What is Low Self-Esteem?
Low self-esteem means having less faith in oneself. While comparing with others you find yourself inferior. You frequently ignore your strengths and concentrate more on your flaws.
When a person lacks confidence in their potential to succeed, is frightened to express their views, and feels unworthy or undeserving of love or happiness, these are a few important symptoms of low self-esteem.
Relationships, employment, and academic performance can all suffer from low self-esteem and lack of confidence. Without interventions, it might also be detrimental to their physical and emotional health.
Causes of Low Self-Esteem
Overly Critical Parent
If your parents are strict or have a high expectations for your behavior, you might feel guilty. You might have felt inadequate as a result of this. You’ll keep aiming for excellence as an adult to get over a rooted inferiority complex. You can also be prone to the harsh judgment of yourself.
Significant Childhood Loss
If your parent passes away or gets divorced, you could feel abandoned. It’s probable that you experienced an empty and insecure childhood. Losing important persons in your adult lives can make this worse.
As an adult, you could try to deal with your feelings of abandonment by becoming reliant on someone, getting addicted to something (food, substance, work), or creating a different coping mechanism.
Parental Abuse
Abuse on a physical and/or sexual level is an extreme kind of deprivation. You might experience anxiety, unease, a lack of trust, guilt, or fury. Adults who experienced physical abuse as children may find it difficult to cease passing judgment on others and may adopt a pessimistic outlook on life.
Men, particularly those who experienced sexual abuse as children, may use rape or other forms of abuse as an adult form of expression. They might also become angry inside, feeling inadequate or self-hatred.
Many adult survivors of childhood abuse struggle to sustain close connections with their partners. This is comprehensible. Even while verbal abuse is less frequent, it can still be incredibly damaging.
Parental Alcoholism and Drug Abuse
Many news articles have been published on a daily basis to indicate the negative impact of parental alcoholism on their kids. Children may find it challenging to feel comfortable or have faith in their parents when there is chaos and instability in the home.
Many of these kids lack identity and have low self-esteem. Support groups are available to assist kids in overcoming the harmful impacts of their upbringing due to alcoholism.
Parental Neglect
Because they are preoccupied with their own work or other problems, parents occasionally fail to give their kids the attention and care they need. Children who are left alone often experience feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, and loneliness. As they grow, they find it difficult to express their needs.
Parental Rejection
Even if a parent doesn’t physically or sexually abuse their children, some parents create a situation where their children consider themselves worthless. This attitude may make kids question their right to exist, which is quite harmful.
This individual is more prone to reject or sabotage themselves. Adults with such histories must learn to love and care for themselves if their parents do not show love and affection to them.
Parental Overprotectiveness
Parents who are overly protective may impede their children from developing independence and trusting people outside of their own family. As an adult, this individual could feel uneasy and be reluctant to leave their familiar surroundings or friends. Overprotected individuals might discover the freedom to live their lives by learning to identify and meet their needs.
Parental Overindulgence
The “spoiled” child of overindulgent parents does not have enough exposure to the outside world to get gratification in life. Adults that fit this description frequently exhibit boredom, a lack of tenacity, or difficulties starting and maintaining individual efforts.
Rather than taking charge of their own lives, they frequently expect the world to come to them. Such people feel cheated and highly insecure unless they are willing to accept personal responsibility since life does not continue to give what they learned to expect from childhood.
Effects of Low Self-esteem
Low self-esteem negatively affects all our life aspects such as relationships, academics, and employment. It is possible to isolate yourself from people and activities if you have low self-esteem for a long time. You develop a habit of avoiding circumstances where you might be judged by others.
People with low self-esteem may not care about their appearance. Others can be more focused on their appearance. You might not be able to defend yourself if you are bullied or abused.
Teenagers with poor self-esteem may turn to drink or drugs to feel better. Additionally, they might be more sexually active than their peers and have a negative body image.
How to Overcome from Low Self-esteem?
Let’s have a few tips to overcome low self-esteem.
Stay with Positive People
If you notice that some people tend to make you feel unhappy, try to spend less time with them or express your feelings to them directly. Try to establish connections with those who admire your presence and thoughts.
Be Nice to Yourself
The act of showing yourself the love, security, and acceptance you require is known as self-compassion. You cannot change the world by yourself. While performing the task you may fail or get a poor result. Do not compare yourself to others. Be nice to yourself and learn from each mistake to move ahead in life.
Give Time for Fun
When you’re under pressure, your negative thoughts will take control and cause you to concentrate on your flaws rather than your strengths. This will further increase your tension and low self-esteem.
Allocate each day, a few times to spend on what you love. This will make your day nice and you value yourself. Life is not always for hard work. We need fun in life too.
Learn to Say No
Low self-esteem makes it common for people to feel forced to answer yes to requests from others, even when they don’t truly want to. Saying yes to others means you are saying no to your own priority.
You would overload yourself with tasks if you continue to say yes to others. This act just makes you stressed and ruin your relationship with others. To avoid damaging your relationships with others, learn how to say no in a kind way.
Do Not Compare Yourself with Others
Keep in mind that we are all unique and that we each have something to offer. You can be considerably happier with yourself after you learn to quit comparing yourself to other people. Learn to accept yourself as you are.
Help Others
It’s remarkable how much helping others without expecting anything in return boosts our confidence. Try helping someone out once a week. Helping others would increase your value in your own eyes.
Challenge Your Negative Thoughts
Change your negative thoughts for more productive ones that highlight your strengths. Whenever you have a negative thought try to challenge them. Making a list of at least three things you excel in will help you achieve this.