How to increase your self-esteem

Self-esteem is one of life’s puzzles it seems.

For starters people don’t even seem to be able to accurately define what it is.

Secondly, it seems to almost be a taboo thing to have high-self esteem as it is often mistaken for arrogance.

And thirdly if you ask most people they’d probably tell you that their self-esteem isn’t great.

So what is self-esteem? How can we improve it and can it really be too high?

Let’s dive in.

What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is how much worth someone places upon their life.

Esteem comes from the Latin aestimare which unsurprisingly means “to estimate”.

So it’s an estimate of oneself.

That was easy enough.

But isn’t that self-confidence?

No, no it is not.

Self-confidence is about having faith in one’s own abilities.

It is therefore possible and plausible to have self-confidence and yet low self-esteem, and I should know because I’ve been in that situation before.

A comedian can have absolute confidence in himself that he can go out and make an audience laugh but place no value on that skill or himself being able to do it.

Self-esteem and self-confidence can rise and fall hand-in-hand but they are by no means conjoined.

Low self-esteem

Sadly there are about 45,624 reasons why any given individual might have low self-esteem and I’m not really qualified to talk about the psychology behind any of it.

The reason for the low self-esteem that someone is experiencing may or may not be at all relevant to improving it. 

Roughly speaking though no matter why you feel your “self” does not have much worth the ways in which to improve it are the same. We’ll get to that a bit later on.

But why is it a bad thing to have low self-esteem?

Low self-esteem and negative thoughts about oneself are best friends, they go everywhere together.

Having negative thoughts about yourself and your abilities can have a huge impact on your mental health and is one of the main causes of not only depression and anxiety but also unhealthy coping strategies such as drinking, drug use and smoking.

It can also form character traits such as shyness, insecurity, laziness, negativity, social ineptness and a bunch of other stuff that you’d probably not choose for yourself ideally.

But you don’t have to keep choosing that for yourself, you can choose to change.

We’ll get to that shortly.

High self-esteem 

I’m more or less giving a surface level description of self-esteem so do not want to go too deep on this.

But there may be people reading this saying so you want us to have high self-esteem, isn’t that being a narcissist?

Short answer, no.

It’s possible that a narcissist could have high self-esteem but the opposite is much more likely.

Narcissists tend to lack the key things that people with high self-esteem do have, a) the ability to care about other people and b) not requiring validation from other people.

Narcissists also constantly seek to validate their perceived self-worth; people who simply have high self-esteem don’t need to

There is the potential that with high self-esteem that people can become overbearing or perhaps arrogant, sometimes even delving into higher risk activities.

On balance, and this is my opinion rather than fact, I would say the dangers of having high self-esteem are much lower than the dangers of low self-esteem.