Having high self-esteem is very important to keep a positive mental health and well-being. It matters because it helps you develop healthy coping skills, to handle issues the right way, and to view negative events from a good perspective.
When you have healthy amounts of self esteem, you also don’t tend to doubt so much, feel hopeless, and focus too much on what you don’t like. Anxiety will not affect you so much, as well as disappointments. If you have high self esteem you will more likely be able to see what you can improve in yourself than to get stuck on seeing your flaws. Research even shows that feeling good about yourself, mostly as a child, will help you adapt better and adjust to the ups and downs of life. It won’t be the end of the world anymore if stuff goes wrong, a loved-one rejects you, or if you find yourself making errors. You will more likely adjust to all this quickly.
High self-esteem is also closely linked to what we call “prosocial” behavior (actions that are meant to benefit others and not yourself, such as being generous and being empathetic), flexibility , and positive relationships with family and loved-ones. For younger ones, research has also shown that you are more likely to succeed in school and adapt better to the social adjustment of living in a new town for example.
Moreover, the way you manage stress is related to the level of self-esteem you have for yourself. Prosocial behavior, which we talked about before, is known to reduce the impact of stressors on life, helping you to handle stressful situations better. There is a positive relationship between good self-esteem and motivation to succeed, and research also showed a positive link between self-esteem and efficiency as well as with self-control.
Does Self- Esteem make you feel better?
High self-esteem even protects you against a lot of mental health disorders, such as anxious disorders and depression. Some studies have even shown that having a good amount of self-esteem will give you a high level of satisfaction in life and will allow you to keep a positive attitude about yourself in difficult life events.
Studies have shown a clear link between Low Self-Confidence and and low self-esteem, as well as the opposite. To have high-confidence will encourage self-reliance, self- advocacy, and trust in your abilities. This in turn will boost your quality of life!
The way you view yourself will likely change all the time throughout your life and will respond to the life events you encounter.
Interacting with peers, getting positive attention, being able to regulate your emotions, your decision making process, and the quality of your life are all impacted by a low self-esteem.
Having high self-esteem will allow you to forget better unfavorable events and turn your focus to better ones, while low self-esteem will make you more aware of negative moods or reactions and judgement of others that are against you.
Low self-esteem indeed flips a switch inside you that makes you much more prone to take criticism personally and to feel easily rejected by the slightest negative reaction of others.
That is why some people with low self-esteem are more reactive to day-to-day circumstances and during the interactions with their peers. During arguments for example, things become quickly blown up into big problems that feel totally out of proportion, which in turn affects negatively self-esteem. It’s a vicious circle.
It is in general more difficult for them to keep their emotions in check and to cope healthily with the difficulties that life throws at them. These individual will furthermore be more prone to turn to unhealthy coping skills like drugs or alcohol.
That is why keeping your self-esteem in check is so important!
Here is a few tips to heighten your self-esteem easily:
Take care of yourself!
Work on eliminating those negative thought patterns.
Define goals and work consistently towards them.
Try to manage your stress with exercises like journaling , meditating and being out in nature.
Try to see the good side of life. Practice gratitude.
Working on your self-esteem is not always easy, but is totally possible with some willpower and consistence , or with the help of a life coach or a psychologist. A huge component to your self-esteem is your thought patterns, what you choose to let your mind focus on, and a key to keeping a healthy amount of self-esteem, is to cultivate optimism. All these are things you can work on with a few tools and methods.
Improving your self-esteem will benefit you in all areas of your life as we have seen, so why not start now?
