What is low self-esteem or inferiority complex?

Self-esteem is the opinion that you have about yourself. If you have a healthy self-esteem, you you can bend mountains, and you can deal with ups and downs in your life with ease. If your self-esteem is low, you tend to see yourself in a negative light, and you less able to handle challanges in your life.

Self-esteem is your sense of your value. With low self-esteem, your self expectations are so high, that you have a gap between what you are now and what you should be, and you end up beating yourslef, as your self value is not to the bar. You don’t like yourself.

You lack confidence about who you are, and what you can do. You constantly compare yourself with others, and worry that you have less, and you can do less than others. You are constantly thinking of others judging negatively of you.

You believe you don’t deserve things in this life, and you don’t value your thoughts, feelings or results. And since you don’t value youself, it’s hard to live up to other people’s expectations of you.

Frequent signs of low self esteem are: poor confidence, wanting to give up easily, assuming the worst, sensetive to crticism, repeatitively thinking about negative and upset thoughts, shaming yourself and feeling guilt, describing yourslef as stupid/ ugly… I guess, you got it now.

What does this low esteem lead you to?

Obviously you won’t end up being the happiest person in the world, and having a low self-esteem may lead you to:

1. Eating, drinking alcohol or smoking too much to suppress negative feelings;
2. Having an anxiety disoder that will make you feel even worse about yourself and leading back to #1 above, or panic attacks
3. Hiding yourslef from engaging with social situations, and avoiding trying new things. While you feel safier, you are withdrawn from society. And the more you are in this condition, the stronger the habbit is to avoiding things, that eventually only leads toward a more negative feeling about yourself.
4. And this is like an infinity loop, this negativity you develop will only accumulate and lead you to a disaster in your life where obesity and being drunk is not the worst thing.

Surely no one wants to be in this condition, however our mind and ego are clever enough, and won’t let us simpy fix it.

How do I elevate my self esteem?

Change the way you think, instead of beating yourself — love yourself

The key is to notice your thoughts, and patterns and eventually transform these.

With low self esteem, you beat youself up for everything, and even for small mistakes. You think you are worthless. The moment you make a small mistake, you say things like “I am stupid”, “I always srew up”, “I am useless”.

You always take yourself down. It is an infinite loop — you turture yourself for every single thing that goes wrong, and then you see all these mistakes and proof yourself you are worthless.

This happens when you strongly associate yourself with your thoughts. Your thoughts in your head are constantly telling you, you are not good enough, even if you have evidence to the contrary.

The way you talk to yourself is critical, judgemental, and harsh, and it destroys your confidence. You think of yourself as low value, as the result you don’t like youself and you think you don’t deserve things. Your negativity acummulates day by day leading to a collapse.

Remember:

If you continue to think the way you have always thought you will continue to get what you have always got.

The way out of this nightmare is to transform your thinking, replace your negative thoughts with positive thoughts, start liking yourself and don’t associate yourself with your thoughts fully.

Build up awareness of you negative thoughts. Notice your negative thoughts, examine them in a very detailed way, truly try to understand where these thoughts are coming from. The key is to ask yourself questions, and journal your answers. First, identify and start noticing the negative believes you have about yourself, make a list of them. For example, you may constantly tell youself you are stupid, or nobody cares about you, fine, put these in your list. Second, explain yourself why do you think so, when it started, and challange it — is it true? Third, transform these by practicing a) self acceptance, b) positive affirmations and c) by completing acomplishments from your daily goals.

Be kind to yourself, and accept that you are enough. Treat yourself with kindness and learn to accept youself for who you are. You are already great as you are, and you don’t need more, only ego needs more. Try the following trick — think of what you’d advise to a friend, or your family in a similar situation like yours. We often give better and less harsh advices to others than to ourselves. Remember being kind to yourself is a skill you have to train, therefore learn and practice how to be kind, value, love and accept youself. And forigve yourself.

Practice positive affirmations. Make a habbit of telling yourself how great you are. Write positive things about youself like “I am good at cooking”, or “I am asked for help often”. Write things that other people say about you. What is importat here is to balance your expectations, you don’t need to have a Michelin star to call youself a great cook, as long as food is eaten.

Practice to change your negative thoughts into positive, “No way this is possible” becomes “I can do it”, “I failed” becomes “I learned something”. Make a list of positivie affirmations, and replace negative thoughts with positive, go through this list daily and add if anything is missing. Put this list somewhere you can see — it will remind yourself your value.

Meditate. 90% of our thoughts are repetative, and a large chunk of it is represented by trivial thoughts that completely drain us out. Remember, we can’t take an action against every single worry we have, the simplest thing is to accept and move on to sustain our energy rather than spending it on things we have no control over. Thoughts will bring you to the past by reminding you your mistakes, or disappointments. Thoughts will worry about endless future too. The only thing that is present is now. Train yourself to clean your mind and be present.

Accept that you may fail. Remember, it is ok to fail or to make a mistake. Everyone brags about their accomplishments, it is well masked through social media. Reraly anyone will share their falure. It creates wrong expectations for us, we think we should not fail, and we set really high bar for us, as the result we end up beating ourselfs for not meeting the bar. Understanding and accepting that a failure may happen helps you to manage your expectations.

Stop comparison of yourself to others. Compare yourslef to your past self rather than comparing yourself to others .

Aren’t we always finding people with more money, success, a better body, relationships or brain. They have more, can do more, and better than us. This ego comparison drives us crazy, it sets the bar that we have no control over. Yet, let me ask you, are you only happy if you are the best at something or than someone? Remember, your happiness is the absence of desire.

Have you ever noticed that after achieving something you don’t feel satisfied, at least for long? That’s because your happiness is fleeting because of new desires. By comparing yourself to others you will always be not enough. The secret is that you are enough already. Accept it. Be humble, and accept you might never be the best, and you don’t have to be.

Everyone is not equal, everyone goes through unique situations, problems and challenges that shape them. Rather than comparing yourself to others, why not to compare yourself to your old self, wouldn’t it be more constructive?

One feeder that never stops the comparison process is the social media. As you browse through social media you find every person demonstrates how exceptional their live is, smartly masking all the ordinary things behind.

We compare ourselves to these people and the more we browse through social media feeds the higher the expectations from our life we get and the more inferior we feel. Like this, you will always feel everyone is better than you.

You can stop this by getting off from social media. Try a 30 days challange, lock your social media accounts in order to subside the comparison to others to reduce your anxiey and srtess.

With low self esteem you need validation from others to feel good about yourself. You have difficulty making decisions on your own without someone else. This means that when people give you positive feedback, like compliments and encouragement, you feel like you’re on top of the world. You suddenly feel like you matter. In contrast, when people put you down or make negative comments about you, you feel like you’re worthless again.

You should pratice accepting your own self validation, this is an important step in overcoming it. Instead of seeking validation from others, pause before you speak and ask yourself first. Why am i seeking an approval? What do I think about this? Why don’t i trust my own opinion? You may find that you may be uncertain, or you want someone else to like you or accept you. Why do you need it? What’s really impacting your confidence?

Low self esteem leads to withdrawing yourself from social situations, or life challanges. You avoid people and activities you would usually enjoy. You avoid new endevouars, new experiences, and you are frequently by yourself.

Why not giving yourself a challange? Set yourself a goal, for example, join a swimming class, or join a meet up social day activity. Set mini milestones, by saying what and when you will do, achieving these goals will help you to increase your self-esteem.

Remember, it’s always easier to start with small steps, for example, come to the place of swimming club just to see the facilities, and a week later apply for the membership, and so on. Try scheduling enjoyable events and activities every week, and have fun. Start saying yes more often. Be open to new opportunities and adopt a growth mindset.

Do have a plan, get things done, and journal it. Your confidence will be built on your accomplishments that you recognized. Try new things every week, small or big, it does not matter. Do things you are uncomfortable with, ask a question to a stranger, try learning how to sing, or run your first mile. To elevate your confidnece, you need to train it like any other skill.

A 30 days plan to improve my self-esteem

1. Journal your thoughts, 10 minutes. Identify and start noticing the negative believes you have about yourself. Retrospect your days, and learn if you are seeking validation from others, or compare yourslef a lot. Have you failed? List all things that may lead to beating yourself up. Then ask yourself, why do you think so, is it true, is it worst case scenario? Try picking up one subject a time, and granularize it to a maximum extend where all your questions are answered. The key is not to fight against the thought, but notice it, notice the grounds its created upon. The more you journal, the more patterns you notice, the more awareness you gain, the more you will tend to change your uncocsious behaviour.
2. Be kind to yourself, 5 minutes. Accept your are enough, and accept your feelings. Take a break. Compliment yourself. Stop trying to be perfect. Stop comparing yourself to others. Motivate yourself. Try doing the things you would do for someone you cared about, for yourself.
3. Practice positive affirmations to build up confidence, 5 minutes. Repeat each affirmation about 10 times. The most effective affirmations follow the 3 P’s of affirmations: Positive, Present, and Personal: These are good examples: “I am confident socially and enjoy meeting new people”, “Everything I’m looking for, I can find within myself.”, “My friends like me for who I am and not what I perceive them to.”, “I do not need to put too much pressure on myself. I deserve to have breaks.”.
4. Meditate, 5 minutes. Listen to your body, your breath, accept the now. A good place to start is here.
5. Try a new or an uncomfortable thing, 5–30 minutes. Set yourself a goal, for example, join a swimming class, or join a meet up social day activity. Set mini milestones, by saying what and when you will do, achieving these goals will help you to increase your self-esteem.
6. Block your social media apps.

Do you have a problem of the self that drives you crazy? Do you want to learn where it comes from and how to deal with it? Share it with me here, and I am happy to learn the issue on your behalf and publish an article that may help. I listen to your stories carefully and want to produce content that helps you living a simpler and happier life.

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