Bad self-esteem – 6 tips to fight low self-esteem

Poor self-esteem is something that affects most people at some point in their lives. It can affect young people, adults and parents.

Yes, even therapists can suffer from low self-esteem.

Some people feel it in the pursuit of recognition. Others are blindly looking for confirmation and can feel constant fatigue because of it. There are also those, who start to feel anxious in social contexts.

Some use friends and family to reflect on their own views of themselves.

The last group chooses to work with a therapist, in order to best get to the bottom of their suffering.

Low self-esteem can be a burden on the quality of your life, and it can take a long time to improve it.

While that may seem overwhelming to read, you have to remember that your poor self-esteem didn’t just happen overnight.

It comes from a life which may have been characterized by you being negative about yourself. Being negative not only strengthens an already existing feeling about oneself, but your self-esteem will definitely feel it too.

Low self-esteem doesn’t come from a bad place. It’s your brain that thinks it has done you a favour by protecting you from potential situations where you might be disappointed, upset, or other unpleasant feelings.

You may have let negative thoughts and feelings take over once in a while. You might have had the experience that other people are doing much better than you.

This can make you doubt whether you are doing the right thing in life.

It can be hard to live with thought patterns that work against what you want. The psychological aspect of being an adult can be difficult enough already, in addition to having low self-esteem.

We demand perfection from ourselves, and it is our self-esteem that is at stake every time things don’t work out.

At some point in life, we all have doubts. Even the most competent adult with all the confidence in the world has questioned himself. Poor self-esteem is like an invisible cloak. You can’t always see who’s walking around with them, but you can definitely feel it when your close.

So with this in mind, it can seem like a mountain that you have to climb to get back to the top. But therefore one can ask more on a more practical level…

How do you get better self-esteem?

Stand by yourself

Being true to yourself simply means accepting yourself completely.

If you’re smart, great.

If you are a petite individual, fantastic.

If you prefer watching Netflix for 4 hours over reading literature, wonderful.

Most people have an idea of ​​who they want to be and can spend a lifetime striving for that ideal.

However, this can be contradictory to their happiness, because the imagery may not match their core values.

The more you dare to listen to yourself and express it to the world, the more you get in touch with yourself.

The more in touch you are with yourself and what makes you happy, the more your self-esteem grows over time.

Stop listening to everything the world tells you

Whether we like it or not, we are exposed to influences in the world. Even if we wanted to, very few people can withstand this 100%.

By creating your life conditions based on other people’s values ​​and intentions, you are the one, who will pay for it in the end.

The more you can speak up for what doesn’t feel right to you, the more your self-esteem is strengthened. Because then you show faith in your own abilities and respect yourself enough to honour the decisions that feel best to you.

Shut out the negative thoughts

Shut out the negative thoughts

We all make mistakes. That is a part of being alive. When you have low self-esteem, there may be a tendency to exaggerate the mistakes that you make though.

It can not only affect your mood, but also your quality of life.

Within cognitive psychology, you work based on something called the triangle

Long story short;

What we think

is the reason for the way we feel

which is what we base our actions on

So if you feel negative, and have a general experience of not feeling good enough, then it is probably because that is what you fundamentally believe.

If you believe the best about yourself and your abilities, it doesn’t matter what anyone says to you. Negativity rubs off on you more easily, and you can choose which constructive comments you want to take with you.

Get some therapy

One’s self-esteem is something that you have to keep working on throughout your life.

Getting support from a therapist can not only accelerate your personal development but also help you gain a different insight about yourself.

This work is an investment, not only in yourself but in your life moving forward.

You can save a lot of time by working on this continuously, rather than having made some choices and decisions that end up affecting you later down the line.

Think like a beginner

You would think it would be the other way around. That you had to pretend until your brain caught up with your progress later down the line.

But sometimes, it can help to focus on on the small steps. It may look like others are really good at something, but their experience may be something completely different.

By adopting a beginner’s mentality, you have the humility to make mistakes. After all, you are a beginner, and you often make mistakes in order to learn.

Stop comparing yourself to others

The most important person you ever have in your life is yourself.

It is within yourself that you should put all your love and attention, in order to have a healthy image of yourself and thereby increase your self-esteem

There are many people who have difficulty with this and suffer greatly from it too.

You may often experience that you end up doing things wrong.

At least that’s how you yourself will perceive it. You turn it into something negative and tell yourself and others that it is your fault.

One of the things that you can start working on is how you see new challenges. Looking at others should be an inspiration, not a basis for comparison.

You don’t know what lies behind their abilities, and you can’t base your own self-esteem on that. You can only compare yourself to who you were yesterday. If you want to improve something, take it one day at a time going forward.