Cognitive Techniques to Overcome Insecurity

Cognitive behavioral techniques can be powerful tools in helping a person overcome insecurities and anxieties. Learning how to change the way you think can alter your behaviors, making you a more productive person in your social and personal life. Several cognitive techniques can be practiced on your own or with a trained professional.

Keeping a Journal

• Write down how you respond in different social situations and include as many details as you can remember. For example, if you froze up when you met a new person last week, write down where you were, who you were with, what you were wearing and what the other person might have said. This can help you recognize patterns in your insecure behaviors. You might be insecure when you are out with a certain friend or at a certain type of location, like a bar. Learning your triggers for insecurity can help you to overcome and avoid them.

Think-Feel-Do

• Have you ever had a happy thought and noticed that you started to smile? Thinking positively or imagining yourself behaving in a certain way can lead to you feeling more confident and less insecure. Imagine yourself walking into a room with your head held high and everyone looking at you with pride. Practice walking around this way in your house and keep those positive thoughts in your head the next time you go out. You will be surprised how much better you feel about yourself just by thinking better of yourself.

Cognitive Restructuring

• Cognitive restructuring involves changing those negative and damaging thoughts that bring you down and make you feel insecure. Whenever you begin to feel insecure about yourself, stop your thought process immediately. Write down what you are doing, the mood you are currently experiencing and the automatic thought that comes into your head. For example, if you walk into a room of crowded people, you might feel anxious and think everyone is staring at you. Your automatic thought could be that people are staring at your big nose or think your clothes are ill-fitting. Stopping those negative thoughts is a key to developing more security about yourself. You need to find evidence that those thoughts you have are untrue; for example, not everyone in the room is staring at you or you can't read their minds. These changed thoughts can help you to challenge your negative thinking and be more positive about yourself and the situation.

Challenge Thinking Errors

• Every person makes errors in their thinking from time to time. People with insecurities tend to make many thinking errors which lead to further insecurity. Thinking errors cloud your judgment and can interfere with positive decision making. Common thinking errors include all or nothing thinking (if it isn't this way, then it is no way), overgeneralizing a situation (she ignored me once so she must hate me) and assuming (he said he'd be here at 10 am and it's 10:15 am, so I'm being stood up). Thinking errors can be challenged in the same way you challenge the negative thoughts in cognitive restructuring. Tell yourself that what you are thinking is incorrect and replace it with a more realistic thought. For example, in the case of a friend not being on time, you can think he might have been caught in traffic rather than standing you up.