Are you often self-critical? Whenever anything goes wrong you constantly blame yourself for the outcomes?
Low self-esteem can have a significant impact on the way you view yourself, but also on your relationships. It can also be tiring as you can make anxious predictions about the future or you may experience low mood related to taking all the blame and responsibility when experiencing something negative. The self-talk can be characterised by rigid statements such as I am stupid, I am unlovable.
What can also happen is whenever something positive happens, you can interpret that as ‘just luck’ and attribute the cause to external factors but any negative outcomes can be interpreted as confirmation of one’s incapability to deal with challenges.
There are several things that can help improve your self-esteem:
1. Positive data logging.
It involves noting down evidence that confirms positive core beliefs about ourselves. Before you start collecting the evidence you can spend some time thinking about your positive core beliefs or positive characteristics you believe you hold for example I am caring or I am reliable. Also, we want to note down when exactly the situation happened for the positive data log and note down as much detail as possible, for example, I was caring because I offered someone help when I was on the station, this is what I said etc. This is very important as we know people with low self-esteem tend to interpret any situation to their disadvantage and unfavourable view of self, so through positive data logging, we are taking steps to counteract this bias.
2. Gradually set boundaries with other people.
Of course, this also depends on the goals you may have or your particular circumstances, but if we forget to set boundaries with other people and we always make the needs of others a priority, we can send a signal to ourselves that indeed our needs are not important. Those boundaries do not need to be significant, but starting to value your needs means you can acknowledge you are also important. You can start with something small, like taking half an hour a day for yourself, when you do not respond to any requests from others or saying no to something once a week.
3. Spend time thinking about how your self-critical thoughts are affecting your life.
For example, you can keep a record of your self-critical thoughts and the way they impact the outcome of your life events or what is the result of the process. It is obviously more complicated but if we agree that usually, it starts with thoughts which lead to the behaviour or reaction and that can produce an outcome or the consequence. For example, you can note down the thoughts you are having before an interview. They may look like ‘I am useless, I will never be able to get that job anyway, so what’s the point in even trying’. Rather than give in to those thoughts and believe them, notice how they affect your mood and motivation to even prepare the interview. In some cases, those thoughts can also lead to not attending the interview altogether. By seeing the impact that those thoughts have on your life you can start gently challenging yourself and make a choice to change your thoughts to help you go for the things you would like to achieve.
Again, as always, if you would like to improve your self-esteem start with small steps which can hopefully provide you with confidence and that the self-critical thoughts are only limiting you and bringing you down. Also, as with any other struggles, consistency is more important than the size of the step you take, as those small steps will accumulate in time to bigger rewards.