Do you feel like a failure? Or do you just don’t feel good about yourself? Watch out—those are a few symptoms of low self-esteem.
In psychology, the term self-esteem is used to describe a person’s overall sense of self-worth or personal value. Self-esteem is also often seen as a personality trait, which means that it tends to be stable and enduring. Self-esteem can involve a variety of beliefs about the self, such as the appraisal of one’s own appearance, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors.
Low self-esteem can negatively affect every aspect of your life, including your relationships, your job, and most importantly, your health. But no need to worry, you can boost your self-esteem and you will be able to feel good about yourself for who you are, appreciate your own worth, and take pride in your abilities and accomplishments.
Before we talk about how to increase self-esteem, let’s see what causes low self-esteem. There are lots of things that could be the cause of low self-esteem, such as:
- Loneliness
- Neglect
- Abuse
- Feeling like you’re the odd one out
- Being unemployed
- Society and the media
- The absence of praise, warmth, affection, or interest
- Something going on at a deeper level
Sometimes it can be hard to identify what the cause of your low self-esteem is. Whether or not you know exactly what the cause is, there are steps that you can take to build your confidence and bring your self-esteem up to where it belongs:
Positive self-talk
The way you think about yourself has a huge influence on your self-esteem. If you keep telling yourself that you are not capable, you look ugly, you are no good, you might just start to believe it even though it’s not true. Change the way you see yourself. Every morning, wake up and look into the mirror. There you see yourself, standing tall, ready to face the day with full confidence, and keep whispering your mind with positive words like “Let’s do the best today.”
Stop comparing yourself to others
We know that it can be really tempting to measure your own worth against people. But you need to remember that you can’t compare your own accomplishment with others. You never know what struggle they have been through to reach their position today. You just need to focus on what you’re good at and make the best out of it. Comparing yourself to others only make you feel worse about yourself and bring burden to your shoulders.
Set realistic expectation
It’s really great if you want to do things well (as it can be a great motivation too). But keep in mind that perfection isn’t possible. When you set a too high expectation, want everything to be perfect; when it doesn’t meet your expectation it will devastate your optimism. You may expect for the best, but also be ready for the worst.
Exercise
Exercise boosts your mood. Period.
Don’t blame yourself when you make a mistake
Nobody’s perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. It is in our basic human nature. When you make mistake, don’t blame yourself of being incompetent or such. Just learn from it, promise yourself that you will not do it again, and move on.
Focus on the things you can change
There’s no point of wasting all of your energy thinking about things that you can’t change, especially the past. Invest your time more by thinking about some of the things that are in your power to control and analyze what you can do about those.
Build positive relationship
Build relationship with positive people who can motivate you to do better. If you find certain people who tend to bring you down, try to spend less time with them. Invest more time with uplifting people who have kinder standards and was of thinking about things.
Be kind to yourself
Be gentle to yourself when you feel like being self-critical. When you feel down, think what you would say to your friends in similar situation. Sometimes we give better advice to other people than we do to ourselves. Now, it’s time to treat yourself better, even better than how you treat others.
Do what you love
When you really, really love doing something then the motivation to do that thing tends to comes pretty automatically. When you feel like losing your motivation, ask yourself: “Am I doing what I really want to do?” If the answer is no, then refocus and start working on that very important thing you love instead.
Try something new
Going outside your comfort zone will help you to challenge yourself and thus, feeling great about yourself. You may find more things that you’re interested in by trying something new. You’ll find that your opinion about yourself goes up eventually after stepping out from your comfort zone.
