Is it a tightness in your chest? An urge to hide your face? A clenching of your belly?
You can experiment with shifting your attention away from your thoughts and onto your body—and then relax into the feeling.
Doing this sends messages to your brain and your autonomic nervous system that you’re safe, that everything is okay. And practicing this experiment repeatedly builds new pathways in your brain—so that eventually, you may find yourself feeling better, more relaxed, and more confident.
Notice when you feel good.
Our brains are wired to pay close attention when something doesn’t feel good—and to remember it. Our attunement to our fears has helped us to survive as a species for thousands of years—it ensures that we pay attention when something is a threat and that we remember it for next time so we can protect ourselves.
But the brain functions that served us when we were living exposed to the elements, amongst wild animals, can kind of get in the way of our happiness here in the 21st century.
If we let ourselves default to focusing on our fears and insecurities, our survival instincts take over, and they just multiply. But if we put in a little extra effort to pay attention when we feel good---if we catch ourselves feeling vital, sexy, and confident and make a mental note to pay attention to that feeling and remember it—it winds up sticking a whole lot more.
That little bit of effort spent paying attention to those good feelings winds up multiplying them. Bit by bit, we can retrain ourselves to spend more time feeling great about ourselves and less time paying attention to our fears. And that builds confidence.