What is Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem is the way you think about yourself, how much you value yourself, and the judgements you make about yourself. It is the sense you have of yourself as a person. You might, for example, say that you are capable, friendly, popular and lovable. On the flip side, you might say that you are stupid, unreliable, unpopular, and unlovable.
What Healthy Self-Esteem Looks Like
Healthy self-esteem is having a balanced view of yourself, valuing yourself as a person deserving of love and your place in the world just as you are. This could include:
- having a sense of your individual skills, abilities and potential
- having an awareness of your shortcomings, accepting your failings, and not allowing these to define you
- having a sense of yourself as part of the world among other people
If you have positive self-esteem, you might be encouraged by favourable comments from others, but you don't need approval of others in order to think well of yourself. A person with positive self-esteem has a basic internal belief that they are broadly acceptable, and deserving of love and respect.
Signs You May Be Experiencing Low Self-Esteem
Someone experiencing low self-esteem has formed a generally poor opinion of how likeable they are, their ability to do things competently, and their value as a person. In daily life, this might show up as:
- Believing that they are not as good as other people
- Avoiding trying new things because they fear failure or embarrassment
- Not voicing their opinion, because they fear being rejected
- Dismissing their successes, as they believe that what they contribute isn't really valuable
- Feeling misunderstood, and unpopular
Where Does Low Self-Esteem Come From?
Early Messages and Conclusions
Low self-esteem is often rooted in past experiences you had when you were young. When young, we crave connection with our caregivers as well as their approval and love, without conditions. Having attentive, loving parents would have helped you begin to construct a sense of self as a valued person, deserving of love.
If your parents or caregivers were unable to provide the support and encouragement you needed, or treated you harshly, this would have negatively affected how you viewed yourself and your place in the world. These early experiences don't just hurt in the moment—they shape how we interpret ourselves for years to come.
Conclusions You Made About Yourself
From these experiences you may have drawn conclusions such as:
- I am not good enough
- I am a disappointment
- I don't deserve love unless I work hard to earn it
- I need to please others to avoid their disapproval and feeling shame
Rules You Created to Keep Safe
Once you believe these conclusions you put in place rules to live by: what you must do and avoid doing to be accepted. These rules are designed to protect you from experiencing things that might be uncomfortable or confirm your worst beliefs about yourself.
For example, you might believe: "I must be perfect to be loved" or "If I please everyone, they won't reject me." These rules seem necessary, but they keep you trapped in patterns that prevent genuine connection.
Low self-esteem is strengthened by sticking to these rules and rejecting new information about yourself that might contradict them. While they might seem to protect you from the disappointment or failure you fear, they also diminish your capacity to fully live your life and realise your potential.
How Low Self-Esteem Keeps Going
The Self-Critical Cycle
Understanding how low self-esteem perpetuates itself can help you recognise when you're trapped in this pattern:
A trigger occurs. Something goes wrong at work, or a social interaction feels awkward. Your core belief activates: "I'm not good enough."
Critical thoughts spiral. "They must think I'm incompetent." "I'll never get this right." Your threat system activates—heart racing, breathing quickens, muscles tense.
Shame takes over. Rather than problem-solving, you feel overwhelmed by self-disgust. You withdraw or try to compensate by over-pleasing others, abandoning your own needs.
More self-criticism follows. "Why am I like this?" "Why is everything harder for me?" These thoughts reinforce your original belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you.
And the cycle repeats.
How Low Self-Esteem Affects Your Daily Life
The Emotional Impact
Your lack of belief in your abilities and your negative predictions bring out protective tendencies. However, you will most likely experience a tension between this safe, predictable version of life and some sense of your unmet potential. Deep down, you sense that you are capable of more.
So what does this mean for your life? You might find yourself wanting to take part in things, to speak out, but find yourself fearfully falling into old habits that feel safe. In short, when you don't value yourself as you are, and instead criticise yourself, you devalue yourself.
The Emotional Systems Involved
Psychologist Paul Gilbert described three emotional regulation systems that help us understand how low self-esteem functions in our bodies and minds:
- The Threat System detects danger and activates our fight, flight, or freeze response
- The Drive System motivates us to pursue goals and feel accomplished
- The Soothing System helps us feel calm, safe, and content
The Threat System evolved to protect us from danger. When activated, it releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, preparing us to respond to threats.
The Drive System motivates us to take action, pursue goals, and achieve. When we succeed, dopamine is released, making us feel good about our accomplishments.
The Soothing System helps us rest, recover, and feel safe. It activates our parasympathetic nervous system—our 'rest and digest' mode—producing endogenous opioids and oxytocin that create feelings of comfort and calm.
The Systems in Balance and Imbalance
In balanced emotional health, we move fluidly between these systems throughout the day. We can perceive 'danger' in interactions with others and respond as our threat system is activated, then move to our soothing system once the difficulty recedes. Our drive system starts up as we return to tasks, then later our soothing system comes forward as we rest and recover.
In people with low self-esteem, there is likely an imbalance. The drive and threat systems may be overdeveloped as a result of self-critical thoughts or shame felt due to believed inadequacies. These are perceived by your brain as threats, and you are less able to engage your soothing system, which is likely underdeveloped.
Self-critical thoughts trigger the same stress response as external danger, keeping you in a state of anxiety or hypervigilance. Meanwhile, your underdeveloped soothing system makes it difficult to recover after setbacks, leaving you vulnerable to shame and self-attack.
Boosting Your Self-Esteem: Practical Steps
Breaking free from the self-critical cycle requires developing new skills and ways of relating to yourself.
Developing the Soothing System
Since your threat system is highly developed and overactive, there's a need to counter this by developing the soothing system. This helps you rest and recover more quickly and effectively, in time balancing out your threat system.
Mindful practices that make you aware of your body when critical thoughts race can help activate the parasympathetic nervous system:
- Notice your breathing. Take deep slow breaths
- Place one hand on your chest or leg, feeling the warmth
- Speak to yourself as you would a friend who's struggling
These small acts activate your soothing system and can provide immediate relief from self-critical spirals.
Moving Towards a Balanced View
Instead of accepting negative beliefs as being undeniably true, you can start to question them. Noticing positive aspects of you and your life, even if at first that's hard to do, will provide some evidence to the contrary. This helps you evaluate critical opinions and harsh judgements about yourself in a broader context.
While you might still hear and feel the effects of critical thoughts, making an effort to notice positive things allows you to move towards a more balanced view of yourself. Instead of swallowing the self-critical talk, you pause to ask 'what, if anything, is true or accurate about this?'
After pausing, you can diminish the power of the criticism and accept where there was something you could have done differently, or when you might have responded in a more effective way.
Now you are beginning to treat your missteps and failures as information that you can learn from. You can move away from responding when you slip up by berating yourself until you feel shame.
Talking to Yourself with Compassion
You can strengthen this balanced view of yourself by using compassionate self-talk. Instead of angrily criticising yourself when something goes wrong, speak to yourself with understanding and encouragement. You would be compassionate to a friend who was disappointed or angry with themself, so show yourself the same understanding.
Compassion isn't being nice to yourself, but instead is admitting things didn't go the way you wanted, asking questions about why that was and what you could have done differently. Then you can own your mistake, learn from it—supporting yourself to recover, reset, and continue.
Using compassionate self-talk in this way allows you to fear failure less, become more resilient and avoid the self-critical cycle.
Building Long-Term Resilience
Six Core Practices for Healthy Self-Esteem
Psychologist Nathaniel Branden identified six practices that form the foundation of healthy self-esteem. These aren't quick fixes—they're ongoing commitments to how you engage with yourself and your life:
- Living consciously – Be mindful and give your full attention to what you are currently doing. Notice when your thoughts drift to regret about yesterday or worry about tomorrow.
- Self-acceptance – Respect and have compassion for your whole self, including your flaws and mistakes.
- Self-responsibility – Recognise that you are responsible for your own happiness. You put your life back in your own hands when you make a decision to own your thoughts, actions and choices.
- Self-assertiveness – Remind yourself that you have as much right as anyone to express your thoughts and feelings confidently, but respectfully.
- Living purposefully – Take responsibility for your life plan, what you want to achieve, how you would like to be, within yourself and with others.
- Personal integrity – Stay true to your sense of right and wrong and the standards you hold yourself to. Check that your actions and behaviour match your intentions and align with your values.