How to be comfortable in your own skin?

If you have a habit of thinking what others think of you and you wonder of their judgments and feelings, then this would make you very uncomfortable in your skin unless you do something to prove otherwise.

This habit affects our sense of worthiness and identity of who we are. If you continousely wonder what your friend thinks of you or your spouse or your boss, you go into that mental cycle of: what is he thinking? What did I say and how it affected that person? Was it good enough what I said or if I said it the other way would make it even better? And again and again the cycle keeps going on.

This is what practitioners in the mental wellbeing field call anxiety and co-dependency. When you research it and read about it, you realize this is a habit started many generations ago. Our grandparents, our parents and people around us do it. Some are aware and some aren’t.

To answer the question: How to be comfortable in your own skin, you may first make a decision for yourself. Do you wanna take full responsibility and ownership towards your thoughts and beliefs?

Second is start educating yourself. Read about anxiety, social disorder, co-dependency and the excessive worrying. Find out the stories of other people who faced this and successfully processed it. The more you educate yourself about this topic, the more ownership and personal power you gain over your thoughts and beliefs.

After familiarizing yourself, you would notice an increasing emptiness and gap in your thoughts. You realize your thoughts are for others and they are actually not yours. Then you wonder: What are my thoughts? What do I see in my mental vision? If I stopped pleasing people around me, then what do I do? You would have a sense of loss like you lost your self-identity and you don’t know who you are now. This is normal. Our brains want to attach and when it loses something, it greives and aims to attach to something again.

Lastly, the challenging part is to start crafting your thoughts of yourself as you are without meeting expectations of others. What you want to be doing during your free time? What career you would rather be doing? What behavior you would choose to do? What hobbies you would start doing? How you want to interact with people around you? How would you choose to present yourself? All these questions can help you reshape your thoughts and make you the person you want to be today.

Lastly, there is no full stop or an end to this mental revolution process. It is a lifetime skill where throughout your life you would be reflecting, checking and adjusting. I always remember a recite from the Holy Book of Quran where Allah encourages us to reflect and think deeply about the truth of Quran before we just accept it. This shows the power of reflection and meditation and how our brains have been created with so much natural skills and abilities.