11 Insightful Ways to Overcome Feeling Inadequate

When you feel inadequate, as normal as this feeling is, can disrupt the entirety of your life if you don’t find a way to manage and cope with it effectively.

You feel discouraged because you feel like your weaknesses are defining you much more than the best aspects of yourself. In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about feeling inadequate.

What It Means To Feel Inadequate

Inadequacy can come from several places such as your insecurities, fears, and doubts. When you feel inadequate, it means that you’re letting your insecurities be much louder than your strengths.

Your insecurities and doubts feel so loud and overwhelming, that you can’t help but listen to them.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t help feeling that you’re just not good enough, perfect enough, capable enough, or strong enough.

Everything you do doesn’t feel like it’s enough for you, which leads to feelings of hopelessness.

No matter how much energy you put into working on your insecurities and mistakes, you feel like you’ll never meet the expectations of yourself or others around you. Even on your best day, you feel like you could have done more.

What Causes People To Feel Inadequate?

People can feel inadequate for several reasons such as the way you were brought up as a child or a certain trauma that is still currently affecting you.

If you were brought up in a negative environment, this can make you feel extremely inadequate and it’s hard to change your thought pattern when you’ve been so used to negative thinking.

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When you’ve been accustomed to feeling inadequate your entire life even when you did nothing wrong, it’s going to be easy to dwell on your thoughts and feelings of inadequacy every time it comes.

Another reason for feeling inadequate is when you’ve experienced certain trauma in your life and you think you’ll always be worthless or just not good enough.

You find no evidence to believe that your strengths will define you much more than your weaknesses and flaws ever will.

11 Insightful Ways To Overcome Feeling Inadequate

1. Counter your thoughts

At some point, you need to realize that the majority of negative thoughts your mind is feeding you with is lying to you.

No matter how easy it is to believe in the thoughts that remind you that you’ll never be enough, you must have enough strength to fight it.

You are not the reflection of your negative thoughts and what you can do is to counter them towards the positive side of things.

2. Don’t compare

You will never feel adequate enough for yourself and others if you’re always comparing and competing against other people.

There will always be people who are better than you in every way, but you must avoid competing against them.

Not only is this detrimental for your mental health and sanity, but comparing won’t get you anywhere but feel more miserable than you already were. Comparison will steal your joy faster than anything else.

3. Acknowledge your achievements

We all have achievements that we sometimes either forget or fail to acknowledge. by acknowledging the certain achievements you’ve had over the years, you feel more adequate and secure in yourself.

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No matter how minor they seem, no accomplishment or success is too small to recognize.

feel inadequate

4. Stop overthinking everything

We have at least a thousand thoughts every day, and it’s hard to filter which ones to analyze, reflect, and process.

You need to stop overthinking each detail such as whether you submitted the perfect project or you were an adequate friend today.

Overthinking scenarios in your head won’t get you anywhere but to obsess over them further.

5. Talk to someone

If your feelings of inadequacy are getting too overwhelming to bear, talking to someone you trust can help release some of these difficult feelings in your chest.

Talking about your feelings is the best way you can deal with thinking that you’re not enough.

6. Focus on your strengths

Everyone has their flaws and imperfections, but everyone has their strengths as well.

Instead of focusing on everything you lack or are insecure about, you can choose to focus on the strengths that define you instead.

7. Treat yourself with compassion

If you wouldn’t talk to a friend so harshly and negatively, then you shouldn’t be doing the same to yourself.

You need to treat yourself with kindness and compassion because you’re worth giving kindness to – if only you would realize it for yourself.

8. Appreciate the process

If the reason behind your feelings of inadequacy is that you’re not seeing immediate results, then you need to appreciate the process more instead of the gratification of the results.

Achieving success isn’t solely about results, but it’s how you got to that point.

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9. Let go of unrealistic expectations

You should realize by now that it’s not healthy to hold on to unrealistic expectations, whether they’re towards yourself or others.

You will always be disappointed if this is the case because perfection is an unrealistic standard to meet.

10. Choose happiness

A lot of people think happiness is a destination, but it’s something you choose every day.

You choose happiness by choosing yourself and realizing that you’ve always been more than enough.

11. Don’t seek external validation

No matter how hard you try to gain approval from everyone else, there will always be people who disapprove of your choices and actions.

You need to realize that feeling adequate doesn’t come from others but from yourself.

Final Thoughts

I hope this article was able to shed insight into everything you needed to know on feeling inadequate. Just because you feel the way you do, doesn’t mean you can’t do something about this.

No matter the reason behind your inadequacy, you need to choose yourself every day in order to believe you’re enough. Otherwise, you’ll always feel like you’re lacking something significant within yourself, no matter how hard you try.

Rebecca

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