How to Stop Being Self-Conscious: Signs of Self-Consciousness

Self-consciousness is a sense of self-awareness heightened to an extreme and problematic degree. It manifests through a fixation on how other people perceive your looks, personality, and behaviors. Since you believe everyone has negative thoughts about you, you develop those same thoughts about yourself. These feelings can easily become overwhelming, leading to a detrimental effect on your quality of life.

Self-consciousness arises in people for all sorts of different reasons. Mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or OCD might put you at higher risk for developing these feelings about yourself. Childhood experiences of abandonment, bullying, and rejection can also have a major impact on a person’s self-image or propensity for negative self-talk. Even into adulthood, negative experiences with others can lead you to develop a poor self-image and an increased sense of self-consciousness.

If you feel like everyone dislikes you and mocks your every move, there’s a good chance you’re a self-conscious person. These three signs might help you better determine whether or not you’re self-conscious:

1. 1. Excessive embarrassment: Perhaps the signature feeling of self-consciousness is embarrassment. In social situations, self-conscious people are prone to think everyone around them views them in a negative light. The embarrassment this causes leads people to experience crushing levels of self-doubt and withdraw from others.
2. 2. Low self-esteem: If you think you have nothing positive to offer the world, you’re probably very self-conscious. While not all self-conscious thoughts and insecurities are so dire, they all tend in this negative direction. It might take some work, but you can overcome these feelings, build self-confidence, and achieve real happiness.
3. 3. Social anxiety: Self-conscious patterns of thought often lead people to experience a great deal of social anxiety. They might have an especially hard time being around strangers, coworkers, and acquaintances. In extreme cases, their fear of rejection might even lead them to withdraw from their closest friends and loved ones.

Even if you’re self-conscious now, you can take steps to build your confidence and become more comfortable in social situations. Here are a few tips you can incorporate into your life:

• Be kind to yourself. To overcome self-consciousness, turn your feelings of self-loathing into self-love. Rather than engage in self-criticism, work on reciting positive affirmations to yourself. Focus on your strengths and what you have to offer the world. Realize that even perceived weaknesses can become strengths when you utilize them well. It might feel unnatural at first, but self-acceptance can prove to be just as much of a learned behavior as self-consciousness.
• Get outside your comfort zone. In the course of your daily life, try to put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable. Start small and work your way up from there as you begin to step out of your comfort zone. Remind yourself there’s a first time for everything. As you experience self-conscious emotions in these scenarios, you’ll slowly begin to realize they aren’t as bad as you worried they’d be.
• Meet with a therapist. Reach out to a licensed therapist to work through how your feelings of self-consciousness developed in the first place. These trained professionals can help you unpack why you feel anxiety in social situations or why your own thoughts can often work against you. They’ll also help you build up your sense of self-worth, leading to an improved state of well-being.
• Practice mindfulness. If self-consciousness is a fixation on negative thoughts, mindfulness is the process of letting these thoughts go. When you practice mindfulness meditation in your everyday life, you start to realize your self-conscious thoughts are like storm clouds passing through the sky. The same goes for your emotions. If you let these thoughts and feelings pass through you rather than latch on to them, you’ll begin to view yourself with more objectivity, equanimity, and compassion.
• Reframe your thoughts. Your inner critic will make you believe everyone thinks you’re awful and knows every bad thing you’ve ever done. This is an example of the spotlight effect—the belief everyone in a room focuses on you. In reality, many people are probably just as self-conscious as you and are worrying over what you think about them. As you reframe your negative thoughts in a positive way, you’ll bolster your sense of self-worth.

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