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Key points
- For very natural reasons, many of us feel an anxious, distracting need to prove ourselves worthy through exhausting self-advertising..
- Mindfulness practice is a popular way to get over ourselves so we can get on with life but there may be more efficient direct ways.
- Often the most effective remedy for neediness is flow, upstaging self-consciousness with some all-consuming challenge.
- We can also gain "calmfidence" simply by recognizing how much iffy guesswork life is for all of us humans.
Many of us have chips on our shoulders and holes in our hearts that keep us feeling needy, trying to justify ourselves, even late in life. Symptoms of such neediness include tedious self-reference, relentless self-flattery, and a mindless dependency on what I call “the tuck and duck” strategy: Automatically tucking ourselves under anything that sounds praiseworthy and ducking ourselves out of anything that sounds blameworthy.
It’s easy to understand why we’d be so needy. Humans are an exceptionally anxious species. We’re plagued by many more doubts than other organisms have. Doubt is demoralizing. It erodes confidence. When we’re overwhelmed by doubt, we’re plunged into self-doubt—doubts about whether we have what it takes to deal with the doubts we’re dealt.
A hummingbird has to eat every fifteen minutes. A shark has to keep moving or it will die. Some of us get like that, needing self-affirmation just to keep from drowning in anxiety. If we can’t get enough praise from others, we’ll sing our own praises to anyone who will listen.
Such neediness is painful to experience and distracting to be around. It’s hard to think straight or have a thoughtful conversation when neediness keeps interrupting, like tedious ads interrupting our favorite shows. Exhausting.
How then can we most efficiently overcome such neediness? What’s the fastest way to calm down about ourselves so we can get on with our lives?
How needy we are is a product of many factors—for example, temperament, upbringing, local cultural expectations, personal opportunities, and personal limitations.
One way to think about neediness is as the “aspirational gap”, the gap between who we are and who we aim to be. We can close that gap four ways. By becoming more of who we want to be, by lowering our expectations, or by pretending we’ve done either, for example, pretending we’re closer to our ideal than we are (“a legend in your own mind”) or pretending we’ve given up on being better (“sour grapes”).
Another way to think about neediness is in terms of the depth of the “groove” we’re in. When we’re snuggly held by the tasks expected of us and our ability to meet those expectations, we tend to feel less needy. That’s what’s meant by flow, the state of full absorption that leaves little time for self-consciousness and doubt.
In contrast, when we become dislodged from our groove (perhaps removing ourselves from it because it came to feel like a rut), we are more easily thrown off our center. For example, a newly divorced single or a retiree from a high-status job may feel on edge, unstable, disoriented, groove-less, and needy.
Yet another way to think about neediness is as walking on eggshells to avoid psychological landmines—living in fear of being humiliated, shamed, or ostracized by the people who matter. Neediness can be a response to imposter syndrome, the sense that we don’t really belong and that if we make the wrong move or say the wrong thing we’ll be banished. That is, you can be in a groove that you fear won’t last because you’ll trip on a landmine that will blow you out of it.
One way to deal with that is to identify the landmines and work out a way to maintain your dignity even if you step on one. You ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen, the worst landmine you could step on. You then prepare a dignified story to finesse it and still feel good if you step on it. In other words, you pre-grieve your worst case scenario.
Expanding the pre-grieving approach, one can develop a robust resilience by recognizing how challenging life is for all of us and adopting an ironic attitude toward your life in the context of life in general.
Life is iffy guesswork for us all. We’re all, in effect, driving winding roads in the fog. We’re all at risk of falling off the edge on either side of the winding road. Life is a do-or-die action film; life is a slapstick comedy.
Evolution isn’t romantic. There’s no guarantee of some “happily ever after” free from having to prove ourselves. Still, we can’t help striving to reach such a plateau. Nature affords us no promises, but we can’t help imagining a promised land on beyond wannabe. We’re stuck with the aspirational gap. It’s tragicomic.
If one dips one’s toes into that hot-mess can-of-worms perspective on the human condition and lets it sink in, eventually settling into it, it can bring about what I’ve come to call calmfidence, confidence not born of anxious assertive self-promotion but self-acceptance.
I was so anxious and needy during my first forty years that a close friend once told me he wished I’d screw up royally just once. Then I’d realize that no one is monitoring my performance. They’re too distracted by their own neediness.
I did end up finding a groove that was more interesting than self-obsession, my pursuit of a better understanding of the human condition. My attention shifted from what’s wrong with me to what’s up with us humans. My attention shifted from anxious self-conscious second-guessing to what I call anthro-introspeculation: introspective speculation about what it’s like to be one of us, a mid-sized mammal that only recently acquired language, this newfangled contraption that floods us with all sorts of self-conscious distractions that keep us from just living our lives.
If neediness is the problem, one can practice mindfulness meditation to close the aspirational gap. Perhaps a more efficient practical way to get over oneself is to find a deeper groove, some consuming activity, an employable skill or consuming hobby that turns one’s attention to the wider world so there’s less attention left to focus on proving oneself worthy.
Nothing seems to help us get over ourselves quite so much as upstaging self-reference with something more interesting. It tends to make us more interesting to others too.
