As we slowly return to something resembling the normality of the past, I return to talking about mental health. I feel there are too many negative opinions going round about Covid at the minute and everything going on in the news right now is confusing, scary and difficult to ignore. People’s opinions are not always fact. Wear a facemask and if you go out and are in the company of other people, be cautious. Just as importantly, be kind to people, don’t judge and look after your physical and your mental health (both of equal importance).
Anyway, over the last few years, something I gradually got to understand is that maintaining a good level of mental health, amongst a lot of other things, is having a healthy sense of self-esteem. I feel that respect and love for yourself begins when you don’t give any value to yourself based on external things. So, the approval or disapproval of other people for example. That shouldn't matter for self-esteem. It's about having an internal locus of evaluation. Blindboy always talks about this in his mental health podcasts. It means no aspect of your behaviour can define your value as a person. "I'm no better than anyone else and nobody else is better than me because human beings are too complex to evaluate off each other." Low self-esteem and poor mental health in general often come from looking for other people's approval. Worrying whether people like you or do not like you will massively influence how you feel about yourself because at the end of the day, you have zero control of the opinions of other people. If people disapprove of you and you end up feeling like shit over that, that can snowball and will slowly break down your self-esteem every time you get that feeling and before you know it, you can feel like why people disapprove of you is basically factual. Well it is not. People disapprove of others for many different reasons, but it does not make their opinion matter of fact. We all have intrinsic human value. Humans are too complex to be basing our value on external circumstances. It's silly. If you can go home at night and look in the mirror and say "today I had a good day, I didn't hurt anyone's feelings and I tried to be kind and compassionate" (while also having compassion towards yourself) then that is the best you can do as a human. The best you can do. But placing your self-worth in external things, is a losing battle.
From several different sources (podcasts, therapy, books and experiences) I have learned different ways in which you can improve your own self-esteem. Funnily enough, looking inwards and improving yourself starts with other people; don't put other people down - even in your own head. It doesn't have to be out loud. If your opinion of yourself is low, one way you can make yourself feel better is by looking at another person and feeling content for them. Let’s say you see someone driving a big BMW, music blaring and your thought is something like "they think they're so great in their BMW", don't do that. How someone chooses to lead their life, is none of your business. Secondly, don’t think you're special. This is probably more prominent in the age group that are coming out of school or university, people that are trying to find themselves. When we have unconscious feelings of worthlessness, we can tell ourselves that we are special. It's a fear of being normal and you think "if I'm normal I'm nothing, so I better be different and special" so you end up using your energy trying to be weird or different and that isn't a very good way of helping your self-esteem. It's looking for an ideal version of yourself instead of being happy with who you are. There's no such thing as being special. Some are talented at sports, some are incredibly gifted intellectually, some give up their spare time to work for a charity, but those are just aspects of that person's behaviour. It doesn't define them as a human being, and it doesn't define you. Stop telling yourself you're special. Through no fault of our own, we grow into adults fully influenced by how we have been treated and nurtured since birth. You might spend your childhood being told “you’re worthless”, “you can’t do anything right”, “you’re a bad boy/girl” and this leads us to feel like we really are bad people, can’t do anything right and have no worth as a human being. However, some of us are treated like the sun shines out our arse, we are better than everyone and we always get our own way and we are “special”. As kids, our parents said things like “you’re better than them” and “you are special” (some people call this mollycoddling), and while many would argue that if they want to mollycoddle their children, that is completely up to them, but it should not be ignored that being subject to that kind of treatment in childhood may lead to low self-esteem in adulthood due to always chasing a better or “special” version of yourself, instead of being happy with who you are as a person. (Bare in mind I have no experience with raising my own children, despite being a preschool teacher. I have no idea how difficult being a parent is and me telling someone how to raise their children is like Forest Gump telling Arnold Schwarzenegger how to do an arm curl. But I do know how to raise a child from an educational perspective so I feel my advice is worthy of consideration. Take from it what you want. Next, seeking approval of other people will probably not help your self-esteem. If we have an unconscious dislike for ourselves, we sometimes overcompensate by trying to get other people to like us. When our desire to get other people to like us is motivated by an internal dislike of ourselves, we then assume everyone else thinks like us, so we feel we have to be extra kind, extra friendly, extra funny or whatever to other people to get them to like us. A lot of our interactions with people become ingenuine, and can even be seen as being excessively polite, and that can be really stressful, which again can result in the feelings of low self-worth. Try to catch those moments when you’re really going out of your way to be nice, when your niceness is felt as a nervousness, when your speaking to someone and you notice your apologising for what you’re saying, using language like "this is going to sound stupid but..." If you show people the respect, compassion and love that they deserve and that person has a problem with you, then it's out-with your control. Don’t try to change who you are just for their approval. Lastly, attempting to feel more significant by controlling other people. No matter what way you look at it, doing that is not OK, ethically, morally, any way. That can manifest in different ways. Toxic control you'd find in a stressful relationship where you're trying to tell them what to do, tell them where they can and can't go, what they should or shouldn't like etc. It doesn't have to be abusive or toxic, it could be quite unclear and simple. There's toxic control and the other type of control. If you don't feel especially important, you might exert your importance by trying to see your importance reflected back at you in someone else’s behaviour. People who don't understand their emotions try and control other people’s behaviours. Controlling behaviour can express itself in you thinking you’re trying to be nice like going out of your way to try to set your single friend up with people. You think you’re doing them a favour but you’re not stopping to think or ask if it's what they want. You want to shape and influence the life of someone around you so that that change can be reflected back at you so you can look at it and say “I'm important, look what I did”. Its unconsciously driven but if it’s a behaviour you engage in, it could be a factor that's resulting in your low self-esteem.
Aside from those things, improve your self-esteem by recognising what you’re good at, building positive relationships, being kind to yourself, learning to be assertive and starting to say no, set yourself a challenge, building a support network and talking…oh and exercise. Exercise is always good for releasing those good endorphins and making you feel good about yourself.
Don’t just read this and then not use it. Implement this stuff into your daily existence. It will improve your well-being and at the very least has a positive impact on your fellow human being.
Tim JP said something on his podcast the anxiety podcast, “look in the mirror and say I love you every day. Speak to that person as if it's your husband wife mother father son daughter etc. Don't think of that person as being you, think of that person in the mirror as someone you know really really well. You know everything that's good about them and everything that's bad about them and you just accept them for who they are and love them unconditionally. If you say I love you out loud to that person in the mirror, 3 times, every day and you genuinely mean those 3 words, even the bad things, you still love that person regardless. Experiment with it. Do that for a few weeks in a row and see if you feel any different. You need to accept you for you and just move forward with what you do have. Accept there are things that go wrong in life, things that you do that can change how you feel or think about different things, but if you really want to improve how you feel, if your anxious, stressed, depressed, you need to be OK with who you are first and love yourself even if you have severe anxiety, depression, stress, PTSD whatever it is, if you still love yourself, then you're well underway to making the improvements in your life. Improvement starts with you. Love yourself.