Change the 3 Bad Habits Guaranteed to Corrode Your Confidence

What is more wonderful that feeling confident? You are calm and centered, sure of yourself without being arrogant. You can accomplish your goals and dreams without being hampered by fear and anxiety.

You may be sabotaging your self-confidence without even realizing it, if you are guilty of these three bad habits.

1. Deprive yourself of enough sleep. Research clearly shows that lack of sleep causes that part of your brain that controls your mood and emotion, the amygdala, to be overactive. A stimulated amygdala interprets situations and events with more threat. If you are routinely tired, your world is a much scarier place. This means a lot more unnecessary anxiety simply because you ignore your body’s need for rest.

Don’t work against your brain. It will win every time. And you will believe that you lack confidence instead of just lacking sleep.

Arrange your schedule to get 8 hours of shut-eye most nights. Even if you think you can’t do this, understand the effect it is having on you.

2. Drink lots of caffeine. Being tired causes you to solve that problem with stimulants to get your motor running: coffee, colas, high-octane sodas, like Red Bull and Monster, Inc. Caffeine is a great temporary fix, but it interferes with your brain’s ability to gear down and go to sleep at the appropriate time for you.

You are creating a vicious cycle of stimulating yourself to compensate for your fatigue, which then interferes with your sleep. Round and round you go without even realizing what you are doing.

Watch out for using alcohol and recreational drugs to get to sleep and to medicate your caffeine-induced insomnia and anxiety.

Slowly cut back on all of the caffeine you are consuming. If you cut back too fast you will cause the nasty, awful, severe headache associated with caffeine withdrawal.

3. Be a passive adrenalin junkie. Watch lots of TV, especially the news, which is always bad news. Make sure that the TV you watch jacks up your amygdala with murder and crime shows, disasters and other terrible things that happen to people. You can routinely include slasher and monster movies in the evening.

Video games are excellent sources of stimulation at night to delay your ability to get to sleep. All of these activities stimulate your brain and constantly give you an adrenalin jolt.

Be on your computer for several hours each evening to feed this vicious cycle even more.

All of the self-help you read to develop more confidence will only be moderately effective as long as you continue to jack up your anxiety with sleep deprivation, lots of caffeine and adrenalin.

Now you have the ammunition to turn your life around and change these 3 bad habits. If you are truly going to change and be confident today, you must start with a solid foundation.

Be smart. You can figure out what to do first to increase your level of confidence. Confidence is always a choice, so notice what you are choosing today – confidence or anxiety.

Confidence Tip: EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique is a very effective method for quickly changing mental patterns that sabotage your confidence.