Do you often keep your opinion to yourself, give in, or feel that other people simply count more than you do? In this video, you’ll learn what research says about feeling worth less than others in social anxiety, how this belief about yourself develops, and why repeating positive sentences rarely changes it. You’ll also see why low self-worth is a learned pattern and not a fixed part of who you are.
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Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
You are sitting with a few people, and you have a thought that you would like to share.
You go over it in your head, you decide that it is probably not important enough, and you stay quiet.
Shortly after that, someone else says almost the same thing, and everyone nods.
You have probably told yourself that you are simply a quiet or modest person.
For many years, I believed the same thing about myself, because I just thought that was the way I was.
This feeling has been studied in detail, and it has less to do with your personality than it seems.
Researchers can explain what it is, where it comes from, and why telling yourself that you are good enough so rarely changes it.
This feeling shows up in many small moments during an ordinary day.
You have an opinion in a conversation, and you keep it to yourself before anyone can hear it.
Someone asks where you would like to eat, and you say that you don’t mind, although you know exactly what you would like.
You agree with a colleague in a meeting, although you see the matter differently.
You say yes to a favour, and inside you mean no.
Someone pushes in front of you in a queue, and you let it happen without saying anything.
A colleague presents your idea as their own, and you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter.
Before you ask a question, you apologise for asking it. When someone praises your work, you quickly explain why it wasn’t really that good.
When you walk into a room, you notice almost immediately who seems more confident, more interesting or more successful than you.
Each of these moments looks small, and most people around you would never notice them.
Behind each of these moments is the same feeling, which is the feeling that other people count a little more than you do.
When is this feeling strongest for you? Is it strongest when other people are around you or could judge what you say, write or do, or is it just as strong when you are completely alone?
Your answer to this question matters, because researchers have found a clear pattern in situations with other people.
The best known models of social anxiety describe the same thing at their center.
They describe a negative picture of how you come across to other people, such as the belief that you are inadequate or have less to offer.
Social anxiety means a strong fear of situations in which other people could judge you.
In everyday life, the negative picture from these models sounds like a sentence in your head, such as “Everyone here is more interesting than me” or “What I say doesn’t really count.”
In one study, people with social anxiety kept a record of the comparisons they made with others in daily life.
Compared with people without social anxiety, they more often judged the other person as doing better than themselves.
A later study checked in with people many times over three weeks. The more socially anxious someone was, the less favourable and the less stable their comparisons with others were.
Several studies found that people with social anxiety place themselves lower than others and describe more submissive behaviour, such as giving in or going along with what others want.
In one study, researchers also filmed people in role plays and saw the same pattern in their body language.
In a situation that felt like a competition, men with more social anxiety held their bodies in a more closed posture than men with less social anxiety.
Maybe you have called all of this modesty for a long time, or you have told yourself that this is simply who you are.
What feels like “that’s just how I am” is a pattern that researchers have described many times, in many different people.
Comparing yourself unfavourably, placing yourself lower than others and giving in belong to this pattern, and the pattern has a name.
Surveys organised by the World Health Organization in twenty four countries found that about one in five people who had social anxiety at some point in their life had ever received treatment for it.
That means about four out of every five people who live with this have never received treatment for it.
For a long time, I was one of them. The anxiety had grown so slowly over the years that I never recognised it as social anxiety, and I just thought that was the way I was.
Maybe you have already tried to change this feeling by telling yourself good things about yourself, such as “I am good enough” or “My opinion matters.”
If you have tried that, you may have noticed that the feeling hardly changed.
There is a clear reason for that, and it becomes visible when you look at how this feeling develops.
In my own experience, it starts with a single moment in which you share an opinion and someone laughs at it,
or you suggest an idea and nobody picks it up, or someone tells you, “You don’t understand this.”
In that moment, you feel something, such as embarrassment or shame. Then your mind draws a conclusion about you as a person, for example “What I say is not worth listening to.”
When similar moments happen again and again, that conclusion turns into a belief about yourself.
After a while, this belief shapes how you act, and you no longer notice that it is there.
These moments don’t have to be dramatic. It can be a parent who always finished your sentences for you, or a group of friends in which you were regularly the one who was interrupted.
Quiet moments like these, repeated many times, can be enough to form such a belief.
There is an old Buddhist teaching about two arrows. The first arrow is the painful moment itself. The second arrow is what the mind adds afterwards.
Someone disagrees with you, and that feels unpleasant, which is the first arrow.
Then your mind adds the sentence “Of course they disagree, because my opinion doesn’t count,” which is the second arrow.
A belief about yourself forms through the combination of both arrows. The unpleasant moment on its own passes after a while, and it does not turn into a belief.
It turns into a belief when your mind links the moment to a conclusion about yourself, and when this happens again and again over the years.
A conclusion like this comes with a feeling that researchers call shame.
Shame is the feeling that something is wrong with you as a person, and the sentence “My opinion doesn’t count” is an example of it.
In a study of people with social anxiety, shame was linked to their social anxiety.
When conclusions like this add up over the years, the result is the belief that you count less than other people.
Researchers call this low self-worth, and they have studied how it is connected to anxiety over time.
They combined eighteen studies that followed people over time. Low self-worth predicted more anxiety later on, and anxiety predicted lower self-worth later on.
Both directions were about equally strong, so each one keeps feeding the other.
A common piece of advice is to repeat positive sentences about yourself until you believe them.
A well known study found that people with low self-worth felt worse after repeating the sentence “I am a lovable person.”
Later, larger studies could not repeat that result. What remains is simpler.
Repeating a positive sentence you don’t believe has not been shown to reliably change how you feel about yourself.
The reason lies in how this belief developed. You learned that you count less than other people through many real moments in which you felt embarrassed, overlooked or not taken seriously.
A positive sentence that you repeat to yourself is a thought that is not connected to any of these moments.
That is why such a sentence rarely changes a belief that was learned through real experiences.
Something that was learned from experiences can change.
In the study about shame, the people with social anxiety received cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a form of talking therapy that works with thoughts and behaviour. After the therapy, their shame went down.
Another study found that people with social anxiety reported less self-compassion than people without it.
Self-compassion means treating yourself with the same kindness you would give a friend in a hard moment.
When you keep your opinion to yourself or let someone push in front of you,
you take the wishes of other people more seriously than your own, and you treat yourself as the one person who has to earn a place first.
In my course, there is a sentence that expresses a different attitude toward yourself.
The sentence is “Even though I have this feeling, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
It names the feeling and the acceptance at the same time, and it does not set any condition that you have to meet first.
The work on this pattern can begin at home, with the moments that built it.
When you work through those moments one by one, you prepare yourself so that being with other people can become easier and easier.
There is one more thing I want to say. If this feeling of being worth less follows you everywhere in your life, and not only around other people, it deserves a closer look.
That is especially true if it comes with a low mood that doesn’t lift, losing interest in things you used to enjoy, hopelessness, or thoughts of hurting yourself.
Depression can exist alongside social anxiety, and very painful experiences from the past can need more support than a video or a self-help course can give.
In that case, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional first.
Reaching out for that kind of help is a good first step.
Think back to the situation where you sat with a few people and kept your thought to yourself.
Holding it back was a form of protection that your mind had learned from earlier experiences, and it said nothing about what your thought was worth.
An old Sanskrit mantra, So Ham, means “I am that.” In the tradition it comes from, who you are goes deeper than any role or any ranking.
You can ask yourself whether your worth really depends on how you compare with other people.
The moments that built this pattern are the place where the work begins.
In my video “Working Through Social Anxiety at Home”, I show the method that I used myself, and I explain how you can work through those moments one at a time from home.
The video also answers a question that many people ask themselves when they start this work, which is “If the anxiety is not who I am, then who am I?”
If you want to understand what this work looks like, watch this video here.