4 Tiny Habits That Only Make You Feel Inadequate

Do you often feel inadequate, like you’re not good enough or unworthy?

Maybe you never seem to measure up with all your creative and ambitious coworkers.
Or maybe you tend to feel bad about yourself because your spouse is so patient with the kids and you lose your temper so easily.

Whatever inadequacy looks like for you, it’s a painful thing to live with.

But here’s what most people don’t realize about inadequacy:

Whatever caused your inadequacy initially, it’s usually your habits that are maintaining it.

Anything from early life trauma to unhelpful comparisons can cause you to feel inadequate. The question is, why do you keep feeling inadequate?

Here are 4 psychological habits that make you feel inadequate:

1. Your emotional expectations are unrealistic

I think a lot of us know that unrealistic expectations are dangerous, especially for other people:

Expecting that your boss is going to be super supportive and nurturing all the time is a good way to end up frustrated and irritable at work.
Expecting that your spouse will always be compassionate and give you their 100% undivided attention is a good way to end up disappointed and unhappy at home.

Of course, lowering those expectations to a more realistic level (and keeping them there) is still a challenge. But the point is, in most areas of life, we at least understand that we should look out for unreasonable expectations from other people.

But a major source of feeling inadequate and unhappy comes from our expectations of ourselves.

More specifically, our emotional expectations are way too high.

An emotional expectation is an assumption you have about how you should feel emotionally.

Here are a couple of quick examples:

You assume that after criticism from your manager at work, you should be able to “just shake it off” and not be bothered by it anymore. But hours later when you’re still stewing about it and feeling anxious, your expectation gets violated which leads to you feeling angry or guilty with yourself for still feeling bad.
You lose someone important in your life. Maybe it’s the death of a loved one or maybe you get broken up with by a romantic partner. You assume that you should feel sad for a couple weeks but then move on after that and feel happy again — which to you means, not feeling sad anymore about your loss. Well, months go by and you still think about and remember the person you lost, and when you do, you feel sad. But because of your expectation that you shouldn’t feel sad after a couple of weeks, you feel anxious that “something’s wrong with me” because you can’t seem to “let go.”

In both cases, here’s the problem:

When your emotional expectations are unrealistic, you end up feeling bad about feeling bad, which is what makes us feel inadequate.

Your emotions are not something you can control directly. So it makes no sense to hold yourself accountable for how they should operate.

Drop your emotional expectations for yourself and you will start to feel more and more okay with yourself.

“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.”
― Donald Miller

2. You rely on reassurance to feel good

A big part of inadequacy is low self-confidence.

Think about it: It’d be pretty tough to feel inadequate about yourself if you were very confident in yourself, right?

So one way of looking at the causes of feeling inadequate is to ask yourself, What habits in my life lead to losses of confidence?

And while there could be many sources of low self-confidence in your life, a subtle one that people often miss is reassurance-seeking.

Reassurance-seeking is the habit of relying on other people to feel good.

A few examples:

Whenever you feel anxious or worried, you immediately call up a best friend, sibling, or parent hoping for some reassuring words to alleviate your fears.
Anytime you feel indecisive or uncertain, you “check” with a variety of people to make sure it’s not a bad decision before you actually do anything.
When you feel sad and down, you immediately make plans to be around other people and use them as a way to cheer yourself up rather than sitting with your sadness and trying to understand it first.

There are two big problems with reassurance-seeking:

It leads to poor quality relationships and resentment among the people who are closest to you. Despite what they tell you to your face, nobody wants to be relied upon as your primary means of emotional support.
It kills your emotional confidence. Emotional confidence is the ability to sit with and manage your painful emotions rather than immediately trying to avoid them or “fix” them. But when you’re in the habit of always alleviating your painful feelings by having someone else reassure you, you’re effectively teaching your brain that you can’t handle difficult feelings on your own.

Sometimes you feel inadequate because you are inadequate: You don’t know how to handle feeling bad.

And one of the most common sources of genuine inadequacy is that you don’t allow yourself to practice managing difficult feelings on your own. Which means you never get to build emotional confidence.

And if you’re not confident that you can handle your feelings, I mean, why wouldn’t you feel inadequate?

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Photo: SHVETS production/Pexels

3. You dwell on past mistakes

Thought experiment:

Imagine you have to go through life constantly accompanied by a grumpy little leprechaun who’s constantly reminding you of mistakes you made in the past and what a terrible person you are because of those mistakes.
Now imagine how that would feel — day in and day out to be criticized and reminded of your past mistakes.
Even on your best days when things are going well and you’re feeling good and happy and content, all of a sudden the little guy would pipe up and remind you of that tone time you cheated on a test in college. Or that time you cheated on your first wife and your marriage blew up.

Even if you “knew” intellectually that those things were in the past, being constantly reminded of them would make you feel pretty terrible, right?

For a lot of people who feel chronically inadequate, it’s not a thought experiment… that’s their life!

Of course, it’s not a grumpy little leprechaun that’s doing it — they’re doing it to themselves by getting stuck in the habit of rumination or dwelling on past mistakes.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with thinking about your past, including past mistakes. It’s one of the primary ways we avoid making more of the same mistakes is by analyzing what went wrong and making a plan to avoid it in the future.

This is called healthy reflection. And it’s different than unhealthy rumination because of one key variable… it helps!

After you’ve made a mistake, taking some time to reflect on it will probably be helpful. But the law of diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly with reflecting on our mistakes:

Spend a few hours thoughtfully reflecting on a mistake… It’s going to be painful, but you’re probably going to learn a lot, which in turn will increase your odds of not making the same mistake again.
Spend a few hours multiple times per month thinking about a mistake… Well, you might still learn a thing or two, which could be helpful to some degree. But it’s unlike your return on investment for that thinking time is even close to as high as it was for the first few hours. But it’s still going to be just as painful.
Spend a few hours multiple times per week for years thinking about your mistake… At this point, it’s all side-effects (guilt, shame, regret) and no benefit.

The lesson here is pretty straightforward:

Thinking about past mistakes is a good idea if it’s productive and leads to new insights and better behaviors.

Unfortunately, many people get stuck in the habit of ruminating on their past mistakes well past the point where it’s productive, which means they get to feel bad about themselves and inadequate without any compensating upside.

The next time you find yourself dwelling on a past mistake, ask yourself this question: Is continuing to think about this actually helping anyone?

“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.”
― Mel Brooks

4. Your values are unclear

Famous New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra famously said…

If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.