Self-esteem is how you value your self worth. In other words, it is an overall sense of yourself, your abilities and your value in your own perception. A person’s self-esteem falls on a spectrum ranging from Low to Healthy to Over-inflated:
With a low self-esteem, you can feel worthless, inadequate, and undeserving of happiness.
With a healthy level of self-esteem, you might feel confident and feel like you deserve the things that come to you.
With an overinflated level of self-esteem, you can feel entitled to happiness, even at the expense of others and you can be overly self-promotional and very defensive when you don’t get the things that you feel you deserve.
It’s important to know that positive experiences create healthy self-esteem and negative experiences create low self-esteem. The development of self-esteem is influenced by a number of factors like your temperament, your family environment, relationships and life experiences, and it keeps changing throughout a person’s life.
Usually, as a child, we start out with a high level of self-esteem essentially because we don’t know any better and mostly everything is positive and joyful. However, as a child matures, self-esteem declines as we are better able to evaluate ourselves against our environment and tend to internalise feedback. At this stage, self-esteem is relatively unstable, meaning that it is easily impacted by positive and negative experiences. These negative experiences can be from parents, teachers or other students. Traumatic experiences at this stage have a much more significant and long-lasting effect on self-esteem, compared to similar events happening at a later stage.
At adolescence, self-esteem continues to decline and researchers believe that this is related to issues with body image and changes that come with puberty.
Although self-esteem changes during adolescence, it is relatively more stable meaning that it’s less changeable during this period.
Self-esteem in adulthood increases gradually over time peaking in the late ’60s and this is thought to be because of changes like establishing a career, developing an expertise in something, having a clarity of purpose and creating a legacy through your family, etc.
The stability of your self-esteem rises through young adulthood and then starts to decline as you reach midlife and older age.
If you struggle with self-esteem, here are two things that you can do to increase your self-esteem or help someone increase their self-esteem:
1. Identify and utilise your strengths:
People who identify their strengths and put them to use tend to feel better about themselves. If your inner dialogue is saying things like “you’re unlovable”, “you’re inconsistent” or “you don’t measure up”, then you’re going to have a hard time recognizing your strength. In fact, oftentimes that kind of negative thinking can convince you that you have no strengths. It’s important that you not only recognize your strengths but also make sure to utilise them.
2. Learn to accept compliments:
People with low self-esteem have trouble accepting compliments as they usually make them feel uncomfortable. You tend to downplay them or say things to shut down the compliments. If you can relate to this, what you need to do is to learn to hear the compliments and appreciate them.
An easy way to do this is to create a few statements ahead of time that you would say in response to the compliments, it could be as simple as “thank you”, “that’s kind of you” or “I appreciate you saying that”.
Tolerating compliments helps you get used to hearing positive feedback, and it also helps the person giving you the compliment to feel good about extending kindness to you. Getting comfortable with accepting compliments also plays an important role in building a healthy level of self esteem on a subconscious level.
Importance of Professional Counseling: A friend or family member may listen to you, but they aren’t professionally, technically qualified or experienced to offer you professional advice. If you wish you can contact us at MindTribe to receive help from our team of expert psychologists.
About MindTribe.in.
MindTribe Founder Dr. Prerna Kohli, India’s eminent psychologist, established the company to leverage the strength of the online to make counseling affordable and accessible to everyone. MindTribe provides counseling, workshops, support groups, forums, and eLearning.
About the Author.
Samira Kotwal is a psychologist at MindTribe.in. You can learn more about her by clicking here
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of MindTribe.in, the Founders, or management team.
Acknowledgement: All images used are open source and from Unsplash.