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6 Pieces of Advice to Boost Your Self-Confidence

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Self-confidence is defined as a person’s ability to trust and believe in their personality traits, talents, skills, and perspective on life. It has a remarkable effect on everything in your life, from giving a speech to making a proposal. It also influences your mental health. When you have a solid sense of self-confidence during your life, you can be more hopeful, strong, glad and energetic. Furthermore, to be more successful in your social or professional life, and be healthy mentally, you should trust and believe in yourself at a healthy level.

By your own effort, you can start to feel more self-confident. Thinking more positively, living a more active lifestyle, and having a realistic perspective are beneficial. Here are 6 pieces of advice to boost your self-confidence.

Understand Your Unique Strengths

Some traits that make you unique are your talents, abilities, traits or skills. You have abilities, traits, talents or skills that not everyone has. You can spend time understanding your unique strengths. When you do things you are good at, your self-confidence and energy levels increase.

boost self-confidence

Asking people close to you what they think you are good at can be beneficial for understanding your unique strengths. At the same time, they can observe what makes you energetic, happy, and self-confident. Ask those people to answer these questions:

– What do you think I am uniquely good at?

– In what areas do I inspire you?

You can list answers. Then, you can ask yourself the questions below to determine your unique strengths.

– In which subjects do people ask my opinion and advice?

– In which areas have you achieved success in the past?

You can also list those answers. They help you to understand your unique talents, abilities, traits, or skills.

Use Your Past as a Self-Confidence Guide

Your past failures supply you lessons you can use to improve yourself. You can analyze right and wrong decisions, your feelings, and you can deduce how your self-confidence is affected by your failures. 

Secondly, think of a time when you succeeded at something. During the process, what did you feel and think? Were you always sure of what you would achieve? Most probably, no. However, this success has contributed to being more self-confident. Lessons taken from past achievements can be used in the future to make better decisions.

self-confidence

Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

One of the surest ways to reduce your self-confidence is by comparing yourself to others. Focusing on features, skills and abilities that you do not have would cause to focus on only inadequacies. How can you feel self-confident this way? Why would you compare yourself to others based on attributes you do not have?

Thinking that others are better and superior would erode your confidence. Life is not a competition. Everyone tries to achieve their own aims through their own mental, social, and academic capacity.

Take Care of Your Body

Do you like yourself when you look at the mirror? If your answer is no, you may have difficulty feeling good about yourself and trusting in yourself. Developing a healthy sleep routine, having a balanced diet, being physically active and being confident in your appearance has a positive impact on your well being overall. First, having a healthy sleep routine helps you to live with energy. Having a balanced diet can help keep you at a healthy weight.

boost your self-confidence

Being physically active is important for increasing energy. Finally, try switching up your style.  Wear clothes that make you feel good about yourself, establish a self care routine, or play with a different hairstyle or color.  Do things that give you confidence and give you that extra spring in your step.  That extra boost in your confidence will make you shine!

Use Self-Affirmations

Your thoughts affect your feelings, and your thoughts and feelings affect your behaviors.

Thoughts that you have about yourself determine whether you are self-confident or not. To affect yourself in a positive way, you can use affirmations. When affirmations are repeated again and again, you begin to accept them as truths over time. Self-affirmations are sentences such as “I deserve” or “I can succeed”. When you repeat such sentences, you start to believe in yourself. That self confidence shapes your attitudes and behaviors.

Look for Social Support

In those times that you need to feel more self-confident, encouragement and realistic compliments from friends and family are beneficial. Phrases that motivate you and encourage you to look on the bright side will change your self-perception and perspective on life positively. The main thing is that those sentences must represent reality. This social support reduces your stress level and feelings of loneliness.

When you do not feel self-confident, you tend to analyze circumstances in a negative way. However, thanks to social support, you can start to evaluate conditions through a realistic perspective.

6 Ways to Build Your Emotional Skills in Stressful Times

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In today’s world, many factors may cause you to feel stressed. Traffic, long meetings at the workplace, financial problems, pandemic illnesses (like COVID-19), or losing a loved one are frequent factors nowadays for challenging situations. How do you respond to those stressful times? How do you make important decisions under pressure? What kind of activities do you choose to manage your emotions? Do you care about emotions more, and ignore objectivity? Of course, it’s challenging to make reasonable and logical decisions when your feelings are intense. However, because that stress affects your decision process, the consequences of those challenging experiences may affect your business, social, and mental life negatively and permanently.

Stress management provides you to show your difference everywhere. Many life experiences, like employment interviews, social relationships, health problems, family life, financial status, and more, require you to handle negative emotions. To make decisions that you do not regret, and to motivate yourself and others, you need to manage your stress by developing emotional intelligence.

Here are six activities for building emotional skills and managing your stress.

Related: Negativity Harms Your Body, Your Mind, and Unfortunately, Your Life

1. Define Your Emotions

A person has a lifelong journey to get to know themselves and develop emotional intelligence, which helps to manage feelings in challenging situations.  This person will have more resiliency when they experience difficulties, like depression or burnout. However, being resilient does not mean being on either extreme of the spectrum (being overly emotional or emotionless). The point is to recognize your emotions, how they make you feel, how you act when experiencing them, etc.  This will help you build your basis for learning how to self-regulate these emotions and develop ways to cope with feelings like anger, hate, depression, or unhappiness.

2. Recognize What Causes Your Stress

It is normal to be stressed in challenging situations. But which situations cause you stress? To define your emotions and constructive responses for those emotions, it is important to determine situations that cause stress for you. You may be stressed in those situations again and again. However, when you know those specific conditions, you can plan activities for building emotional skills before you encounter those situations. For example, you can choose to be alone, you can listen to a specific song, or you can talk with somebody that helps you to de-stress.

emotional skills

3. Try to Look from Different Viewpoints

Think about a moment that is stressful for you. You may generally think about those situations from your own perspective. When you continue to justify yourself by noticing your own emotions and thinking, you may continue to be stressed. Fortunately, there is a trick for countering this! Try to see things from another person’s perspective! Why did a person act or feel a certain way? Think about the person’s past experiences. When you continue to approach people and situations like this, you might decrease conflicts and judgments.

4. Perfection is Harmful

Thinking that everything must be perfect harms building emotional skills. Thinking that things should be always complete, perfect, and successful is annoying and stressful for you. Life is never perfect, so your products, emotions, and thinking are not going to be perfect every time. Letting go of the expectation of perfection will help you feel more productive, creative, and less stressed.

5. Take the Lessons from Your Mistakes

One of the most important activities for building emotional skills is taking lessons from past failures. Mistakes sometimes inflict pain, make people feel that they are insufficient or unsuccessful. However, successful and logical people analyze the reasons and the consequences of their mistakes. To avoid making the same mistakes and make reasonable decisions the next time around, you need to figure out why you made the mistake and how you respond to the mistake.


emotional skills

6. Apply the Cognitive Approach

The cognitive-behavioral approach emphasizes awareness of how your feelings and thinking affect your behaviors. Evaluating negative thinking and emotions allows you to manage them. Also, recognizing how feelings and thinking affect your actions allows you to recognize and fix mistakes. 

Think about it. If you say, “I will never pass this university exam”, you might find your motivation to study decreasing. If you don’t study, you probably won’t pass that exam. You have to recognize that your negative self-talk had a detrimental effect on your preparation for the exam. This contributes to feelings of insufficiency. A positive alternative to that sentence would be, “If I keep steady and study, I will pass this exam.” A simple sentence can alter our outlook. 

Need to Calm Yourself? Here Are 7 Ways

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Worries, difficulties, overdosed work-load, issues of the pandemic  or problems with loved ones… These all may make us stressed or worried, or even furious from time to time and it may be difficult to calm yourself.

Here are 7 ways to calm yourself in these situations.

1)   Breathing

Breathing is definitely the most effective way to calm down. What basically breathing does is stimulate our nervous systems. Since there are 2 basic nervous systems being the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems,  breathing has different effects on both systems if used correctly.

breath to calm yourself

Briefly, when we breathe, it stimulates these systems in each cycle.  What inhalation does is that it affects the sympathetic activities like fight or flight responses, while exhalation stimulates the parasympathetic nervous systems that relates with the can also adjust the effect on our nervous system.  There are lots of studies that show that longer exhalations directly affect the ‘rest and digest’ influence of the parasympathetic system. If we breathe diaphragmatically, then these relaxing effects may start to rise up and we immediately start to calm down. Here follows an easy technique: how we can prolong the exhalation to calm down.

2-to-1 ratio: If you are stressed out, find a quiet place and sit nice and tall, inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth 2-3 times. Then start to breathe in a 2 to 1 ratio. What this means is that, for example, inhale for 3 counts, but exhale till 6 by prolonging the exhalation. Or you may use the ratio of 2-4 or 4-8 without forcing the breath. Continue this technique at least 2-3 minutes, then you will immediately feel the relaxation.

2)   Exercising

Exercises like yoga, pilates, walking in nature, running or sometimes boxing may be a perfect way to calm down. It is known that regular exercise not only changes the physical body, but also changes our mental body. Regular practice stimulates and calms the body. Furthermore, there are also verified clinical trials that use exercise to treat anxiety disorders and depression.

excercising

3)   Listening

Listening to podcasts or music may be another option to calm yourself down. There are many studies proving that music around 60 beats per minute stimulates the brain to produce alpha brain waves which release from the brain when the body is relaxed and conscious. So music has a positive effect on calming our bodies down. As slower music is more effective in relieving stress, upbeat music may of course also be effective to calm yourself.

Woman listening to music at home during coronavirus pandemic

4)   Taking a Cold Shower

Cold showers have tons of benefits according to Ayurvedic medicine techniques. The most commonly known effect of taking a cold shower is to reduce symptoms of anxiety.  It is said that taking a cold shower for at least 5 minutes, 2-3 times a week helps to release tension. But it may take a while to build up the ability to have a cold shower, if you’re not used to it.

cold shower

5)   Massage to Calm Yourself

It is known that there are certain points on the body that immediately release tension both in the body and mind when pressure is applied. Although there is still limited research about these acupressure points, there are also promising results when used in stressful situations. Basic points like the third eye area, auricle, shoulders, hands, feet, and the pressure points of the wrists can be used to release tension. Here is a guideline on how and where to press.

Massage to calm yourself

6)   Meditate

It can seem very difficult  or impossible to focus on something when we get stressed out. But a simple and short meditation is a great way to calm yourself. Breathing is the most readily available aspect of ourselves where we can quickly gain focus and control. Focusing on the breath or counting down each breath is a great way to make the mind steady. Focusing on breath may be combined with lengthening the exhalation and this technique definitely affects the brain release alpha brainwaves and helps us to calm down.

Moreover, you do not need to sit in a crossed-leg position to meditate. You may stand up nice and tall or sit upright and also meditate. And start to focus on your breathing or whatever emotion you want to bring awareness to during your meditation session. Whether it takes 2 minutes or 15 minutes, focusing on the breath starts to stimulate the brain and eventually you will feel more calm.

meditate to calm yourself

Related: Meditation For a Good Night Sleep

7)   Get It Out and Write It Down

Writing is a good exercise to calm yourself when you get angry. Expressing the feeling out loud may be hard, but writing them can be more helpful to calm yourself. It is important to note, that ignoring feelings or repressing them may cause more stress in the long term. When you are stressed out, try to write out your feelings, maybe the reasons why you feel that way or etc. Then read them loudly and you will see you feel more relaxed.

writing to calm yourself

Problems People Experience in Achieving Their Wellness Goals

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You’ve probably thought about your health and wellness goals at least once in your life. Since we have been fighting against the COVID-19 virus, your wellness goals may have taken on new meaning for you. We can all see the importance of having a strong immune system and how following a wellness lifestyle is more advantageous. 

Psychology First: Focus On Your Mind

Wellness is a state of complete well-being, both physically and mentally. Your mental health may be even more important than counting calories when it comes to reaching your wellness goals. Strive to be someone who can find the constructive and positive side of negative situations. This mindset can help you turn this period when we are all thinking about our health, into a time when you reach your wellness goals. The first place to start is by being realistic about your goals. Note the thoughts and habits that prevent you from focusing on your wellbeing objectives. We will touch on some of these thoughts in our article and offer you alternative solutions.

Psychology First: Focus On Your Mind Vivoo

A Classic: “I don’t have time.”

According to the Office of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 75% of the population do not consume recommended amounts of vegetables, milk, and fruit. Unfortunately, most Americans consume excessive amounts of sugar, saturated fat, and sodium. Some people believe that healthy cooking takes too much time and they may reach for quick, unhealthy foods instead.

Solution: You don’t need a lot of time to prepare healthy meals. Oven-roasted vegetables have short preparation time and are a fun, alternative way to eat veggies. They will keep your dinner light and help you get your five portions of vegetables a day.  In addition, you can consume fruit as a smoothie or a snack. You can find sample recipes on the internet and try them at home.

The Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest diets in the world, is predominantly vegetable-based

“Healthy eating is too expensive!”

While it’s true that foods such as fresh produce, whole-grain bread, and other healthy food items may be more expensive than junk foods, a 2013 study published in the British Medical Journal found that the difference between the healthiest and poorest diets is only $1.50 per day. (This research was done before the explosion of private labeled versions of healthy foods that can be found in almost any national market chain or large food store.) The Mediterranean diet, one of the healthiest diets in the world, is predominantly vegetable-based and is more budget-friendly in the long run compared to ready-made nutrition. This is before taking into account the possible health problems that may arise due to an unhealthy diet!

Solution: Buy your vegetables when they are in season and choose vegetable protein instead of meat protein for some meals. Make a weekly meal plan so you use all the food you buy without wasting ingredients. Your determination will save your budget and make it easier to achieve your wellness goals!

Problems People Experience in Achieving Their Wellness Goals

“I won’t be able to go out with my family and friends.”

Humans are social creatures, and our social lives are important for good mental health. Trying to persuade your family or friends to join you while pursuing your own wellness goals can have benefits for both parties. On the other hand, if this will put your relationships under pressure, you don’t need to say anything to anyone. Just set your own limits. Deciding how many glasses of wine to drink or choosing healthy meals at your favorite restaurant will allow you to live healthy while still going out.

Solution: Define your own limits and stick to them, even while socializing with family and friends. Explore new restaurants that cater to healthy lifestyles or choose healthy menu options when out with your friends. Another suggestion is to review your relationship with your friend who opposes this or underestimates your wellness goals!

Problems People Experience in Achieving Their Wellness Goals

“Healthy foods are so boring!”

There is more than one way to prepare healthy foods. Maybe you tried something in the past and decided it wasn’t for you. Or maybe you think that healthy foods always have to be consumed in the same way. This is absolutely wrong! We get used to things being a certain way, but we can definitely change things up. Habits can evolve over time, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Give yourself a chance to try new things and adjust your preferences.

Solution: You can increase your consumption of vegetables and fruits by starting slow. Add garnish vegetables to your meat dish. You can also consume fruit as a smoothie or snack. The internet is full of simple and delicious recipes that you can  try at home.

Healthy Breakfast Smoothie to Increase Veggie Intake

Healthy Breakfast Smoothie

For 1 serving

Ingredients

-Ice

-Kiwi

-Strawberry

-1/2 cup milk

-1 cup fresh spinach

Preparation

Add the ice, kiwi, strawberries, milk, and spinach to a blender. Blend on high speed until smooth. Enjoy!

Nutrition Info

Calories 49 Carbs-9 gram Fiber 1 gram Sugar 4 gram Fat 0 gram Protein 1 gram

Sweet Potato Pizza Bites

Sweet Potato Pizza Bites  

For 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 sweet potatoes
  • Olive oil, to taste
  • Salt, to taste
  • Pepper, to taste
  • ½ cup marinara sauce (130 g)
  • ½ cup pesto sauce
  • Fresh basil, for garnish
  • ½ cup shredded mozzarella cheese (50 g)

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Carefully slice the sweet potatoes into ½-inch (1 cm) rounds. Transfer the sweet potato rounds to a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Stir to coat. Transfer the rounds to the baking sheets, spacing evenly. Bake for 30 minutes, flipping halfway, until golden brown. Top the sweet potato rounds with marinara sauce and mozzarella, or pesto and mozzarella. Bake for another 5 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the sauce is warmed through. Garnish with fresh basil and serve. Enjoy!

Nutrition Info

Calories 404-Fat 21g-Carbs 44g-Fiber 6g-Sugar 14g-Protein 10g

Problems People Experience in Achieving Their Wellness Goals

Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good

Advertisements, social media accounts, celebrities… There are perfect bodies everywhere, and we are often disappointed with what we see in the mirror. The bad thing is that perfectionism triggers emotional eating. In a typical emotional eating attack, we may consume a wide range of unhealthy packaged products. Then we regret it, feel worse about ourselves, and eat even more. Soon our weight spirals out of control! Put these thoughts aside and imagine your best version of you. Set a photo of your ideal weight as your phone background. Then look at this photo whenever you are tempted to stray from your wellness path. It is an incredibly effective method.

 

Related: Emotional Eating Is Not the Solution