Confidence feels good, so you want more. Confidence is the “fix” for anxiety, which doesn’t feel good. Avoiding situations in which you feel uncomfortable leads you to conclude that you lack confidence.
These three bad habits are guaranteed to sabotage your confidence and expand your anxiety.
- Deprive yourself of enough sleep. Research clearly shows that lack of sleep causes that part of your brain that generates anxiety, the amygdala, to be overactive. Your world is a much scarier place when you are chronically tired. You have more unnecessary anxiety simply because you ignore your body’s need for rest.
Don’t work against your brain. It will win every time. And you will believe that you lack confidence, instead of just lacking sleep.
- Drink lots of caffeine. Being tired causes you to solve that problem with stimulants to get your motor running: coffee, colas, high octane sodas, like Red Bull and Monster, Inc. It is a great temporary fix, but the caffeine interferes with your brain’s ability to gear down and go to sleep at the appropriate time for you. You are creating a vicious cycle.
Watch out for using alcohol and recreational drugs to medicate your caffeine-induced insomnia and sleep-deprived anxiety.
- Be a passive adrenalin junkie. Watch lots of TV and be on your computer for several hours each evening to feed this nasty cycle even more. Video games are especially great for this. All of these activities stimulate your brain and your adrenalin constantly.
Make sure that the TV you watch jacks up your amygdala with murder and crime shows, bad news about the world, disasters and other terrible things that happen to people. You can routinely include slasher and monster movies in the evening. Video games are excellent sources of stimulation at night to delay your ability to get to sleep.
All of the self-help you read to develop more confidence will only be moderately effective as long as you continue to jack up your anxiety with sleep deprivation, lots of caffeine and adrenalin.
Now you have the ammunition to turn your life around and change these 3 bad habits. If you are truly going to be confident today, start with a solid foundation.
Be smart. You can figure out which habit to tackle first to increase your level of confidence. Confidence is always a choice, so notice what you are choosing today – confidence or anxiety.
Confidence Tip: EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique is a very effective method for quickly changing mental patterns that sabotage your confidence.