9 Tips to Raise Your Self-Esteem

Self-esteem answers a deceptively simple question: who are you, and how do you feel about that? Nobody is born with it. You pick it up from the household you grew up in. Psychologists tend to separate two kinds. The steady, background sense of who we are gets called global self-esteem. Then there is situational self-esteem, which attaches to what we do in particular moments and bounces around depending on the role we're playing. You can feel competent and solid at work by mid-afternoon, then walk through your front door and feel like you're failing at home by evening.

Low self-esteem shows up as a negative verdict you hand down on yourself. Usually it gets triggered when life bumps into one of your sore spots. You take the moment personally, and your body and mind react: emotion, physical tension, racing thoughts all at once. Feeling blocked or rattled, people often behave in ways that work against them. The response is automatic, driven by impulse. Thinking shrinks to a pinpoint. Your sense of yourself slips, you stop taking care of yourself, and you turn inward while gripping tighter for control.

Global self-esteem isn't fixed. Lifting it takes effort, and it doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen. It grows when you learn from what you've been through and stop avoiding the things that scare you. Here are nine ways to start.

1. Get sober. Addictions can flatten your mood and shut down your ability to learn. A 12-step group is one route out of self-destructive patterns. Name the addiction, then put self-care where it used to be.

2. Look after your health. Making positive choices about your physical health supports the rest. Self-help groups can give you footing while you're building new habits.

3. Find your triggers. When something stressful happens, say a piece of criticism, you may quietly read a negative meaning into it about yourself. A self-defeating move tends to follow close behind. Try the opposite: treat each of these moments as a chance to study your own fears and the beliefs underneath them.

4. Interrupt the automatic reaction. Impulsive responses to other people deserve a pause. Stress-reduction and relaxation techniques can redirect that spike of arousal toward soothing yourself instead. The gap you create is where an unspoken fear becomes something you can actually face.

5. Stop and pay attention. Notice how familiar the impulse feels. Most of us overreact to the same kind of event in the same way every time. Catching that pattern, even once, slows the reflex down.

6. Do something with the reaction. Don't just register it and move on. Put words to it. Say out loud what you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're about to do.

7. Pick your response. Choose the self-caring, effective move over the self-defeating impulse. Acting in a more functional way is itself a step toward the fear you've been dodging.

8. Credit the impulse. Your overreactions usually hand you some payoff. Often it's protection. If you can see what you're getting out of them, you start to understand the hidden reasons behind the actions that work against you. This is hard at first. Once you get the hang of it, you'll notice that your self-defeating reflex was built to meet a real need. Knowing that, you can meet the need some better way next time.

9. Build the skills. These are the emotional self-management abilities that steady you when things get confusing and keep you safe. They're worth practicing:

Feel your feelings. Your hidden needs become visible when you actually feel what you feel. Ignore your emotions and you're left running on what other people think and want, which erodes any independent sense of yourself and takes self-esteem down with it.

Keep your options open. Either/or thinking has to go. Reframe what a situation means by handing yourself several ways to read it, which cracks open new possibilities for working through whatever has you stuck.

Hold your boundaries. You don't have to agree to everything people ask of you. Saying no, pushing back on mistreatment, insisting on your own separateness: that's how boundaries stay intact.

Speak up. Use "I" statements. Say what you want, what you feel, what you see. Expressing your desires and thoughts directly and openly is how you demonstrate that your life belongs to you.

Listen. Take in what other people actually say and reflect it back. It pulls you out of your own head. You start to register other people's needs and to see your own part in how things played out.

Skip these practices and it's easy to end up flat, defeated, low on self-regard, and low self-esteem has a way of pushing people into bad decisions that make the whole thing worse. The direction can change, though. Work at raising your self-esteem and you can feel better about the person you are. Erin