How to Stay True to Yourself Amid Societal Pressure

Are you constantly facing societal pressure from friends and acquaintances, but you want to stay true to yourself? We will continually face situations that test our firmness to our core values and ideologies. This is where staying true to yourself really matters.

Staying true to yourself is about acting and thinking in ways that align with your core values and ideologies without compromising them to please other people or fit in. It is the ability to be honest about who you are and what you want out of life, living authentically and genuinely without being easily influenced by fear or favor.

Shakespeare in Hamlet’s dictum “This above all, to thine own self be true” has edged into the importance of staying true to oneself. However, in our postmodern culture where strong emphasis is placed on feeling good as the goal of behavior, we find that staying true to oneself is no simple task.

But given the importance of this form of genuineness and authenticity, it is necessary to explore some practical ways to stay true to yourself amid societal pressure, as you will see in this post.

Benefits of Staying True to Yourself

The benefits of staying true to yourself encompass all aspects of our lives. It keeps us on the path to finding true satisfaction and fulfillment in the things we deeply hold important.

Here are some proven benefits of staying true to yourself.

1. It gives you true happiness

Society teaches us that to feel good, we need at least material wealth, beauty, sex, or education. This is the so-called hedonistic view where people simply want to feel good.^[1]Hallam, W. & Olsson, Craig & Bowes, Glenn & Toumbourou, John. (2006). Being true to oneself. Youth Studies Australia.

The philosopher, Aristotle also proposed that finding happiness and meaning boils down to living an authentic life. This is the so-called eudaimonic view which prioritizes self-fulfilment and self-improvement rather than simply feeling good via any means. This is in keeping with recent research which shows that staying true to yourself is an important pre-requisite to living a life of true peace and happiness.^[2]Gautam S, Jain A, Chaudhary J, Gautam M, Gaur M, Grover S.  (2024). Concept of mental health and mental well-being, its determinants and coping strategies. Indian J Psychiatry. 2024

2. It promotes your mental health

The sense of well-being or “feeling good” affects our mental health in several ways. Mental well-being involves finding self-satisfaction through optimal physical and behavioral health, achieving one’s life’s purpose, participation in enjoyable work and play, pleasant relationships, and contentment. All of these significantly affect one’s mental health.^[3]Ibid. Hallam et al, 2006

Staying true to yourself coincidentally helps you optimize your physical and behavioral health, pursue the things that truly matter to your goals, build pleasant relationships, and participate in activities you enjoy or that make you feel fulfilled.

In the subsequent points, we will see how staying true to yourself helps you achieve some of the above.

3. It ensures optimal physical and behavioral health

Living an authentic life helps you make better choices. By knowing what you want and sticking with who you are, you are not influenced by people to do things that will harm your physical health.

According to a 2012 Harvard University meta-analysis of 200 articles, hopefulness/optimism/positivity correlates with cardiovascular health and may decrease the rate of cardiovascular disease progression. Also, depression was statistically linked to a 50% increase in a person’s risk of dying from cancer and a 67% increase in dying from heart disease. These demonstrate a strong association between mental health and physical health.^[4]How Mental Health Affects Physical Health – Bradley University Online

Behaviorally, staying true to yourself helps you maintain behaviors that align with your personal values and ideologies, such that before you adopt a new behavior, you must first consider its effects on you and your core values.

4. Helps you build meaningful relationships

Being true to yourself helps you form deeper and more honest connections with people. When you live your authentic life, you attract people who share deep connections with you, and you can be sure that they love you for who you are and not for what you claim to be.

Loving and embracing yourself is key to building meaningful and lasting relationships. This has been well-stated in the Old Testament when God commanded the Israelites through Moses to love their neighbors as themselves. You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.^[5]Lev. 19:18. The Holy Bible

Genuinely loving others is foundational for building healthy relationships. It makes them love and appreciate your person too. From Aristotle’s view on self-love, loving yourself is an expression of deep appreciation for the value and goodness of oneself. When you truly love yourself, including your imperfections, you become loving, kind, and compassionate, and this makes it easier to build healthy relationships with others.^[6]Gooding, N. P. (2019). The Social Achievement of Self-Understanding: Aristotle on Loving Oneself and Others. UC Berkeley.^[7]Caldwell, Cam & Anderson, Verl. (2023). Loving Oneself and Its Importance in Relationships. NOVA Science Publisher

5. It confers self-mastery

Staying true to yourself helps you to consistently pursue the things that matter to you, which ultimately leads you to self-mastery. You significantly understand yourself better leading to self-improvement and development.

It also helps you avoid getting distracted by external influences. This focus stems from your desire to do things that align with your goals and values, rather than simply doing things to fit or please other people.

How to Stay True to Yourself Amid Pressures

There is always the societal pressure to change ourselves to fit. Sometimes, we are forced to compromise our values and ideologies for favors or even for survival. But having seen the benefits of staying true to yourself, you can achieve it if you desire to.

Here are some practical steps to stay true to yourself amid societal and environmental pressures to compromise.

1. Know yourself

You can’t stay true to yourself if you do not first know who you are. Self-awareness (knowing yourself) is the experience of own personality or individuality, involving the individual’s understanding of their character, feelings, and desires.^[8]Li J, Ma W, Zhang M, Wang P, Liu Y, Ma S. Know Yourself: Physical and Psychological Self-Awareness With Lifelog. Front Digit Health. 2021

Knowing yourself involves identifying your values, interests, life goals, passions, desires, and so on. This typically requires deep reflection, self-questioning, or even journalling to unravel deep things about you.

In areas of passion and ambitions, exploring other aspects of your life may be a better way to better understand your abilities and capabilities. And once you know who you are, you can more easily stay true to yourself.

2. Accept yourself

To stay true to yourself, you need to accept yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, and imperfections. Only then can you know what you are capable of doing and what you wouldn’t do.

Take, for instance, the few times you took alcoholic beverages, you had funny experiences you wouldn’t want to have again. Understanding yourself and accepting who you are will help you avoid yielding to peer pressure to consume alcohol simply for recreation another time.

Acceptance of yourself does not mean fixity against growth and self-improvement but it refers to a receptivity and openness to oneself, and acceptance of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions, rather than avoidance and denial. This also helps you know what to modify in your ‘core human engine’ when necessary, without having to compromise on yourself.^[9]Klussman K, Curtin N, Langer J, Nichols AL. The Importance of Awareness, Acceptance, and Alignment With the Self: A Framework for Understanding Self-Connection. Eur J Psychol. 2022

3. Continuous alignment with yourself

After having understood the definitions and accepted who you truly are, staying true to yourself involves aligning with those values, beliefs, and ideologies without compromising. Alignment is a conscious decision to act in ways that authentically reflect your perceived self.^[10]Ibid. Klussman et al., 2022

While it is believed that staying true to yourself enhances your self-worth, self-worth also enhances one’s ability to stay true to oneself. The strength to align with yourself and your beliefs comes when you know your self-worth so much that you don’t have to bend just to fit in the agenda of other people.

To fully align with your self and core values, the following may be important.

• Have a mindset of independence and stay so: You don’t have to need people to achieve anything you desire. Staying true to yourself helps you connect with people who genuinely want to be with you.
• Continually boost your feeling of self-worth: Seeing the importance of self-worth in staying connected to yourself, it is extremely important to uphold your self-worth at all times. Tell yourself you are your best self, and avoid internalizing things that make you feel less of yourself.
• Forgive yourself and move on: Even when you reflect on occasions when you were not true to yourself, learn from it and move on to do better in subsequent times.
• Be proud of yourself/looks: Sometimes, staying true to yourself is as simple as embracing yourself and your identity without feeling any need to ‘Photoshop’ your looks in front of the public.
• Be prepared to face any rejection: Authenticity is not a default behavior in a world like ours, which means you have to get prepared for the outcome of staying true to yourself. The good thing is that there are a lot more benefits in staying true to yourself than in compromising yourself to fit in or please others.
• Develop the courage to say no—and yes: Brené Brown, a popular proponent of staying true to oneself added that being authentic means saying no when you don’t want something, and saying yes to new things that appeal to you and your personality. Brené also talked about creating a music playlist that brings you back to yourself or inspires you to be you.

Practical Ways to Identify Who You Are

Even in life’s most anxiety-inducing moments, you can be who you are, Brené teaches how. Here are some practical ways to know who you are.

1. Reflect on yourself
2. Assess your strengths and weaknesses; preferably, make a list
3. Assess what brings you comfort and happiness
4. Find out what gives you pain and hurt
5. Assess your view about society, politics, feminism, justice, etc
6. Take a personality test
7. Record your thoughts and emotions in a journal
8. Think deeply if you are an introvert or extrovert
9. Think about your hobbies and things you’d do for free
10. Ask others what kind of person they see you as, etc

The above was adapted from WikiHow on Knowing Who You Are

Final words

Staying true to yourself has immense benefits to yourself, productivity, and self-fulfillment. It brings true happiness, among others.

The first thing you have to do in living a life of authenticity is know who you are, and this typically involves having deep reflections about yourself, your inner desires, ideologies, and abilities. Brené Brown discussed some ways to stay true to yourself.

I hope you found this article helpful. Kindly drop a comment if you have any challenges staying true to yourself.