How to have a healthy sense of self-esteem?

Self-esteem, one of the most famous and often misunderstood topics in pop culture and popular psychology. While some consider it as a cornerstone of healthy emotional and psychological development, others confuse it with self-absorption and narcissism. Even psychologists are not in agreement as to what is self-esteem, its importance, and its effects on humans. Their definition keeps changing depending on the kind of school they belong to and the approach they follow, whether it be cognitive behavior therapy or the acceptance approach. The understanding of self-esteem also highlights a generation gap as mainly youngsters are concerned with it. While most adults think it is a part of the “feel-good philosophy”, and that people should put their nose to the grindstone, rather than worrying about their emotions.

But one thing everyone can agree on is that healthy self-esteem has become a key consideration of almost every personal development and self-help philosophy. Therefore, it does make one wonder what is self-esteem and how it can help us achieve better mental health.

Self-esteem

In simplest terms, self-esteem can be described as one’s attitude towards oneself. Now, I mentioned “in simplest terms”, because if you dive deeper it is not necessarily true as psychologists keep dissecting it into different pieces such as self-worth, self-image, and self-love. Our analysis here mainly deals with practicalities and therefore refrains from such practice. We will simply regard self-esteem as to what an individual thinks about himself/herself. Whether he/she is good or bad, worthy of love or not, success or failure, and so on.

An apt personification of self-esteem would be like a little judge who sits inside your head and keeps telling you things about yourself (not your environment), about the kind of human you are.

Its importance

As mentioned earlier, its popularity and prevalence in our culture are what makes it important for us to understand it. From personal therapy to the corporate world, everyone is concerned with how they can improve their, their children, or their employee’s self esteem. But apart from this, if you think for a moment you can realize that if the little guy inside you keeps telling you negative things all the time, it can substantially affect your health, both physical and mental. On the other hand, a more understanding and positive image of oneself can significantly help to improve the whole demeanor of a person.

Low and healthy self-esteem

Now, while it’s evident that a healthy sense of self-esteem is much better than a low one, it is important to understand exactly what is a low sense of self-esteem and what is a healthy one. This will help you to identify your place on the spectrum. Even though in our research we came across several different theories related to self-esteem, some of the common aspects of low and healthy self-esteem are mentioned below.

Low self-esteem

People with low self-esteem i.e low opinion of oneself tend to:

• Believe that others are better than them and they should put other people’s needs before their own. They just cannot say “no”.
• Find it difficult to express their needs and engage in compulsive people-pleasing.
• Focus on their weaknesses, struggle with confidence, and feel that their opinion is not important
• Frequently experience feelings such as shame, depression, or anxiety
• Compare themself with others and have a negative outlook on life
• Have an intense fear of failure and have trouble accepting positive feedback
• Avoid taking risks or trying new things, and engage in addictive avoidance behaviors

Healthy self-esteem

People with a healthy sense of self-esteem are often the complete opposite of people with low self-esteem.

• Avoid dwelling on past, negative experiences. Handle criticism without taking it personally.
• Express their needs, feel confident, and say “no” if necessary
• Have a positive outlook on life
• See overall strengths and weaknesses and accept them
• Act assertively without experiencing any guilt
• Believe they are equal to everyone else and feel at ease communicating with others.
• Recognize and accept a wide range of feelings, both positive and negative, and share them within your healthy relationships.
• Enjoy a healthy balance of work, play, and some quiet time.
• Make their own decisions and conform to what others tell them to be and do only when they agree.
• Accept challenges and take risks in order to grow.
• Value themself and communicate well with others, without fear of expressing their likes, dislikes, and feelings.
• Know what their values are and live their lives accordingly.
• Speak up and tell others their opinions, calmly and kindly, and share their wants and needs with others.

Causes of low self-esteem

The dreaded feeling of low self-esteem is very familiar to most of us. The constant chattering of the little judge that you are not good enough, that everyone is living a better life than us, we are a failure, and so on. We’ve distilled down the causes of low self-esteem to two major factors; comparison with others and believing your emotions. No matter how many different causes are there for low-esteem, they are a part of one of these factors.

Comparison with others

In their seminal book “Thinking fast and slow”, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Nathan Tversky mentioned the concept of “everything is relative”. According to them, things have no intrinsic value and you one ascertain something’s value by comparing it with a similar object. The same concept applies when we think about ourselves. How do we know that we are successful? That we are making good money or that we are good? By looking at our neighbors and our peer groups, and judging how well they are doing. Therefore, more often than not, people are not jealous of other’s success, it’s just that due to the success of their friend or neighbor, their own social status is reduced, by comparison.

The same theory is pertinent for our analysis of self-esteem because the only way we can judge our self-worth is by comparing it with others. And if our friends are more successful our self-esteem decreases. Two aspects of this inference should be noted, first, we only care about the lives of people around us. Nobody gets seriously jealous of some 12 years old in some other country who is making millions, but if that 12-year-old is our cousin, then that’s a completely different story. Another thing is that we also compare our self with the same-sex parent. It’s much easier to have healthy self-esteem if your parent is a normal middle-class employee than if he/she is the CEO of some MNC.

Believing your emotions

The second factor resulting in low self-esteem is believing your emotions. By this, we mean having a reactive behavior towards your emotions. There is a beautiful concept in meditation of having a sense of curiosity towards your thoughts. Rather than simply reacting when you have a thought, meditation gurus advocate that we should take a moment to look at the thought itself. But most of us simply react when we have thought. It might sound a little confusing but the main thing we are talking about is that people have low self-esteem when they simply believe that their emotions are true and they portray reality as it is.

For instance, when we see pics of our friends having fun on social media, we get a sudden ping of jealousy, and because of that feeling, we start thinking how unfulfilling our life is or get into this vicious cycle, without ever taking a moment to think about our emotions. Should we be jealous? Does this one picture represent their entire life? Don’t we have a moment or two of happiness, now and then?

How to manage low self-esteem

In order to deal with low self-esteem all, you have to do is address the factors we just talked about. Stop comparing yourself with others and stop believing that what you feel is true. But since we know that it’s not that simple to adhere to even one of these suggestions, let’s take a deeper look into both of them.

Stop comparing yourself with others

This sounds simple and is a cure for many mental health issues, but it’s just as hard to do. As we’ve mentioned, comparing yourself with others is probably the only way you can judge how you are doing in life. Therefore, we do not recommend that anyone should shut himself/herself in and live their own little well. We suggest that

• You should understand that everyone has their own story, and you cannot simply become like someone else with your own story.
• Everyone has problems (it’s obvious).
• Some people are comparing themselves with you whether because of the way you look, your financial stability, your loving family life, etc

We are not advocating for a life of ignorance or becoming the “happy” guy. No, you should be objective and should acknowledge what you lack, and should try to improve that aspect of life. But at the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that this one aspect of life does not determine who you are as a person and that some people will be more than happy to exchange lives with you.

Here, we would also like to point out that people who are trying to manage self-esteem should limit their social media usage. Because while we know our entire story, and know nothing about the lives of people on social media. We try to compare our life with that one or two perfect pics.

Stop believing your emotions

This and that factor mentioned above go hand in hand. You cannot stop comparing yourself with others without having a better grasp of your emotions and without understanding that you cannot take them at face value. This is more of a life skill. In order to learn it, one of the best ways is to learn meditation. You might be sick of people suggesting you meditate, but it’s crucial in order to have a healthy self-esteem. This is so because in essence being non-reactive to your emotions and thoughts is what meditation is all about.

Meditation teaches you how you can “take a deep breath” before you act on your thoughts and emotions. In case you don’t know how you can start, simply download any free meditation app and start. Don’t think too much, no one has a secret, you can learn meditation with any app. Once you learn how to take an outsider’s perspective towards your emotions, you will understand how flawed they are and that they are more guided by your own past and personality than by any outside factor.

Conclusion

In short, having a healthy sense of self-esteem is crucial for your mental health and your life. You cannot simply ignore the constant abuse of the little judge inside you. Therefore, you should take active measures to understand and to deal with low self-esteem. This is especially important since low self-esteem does not affect a certain aspect of your life, it affects you, your personality, your thoughts, and the kind of person you are. Two main causes of low self-esteem are comparing yourself with others and having a reactive attitude towards your emotions.

Thus, in order to manage low self-esteem, you have to stop comparing your life with that of your peers and have to understand that your emotions are not always true. You cannot expand your energy on those momentary feelings of jealousy when you see a pic on social media because you do not know the entire story of others and their lives. Meditation is one of the best ways to learn how you can be objective towards the comments of that little judge inside your head and not let him/her control the way you live.

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