 Hey, Psych2Goers, and welcome back to our channel. Thank you all so much for the love that you've given us. Your ongoing support has helped us make psychology and mental health more accessible to everyone. Now, let's begin. We all have moments of insecurity, whether it stems from a sudden rejection or in the midst of difficult circumstances. But if your personal insecurities routinely get the best of you, this takes a toll on your emotional and physical well-being in the long run. Your insecurities can keep you from romantic relationships, important job opportunities, and lower your self-esteem, and aggravate your anxiety. Here are seven signs that you might be insecure about yourself. Number one, you reach for a sense of unhealthy perfectionism. You have an ingrained need for perfectionism in all that you do. Does this leave you feeling drained, unmotivated, and exhausted? This could be because you have a sense of perfectionism that seeks fulfillment or approval from others. Unhealthy perfectionism is caused by internal pressures like the shoulds and musts that run through your mind, causing you to be overly critical, procrastinate, and develop a fear of failure and low self-esteem. Perfectionism causes you to set unrealistic expectations for yourself, leading to more internal frustration. Social media does not make this burden any easier to bear. With social media, we are also now exposed to social comparison and feel pressured to lead Instagram-worthy lives. Two, you are over-competitive. Even someone who seems flawlessly confident in their abilities can actually be insecure. Are you always impulsively one-upping others? Do you feel superior to others when you do well, but distraught and ashamed when you don't? Your self-esteem could be tied to how others perceive you and your achievements. Displaying overly competitive behavior may be due to a competitive environment, fragile self-esteem, narcissism or sociopathy, or a scarce resource model. All these reasons point to an attempt to protect a superiority complex. Alfred Alder, a V&E's psychoanalyst, believed that external and internal factors need to be taken into account to understand a person's psychology. He looked towards early childhood as a source of these behaviors. Alder states that throughout infancy, a child feels inferior and looks towards a parent to feel secure and protected. When a parent ignores their child's physical or emotional needs, that is when a complex develops and the child grows up feeling the need to compensate for their unmet needs. Three, you're a people-pleaser. People-pleasers are motivated by a strong desire for approval, an external validation and maybe insecure in their relationships. This insecurity makes you conform to other people's opinions and expectations, even when you don't want to. You might have a hard time saying no to something you genuinely don't want or like if it goes against the other person. This is because you hope that by agreeing to everything others ask of you, they will like you and accept you. Four, you're a little more detached from others. You act more aloof and aren't entirely comfortable with people you don't know. You struggle to trust others. This could be linked to your attachment style. The theory of attachment was developed by the British psychoanalyst John Bulby and he defines attachment as the lasting psychological connectedness between human beings. In 1987, two psychologists, Hazen and Shaver, applied Bulby's research to attachment in romantic relationships. Based on their studies, adults who have anxious resistant attachment types are more likely to feel insecure in their relationships with others. They often worry that others do not love them or that they will not fit in. Though attachment styles are created during childhood, they can change throughout adulthood. Working with a counselor on your attachment style can be an effective way to alleviate attachment insecurity and help develop secure attachments. Five, you have a loud inner critic. A source of insecurity may be a highly critical inner voice. This inner dialogue is worn out of painful or hurtful early childhood events. Typically, your inner critic becomes louder the closer you get to your goals. It often tells you that you're incapable or insufficient. You react to these thoughts and become physically or emotionally insecure. The best way to combat this voice is by challenging and interrupting these thoughts. Ask yourself, what experiences from your past helped shape these thoughts? Where are they coming from? This will help you separate your self-worth from the negative ideas and allow you to feel self-compassion. Number six, you get offended easily. How do you deal with critical comments? You take everything others say to you to heart? It is normal to take offense when someone insults you. But exploding into a fit of rage may be a sign of insecurity. This insecurity arises when you attribute what is said about you or your actions as a reflection of your self-worth. A weak sense of self-confidence causes you to become inflamed in the face of criticism and eventually push back, especially if the comment strikes a chord of self-doubt. And seven, you might be too self-aware. Though a healthy sense of self-awareness is good, being too self-aware has its downfalls. When you're overly self-aware, you can second-guess yourself and become too self-conscious. Self-consciousness is a type of insecurity in how we perceive ourselves. People who develop internal self-consciousness have high internal awareness because they know themselves too well. They tend to monitor their thoughts and actions. They also have a tendency to focus on more unpleasant and negative sensations. A negative internal awareness can magnify feelings of stress and anxiety. With an external self-consciousness, people tend to monitor their actions based on how others will perceive them. Because of this, they're prone to always follow social norms and avoid risky situations like anything that might cause humiliation or embarrassment. Having high external self-consciousness often lends itself to social anxiety disorder. We all face moments of insecurities when faced with rejection and doubt. What defines the moment is not the insecurity, but rather how we react in the face of it. Let us know if any of this has helped you deal with your insecurities in the comments below. Please like and share this video if it helped you and you think it could help someone else too. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more Psych2Go videos and thank you for watching. We'll see you next time.