult sensations and the feedback of self-doubt become a powerful source of clarity, calm and confidence.
The Truth About Calm is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that will help you to explore the difficult thoughts, emotions, behaviors and sensations that your system creates and how you can use them to successfully navigate the unique challenges and environments that you face, and confidently transform the energy of anxiety, overwhelm and stress.
But in this course, we will zoom in on the energy of self-doubt and how you can use it to successfully overcome your challenges and master your environment.
You will discover common self-doubt myths that can keep you stuck and the hidden truth behind them.
Why all self-doubt isn't the same, how to identify your unique self-doubt patterns, and the precise messages of guidance that they bring.
And you will learn fun, creative exercises for transforming your unique patterns of self-doubt into lasting clarity and confidence.
As you prepare for this process, there is one big barrier that you need to be aware of when it comes to transforming self-doubt. And up next we will explore this barrier and what it takes to overcome it.
Then, you will learn a fun, core exercise for boosting confidence.
But first, let’s review the concepts in this lesson below, with a short, recap quiz.