You’re standing in your closet at 7 AM, holding two perfectly acceptable outfits, paralyzed by indecision. You text your best friend a photo of both options with “Which one?” even though you already know which one you prefer. Twenty minutes later, you’re still waiting for her response while mentally cycling through every possible reaction your coworkers might have to your clothing choices. You’re not making a life-altering decision—you’re choosing what to wear to work—yet your brain is acting like the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
Or maybe it’s at the restaurant when the server asks for your order. You’ve read the menu three times, settled on something that sounds delicious, but then you hear what the person next to you is ordering and suddenly you’re second-guessing everything. “Actually, can I have what she’s having instead?” you find yourself saying, even though you weren’t particularly interested in that dish five seconds ago.
Perhaps it’s the bigger decisions where your self-doubt really shows up. You’ve been considering a career change for months—you’ve done the research, you have the qualifications, you know deep down it’s the right move—but every time you sit down to update your resume or reach out to contacts, that familiar voice starts whispering: “What if you’re wrong? What if you can’t handle it? What if everyone else sees something you don’t?”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that research supports: most of us don’t trust ourselves as much as we think we do. We’ve become so accustomed to seeking external validation, comparing our choices to others’, and overthinking every decision that we’ve lost touch with our own internal guidance system. A striking recent study found that people with more compulsive and intrusive thinking symptoms generally reported higher confidence, but had a less accurate self-assessment, suggesting that many of us confuse anxiety-driven overthinking with thoughtful decision-making.
The cost of not trusting yourself goes far beyond daily inconveniences. When you consistently doubt your judgment, you miss opportunities, stay stuck in situations that don’t serve you, and gradually erode your sense of personal agency. You become dependent on others’ opinions to feel confident in your choices, which creates a cycle where you trust yourself even less because you’re not practicing using your own judgment.
Understanding Self-Trust: More Than Just Confidence
Before we explore the signs of insufficient self-trust, it’s crucial to understand what we’re really talking about. Self-trust isn’t the same as confidence, though they’re related. Confidence is believing you can do something well; self-trust is believing that your judgment, values, and internal compass are reliable guides for your decisions.
Research from the University of California, Davis shows that high self-esteem can have a positive influence in many areas of people’s lives, but self-trust goes deeper than self-esteem. It’s the foundational belief that you can rely on yourself to make decisions that align with your values, to handle whatever consequences arise from those decisions, and to learn and adjust when things don’t go as planned.
Self-trust develops through experience—specifically, through the experience of making decisions and surviving the outcomes, both positive and negative. When we consistently seek external validation or avoid making choices altogether, we deprive ourselves of the very experiences that would build this trust. It’s like trying to build muscle strength without ever lifting weights.
Imposter syndrome is defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud in every situation, and while not everyone experiences full-blown imposter syndrome, many of us experience its milder cousin: chronic self-doubt that makes us question our judgment and seek constant reassurance from others.
The challenge is that our culture often reinforces external validation over internal trust. Social media gives us constant feedback on our choices, we have access to endless information about the “right” way to do everything, and we’re surrounded by expert opinions on every topic imaginable. While information can be helpful, it can also become a substitute for trusting our own judgment, especially when we use it to avoid making decisions rather than to inform them.
8 Clues You’re Not Trusting Yourself Enough
1. You Seek Multiple Opinions Before Making Simple Decisions
There’s a difference between gathering information and seeking validation. When you find yourself asking several people what they think about decisions that don’t significantly impact anyone else—what to wear, where to go for lunch, which movie to watch—you might be outsourcing your judgment unnecessarily.
This pattern often starts with bigger decisions where seeking input makes sense, but gradually extends to choices where your own preference should be sufficient. You might find yourself taking photos of potential purchases to send to friends, asking for opinions about haircuts, or checking with others before making social plans that only affect you.
The deeper issue here isn’t that you value others’ opinions—it’s that you’ve stopped trusting that your own preferences are valid. You’ve become so accustomed to external confirmation that making decisions based solely on your own judgment feels risky or selfish. But here’s what research tells us: people who trust their own judgment and make decisions based on their values tend to feel more satisfied with their choices, even when those choices don’t turn out perfectly.
Pay attention to the decisions where you automatically seek input. Are you genuinely looking for information you don’t have, or are you looking for someone else to validate what you already know you want? There’s nothing wrong with occasionally asking for opinions, but when it becomes your default approach to decision-making, you’re training yourself not to trust your own judgment.
2. You Change Your Mind Based on Others’ Reactions
You walk into a meeting confident about your idea, but when you see a few furrowed brows or neutral expressions, you immediately start backtracking. “Actually, maybe that won’t work,” you hear yourself saying, even though nothing about your idea has actually changed—only your perception of how others received it.
This pattern shows up in countless ways throughout daily life. You’re excited about a vacation destination until someone mentions they didn’t love it there. You feel good about a decision until a family member expresses concern, and suddenly you’re questioning everything. You share an opinion that feels true to you, but when others disagree, you find yourself adopting their perspective instead of staying grounded in your own.
The challenge with this pattern is that other people’s reactions are based on their experiences, values, and perspectives—not yours. When you change your mind based on their responses, you’re essentially deciding that their judgment is more reliable than your own. Over time, this erodes your confidence in your ability to assess situations and make good choices.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore feedback or never change your mind when presented with new information. The key difference is whether you’re changing your mind because you’ve genuinely reconsidered based on new data, or because you’re afraid your original judgment was wrong simply because others reacted differently than you expected.
3. You Overthink Simple Decisions But Avoid Big Ones
Paradoxically, people who don’t trust themselves often spend enormous mental energy on small decisions while procrastinating on larger ones. You might spend an hour researching the best brand of paper towels to buy but avoid thinking about whether you’re happy in your job. You’ll debate for days about which streaming service to subscribe to but put off difficult conversations in your relationship.
This pattern makes sense when you understand it as a way of maintaining the illusion of control. Small decisions feel manageable—you can research them thoroughly, get opinions from others, and make the “right” choice. Big decisions feel overwhelming because they involve uncertainty, potential consequences, and the possibility of being wrong about something that actually matters.
But here’s the truth: over-researching small decisions doesn’t build trust in your judgment—it actually reinforces the belief that you can’t be trusted to make good choices without extensive external input. Meanwhile, avoiding big decisions means you’re letting life happen to you rather than actively creating the experience you want.
The most trusted decision-makers aren’t people who never make mistakes; they’re people who trust themselves to handle whatever outcomes arise from their choices. They understand that perfectionism in decision-making is both impossible and counterproductive.
4. You Interpret Your Emotions as Evidence You’re Wrong
When you feel nervous about a decision, do you automatically assume that means it’s a bad choice? When you feel excited about an opportunity, do you worry that you’re being naive? Many people who struggle with self-trust have learned to interpret their emotions as warning signals rather than useful information.
This often develops from experiences where emotions led to poor outcomes, or from messages that emotions are unreliable or dangerous. But emotions contain important data about your values, needs, and responses to situations. When you consistently dismiss or distrust your emotional responses, you’re cutting yourself off from valuable information about what matters to you.
The key is learning to distinguish between emotions that signal genuine concerns and emotions that reflect anxiety, past experiences, or external pressure. Nervousness before a job interview doesn’t necessarily mean the job is wrong for you—it might mean you care about doing well. Excitement about a new relationship doesn’t automatically mean you’re ignoring red flags—it might mean you’ve found something genuinely good.
People who trust themselves have learned to be curious about their emotions rather than afraid of them. They ask questions like “What is this feeling trying to tell me?” rather than “Should I trust this feeling?” They use emotions as one source of information among many, rather than either dismissing them completely or letting them make all the decisions.
5. You Need Constant Reassurance That You’re Doing Things “Right”
There’s a difference between occasionally checking in with trusted people and needing constant confirmation that you’re making acceptable choices. If you find yourself frequently asking questions like “Do you think I did the right thing?” or “Was I too harsh?” or “Should I have handled that differently?” you might be outsourcing your moral and emotional compass to others.
This pattern often develops in families or relationships where approval was conditional or unpredictable, leading you to become hypervigilant about whether your choices are “correct” according to external standards. The problem is that there rarely is a universally “right” way to handle most situations—there are just different approaches with different trade-offs.
When you need constant reassurance about your choices, you’re essentially saying that others are better judges of your life than you are. This might feel safer in the short term because it spreads the responsibility for your decisions to other people, but it ultimately leaves you feeling anxious and uncertain because you never get to practice trusting your own judgment.
The most emotionally mature people make decisions based on their values and handle the consequences without needing others to validate that their approach was “right.” They understand that different people might make different choices in the same situation, and that doesn’t automatically make anyone’s choice wrong.
6. You Apologize for Your Preferences and Needs
“Sorry, I know this is probably weird, but I actually prefer to meet earlier in the day.” “I hope this isn’t too much trouble, but could we do something quieter instead?” “I feel bad asking, but would it be okay if we changed the restaurant?”
If your preferences come with apologies attached, you might be struggling to trust that your needs and wants are as valid as everyone else’s. This pattern suggests that somewhere along the way, you learned that having different preferences was inconvenient, selfish, or wrong.
The truth is that your preferences are data about who you are and what works for you. They’re not arbitrary or unreasonable just because they’re different from what others want. When you apologize for them, you’re sending the message—to yourself and others—that your needs are less important or that you don’t trust yourself to know what you actually want.
This shows up not just in social situations, but in bigger life choices too. People who don’t trust themselves often feel guilty for wanting things that others don’t understand or approve of—a different career path, a lifestyle change, relationship choices, or ways of spending time that don’t match external expectations.
Learning to trust yourself includes trusting that your preferences matter and that you don’t need to justify them to anyone else. This doesn’t mean being demanding or inconsiderate, but it does mean presenting your needs and wants as valid parts of any discussion about shared decisions.
7. You Stay in Situations That Feel Wrong Because You Can’t Prove They’re Bad
This might be the most costly clue of insufficient self-trust. You stay in jobs that drain you because you can’t articulate exactly what’s wrong with them. You maintain friendships that consistently leave you feeling bad about yourself because the person isn’t technically doing anything “wrong.” You remain in living situations, romantic relationships, or commitments that feel off because you can’t point to concrete evidence that justifies leaving.
The pattern here is believing that your internal sense that something isn’t working for you needs to be validated by external evidence before it’s trustworthy. You think you need to be able to explain to others—or to yourself—why something is objectively bad before you’re allowed to change it.
But sometimes situations are wrong for you not because they’re inherently problematic, but because they don’t align with your values, energy, or life direction. Your internal compass—that sense of rightness or wrongness—is actually sophisticated information about compatibility and alignment. When you consistently override it because you can’t “prove” your case, you’re training yourself to ignore valuable guidance.
People who trust themselves understand that “this doesn’t feel right for me” is sufficient reason to make changes, even when they can’t fully explain their reasoning to others. They’ve learned that staying in situations that consistently feel wrong is more damaging than the temporary discomfort of making changes based on internal guidance rather than external validation.
8. You Assume Others Know Things You Don’t
In meetings, you stay quiet even when you have valuable insights because you assume everyone else knows something you don’t. In social situations, you go along with plans you’re not excited about because others seem confident about them. When facing challenges, your first instinct is to find someone else who has dealt with something similar rather than trusting yourself to figure it out.
This pattern reflects a fundamental assumption that others have access to information, wisdom, or capabilities that you lack. While it’s true that other people have different knowledge and experiences, the assumption that they’re generally more qualified to make decisions about your life is where self-trust breaks down.
The reality is that most people are figuring things out as they go, just like you are. The difference is that some people trust themselves to navigate uncertainty, while others assume uncertainty means they’re not qualified to proceed. Research shows that nearly seven out of 10 people grapple with impostor syndrome, which means most people sometimes feel like they don’t know what they’re doing—they’ve just learned to move forward anyway.
When you automatically assume others know things you don’t, you miss opportunities to contribute, to learn through trial and error, and to discover that you’re more capable than you realized. You also put yourself in a perpetually one-down position where others are the experts and you’re the student, even in situations where your perspective and judgment are just as valid as anyone else’s.
When Self-Trust Gets Complicated
It’s important to acknowledge that trusting yourself isn’t always straightforward, especially if you’ve had experiences that genuinely damaged your confidence in your own judgment. If you’ve made decisions that had serious negative consequences, if you’ve struggled with addiction or mental health challenges that affected your decision-making, or if you grew up in environments where your judgment was consistently undermined, rebuilding self-trust requires patience and often professional support.
There’s also a difference between healthy self-trust and what psychologists call “overconfidence bias.” The goal isn’t to trust your first instinct about everything or to ignore valuable input from others. Healthy self-trust involves being able to gather information, consider different perspectives, and then make decisions based on your own assessment of what’s best for your situation.
Sometimes what looks like insufficient self-trust is actually good judgment. If you’re in an abusive relationship, your hesitation to trust your impulse to leave might reflect realistic concerns about safety rather than self-doubt. If you’re dealing with mental health challenges that affect your perception, seeking external input might be wise. The key is learning to distinguish between situations where your hesitation reflects genuine uncertainty and situations where it reflects habitual self-doubt.
Cultural factors also play a role. Some cultures emphasize collective decision-making and community input over individual choice, and what looks like lack of self-trust might actually reflect healthy interdependence. The question isn’t whether you should make all decisions independently, but whether you have access to your own judgment as one important source of information in your decision-making process.
Rebuilding Trust in Yourself
The encouraging news is that self-trust can be rebuilt and strengthened at any age. Like any skill, it develops through practice—specifically, through making decisions and learning from the outcomes. Here are research-backed approaches for developing stronger self-trust:
Start with decisions where the stakes are genuinely low. Practice choosing what to have for lunch based on what sounds good to you, rather than what sounds healthy or what others are having. Pick movies based on your interests rather than reviews. Choose routes to familiar destinations based on your preferences rather than GPS recommendations. These small acts of trusting your judgment build evidence that you can make reasonable decisions independently.
Pay attention to your decision-making process. Notice when you’re seeking information versus seeking validation. Ask yourself: “Am I looking for data that will help me make a better decision, or am I looking for someone else to tell me what to do?” Learn to recognize the difference between gathering input and avoiding responsibility for your choices.
Practice sitting with uncertainty without immediately seeking external reassurance. When you feel unsure about a decision, try tolerating that uncertainty for a specific period—maybe an hour, maybe a day—before asking for opinions. Often, clarity emerges when you give yourself space to think without immediately reaching for external input.
Develop a practice of checking in with yourself before checking with others. Before making decisions, pause and ask: “What feels right to me here? What are my values telling me? What outcome am I hoping for?” This doesn’t mean you can’t seek input from others, but it means you start by accessing your own judgment rather than starting with external sources.
Keep track of decisions where you trusted your judgment and things turned out well. Many people who struggle with self-trust have a cognitive bias where they remember their mistakes vividly but forget their successes. Actively noticing when your judgment proves reliable helps build evidence for your competence.
Learn to separate your decision-making process from the outcomes. You can make a thoughtful decision based on the best information available and still have things turn out differently than you hoped. This doesn’t mean your judgment was wrong—it means life involves uncertainty and variables you can’t control. People who trust themselves understand this distinction.
The Ripple Effects of Self-Trust
When you develop genuine trust in your own judgment, the changes extend far beyond making decisions more easily. Research suggests that people with stronger self-trust experience less anxiety around choices, maintain better boundaries in relationships, and feel more authentic in how they present themselves to the world.
In relationships, self-trust allows you to be more genuinely yourself rather than constantly adjusting based on others’ reactions. You can receive feedback without immediately assuming it means you’re wrong, and you can disagree with people you care about without feeling like you’re betraying the relationship.
In work situations, self-trust enables you to contribute your ideas confidently, advocate for yourself appropriately, and make decisions without needing consensus from everyone around you. You become someone others can rely on because you’re willing to take responsibility for outcomes rather than avoiding decisions until someone else makes them.
In parenting, modeling self-trust teaches your children that they can rely on their own judgment while still being open to learning from others. Children learn more from what they observe than from what they’re told, and when they see you trusting yourself appropriately, they develop confidence in their own decision-making abilities.
Moving Forward with Self-Compassion
Recognizing that you don’t trust yourself enough isn’t a reason for self-criticism—it’s information that can guide your growth. Many people develop patterns of self-doubt for understandable reasons: childhood experiences where their judgment was dismissed, relationships where their preferences were consistently overruled, or situations where trusting themselves led to difficult consequences.
The goal isn’t to become someone who never seeks input or considers others’ perspectives. Healthy self-trust includes knowing when you need more information, when others’ expertise is valuable, and when collaboration leads to better outcomes than solo decision-making. The difference is that you’re choosing to seek input from a place of strength rather than from a place of doubt about your own capabilities.
Building self-trust is a gradual process that requires patience with yourself. You might find that you trust your judgment easily in some areas of life but struggle in others. You might have days where self-trust feels natural and days where every decision feels overwhelming. This variability is normal and doesn’t mean you’re not making progress.
Remember that trusting yourself doesn’t guarantee that all your decisions will turn out perfectly. It means believing that you can handle whatever outcomes arise, learn from experiences that don’t go as planned, and adjust your approach based on new information. It means viewing yourself as a competent adult who can navigate life’s complexities, even when you don’t have all the answers.
The most self-trusting people aren’t those who never doubt themselves—they’re those who can acknowledge uncertainty while still moving forward based on their best judgment. They’ve learned that waiting for complete certainty often means waiting forever, and that the confidence they seek comes from taking action, not from having all the answers before they begin.
Your judgment has gotten you this far in life. While it may not be perfect, it’s more reliable than you think. The path to trusting yourself more isn’t about becoming infallible—it’s about recognizing that you’re capable of making reasonable decisions, learning from outcomes, and adapting as you go. That’s not just enough—it’s exactly what being human requires.
Which of these patterns do you recognize in yourself? Have you noticed areas where you trust yourself easily and others where self-doubt takes over? Share your experiences in the comments below—sometimes just knowing we’re not alone in questioning our judgment helps us start trusting ourselves more.
If this post gave you some insights into your relationship with self-trust, please share it with someone who might benefit. We all need reminders that our own judgment is more reliable than we often believe.