Everyone has suffered from moments of low self-esteem. But when it continues past those moments, it can have real negative impacts on your life.
If you’ve ever found yourself searching “How to build self-esteem,” you’re not alone. Low self-esteem can come from a variety of places, and whether you’re trying to feel more confident to do more with your life or to better your mental health, these strategies can help.
Recognize and Remove
When you’re first trying to rebuild self-esteem, it can help to find out where your low confidence originated from. Do you have family or friends who talk down to you? Are you in a toxic environment that has enforced negative thoughts about yourself?
Once you can recognize where some of your self-esteem problems came from, you can remove yourself in certain ways. Perhaps your self-esteem is rooted in past problems that have continued with your own thoughts. You can work on reframing your mentality or surrounding yourself with more positive people and begin rebuilding.
Positive Surroundings
Find people who love you and want to help with your life circumstance, and surround yourself with them. For your mental health, it can be best to do things that make you happy and be around people that make you happy. This can help you build up your confidence over time as well.
And this isn’t just true with people. Find things that bring you joy or give you a boost, and use them to your advantage.
If you find yourself feeling more confident when wearing certain clothes or using certain make-up, go for it. Maybe you have a favorite Jean Paul Gaultier scent but ran out. If that puts more pep in your step, get some more.
Change Your Thinking
A big step in building self-esteem, be it low confidence from family issues or another life circumstance, is to change your thinking. Low self-esteem may have been initiated by others, but if you still think of yourself in negative terms, or are constantly putting yourself down with negative self-talk, that can perpetuate problems.
It can be helpful to try and challenge those negative thoughts and try speaking to yourself as you would a good friend. You might be adding unnecessary pressure to your life or blaming yourself for things out of your control. When you can recognize those negative thoughts, you can begin to change them and refocus toward positives in your life and yourself.
How to Build Self-Esteem
If you have recognized you have low self-esteem and want to work on it, you’re already making progress. When it comes to how to build self-esteem, a lot of the battles are internal and require you to recognize your negative thoughts and turn them around. These can be helped by external and internal practices.
No matter how you ended up with poor self-esteem, you’re on your way to a more positive outlook on yourself and your experiences. And if you found this helpful, keep reading our blog posts for more life tips.