How to Be Yourself

Our current daily lives generally consist of absorbing unrealistic expectations from media for what we should look like, how our romantic relationships should be, and even what we should be doing between the sheets with our sexual partners.  That's is why our social media profiles are merely presentations of who we think we should be and not reflections of who we really are. We’re simply just trying to fit in with the status-quo, be liked, and be accepted by other people, thinking that no one would possibly like us for who we really are as such.Do you think any way we can get past all these and learn how to just be ourselves? 

Our personal relationships are so important to us that doing anything which could threaten those relationships can feel extra scary and unpredictable. Some of us might already feel lonely and disconnected hence why on earth would we want to be ourselves if that might drive people away?

Revealing our true selves can feel like a huge risk now that we live in a world where everyone is presenting themselves as perfect, attractive, and happy online. And what if we don’t associate with of these things or people? Then will being ourselves scare people away? Will everybody just immediately abandon us?

Being yourself can feel very risky, and it really is. There may be people in your life who have fully bought into the idea that being a certain way and presenting a certain image is all that matters in this world after all. If you start showing your true self, these people may indeed treat you differently, and that’s a bad risk to take. But if you have to hide who you really are to be around these people, then you can end up feeling lost, lonely, or even worthless in the end, because you are basically telling yourself that who you really are isn’t alright. Besides, other people don’t ever get to know who you really are, so you don’t feel as strongly connected to them either. So rather than letting fear drive our self-expression, we need to learn how to accept ourselves, so we can truly be who we are. Here's what you can do: 

1. Accept yourself for who you are.

Social media can make us feel unattractive. beautiful models and actors are attractive, of course, but now even our friends who are on social media have photo-shopped their pictures to perfection, often making us feel unattractive in comparison.

Strong evidence shows that the more media we consume with attractive people in it, the worse we feel about ourselves. But because we don’t want to give up our addiction to media — an addiction that provides us with companionship, entertainment, and so many good memories and moments — we don’t quit it at all. It subconsciously tells us that we’re not good enough so many times that we start to believe it’s true. We have been made to believe media wouldn’t lie to us for a long time. Ironically, it mostly does.

2. Control negative self-talk.

Another way we can better accept ourselves is to identify and challenge our negative self-talk using self control intuition. Every always has these inner monologues chirping away at us, interpreting the events happening all around us. For many of us, this self-talk is mostly negative and self destructive. For example, we might think, "My life sucks," when we watch TV shows or look at our social media of others who portray to be living lavishly. 

3. Appreciate your strengths.

When we get down on ourselves for the things we’re not good at, it’s going to be difficult to like ourselves as much as we should. Hence, besides to trying to improve our weaknesses, we have to remind ourselves regularly of what we are good at. If we think about our many strengths, even if these strengths seem small and insignificant, it helps our mental strength and tenacity against manipulative tendencies of others. By identifying them we realize, hey, our weird, one-of-a-kind self is pretty awesome and amazing after all.

4. Express yourself without fear or favor.

Mostly, fear of what other people might think about us if we showed our true selves stops us from expressing our original thoughts and opinions, thus making us pretentious. For instance, maybe our friends all have the same opinion about a political topic, so we decide not to share our different point of view. Maybe our friends like a particular genre of music, and so we decide not to talk about the kinds of music we like. Or maybe our friends enjoy dining at fancy restaurants, so we decide not to invite them to our house for the cozy dinner we'd really prefer. We hold back, because we are afraid of the possible consequences — consequences like them thinking we're weird or ditching us.

Are you really yourself?

So how do we know whether our expressions have become presentations for an audience rather than creative expressions of who we really are? Well, we might start to wonder: Who is that person we pretend to be on social media — the one with the perfect clothes, photo-shopped body, with the biggest smile you’ve ever seen? Or we might start to notice that we post pictures online not to show to others, but to make others think something specific about us. We’ll have to start paying attention to whether we are acting in order to be ourselves, or whether we are putting on a show.