Self Esteem
- Thread starter maria1
- Start date
cLavain
Well-known member
Only one thing: Exercise. Especially increasing your strength. This has helped me, partly because it makes me physically stronger, but perhaps more importantly - when you see the results of your hard work it shows that you can control at least some parts of your life and not just be pushed around by circumstances! No complete cure for low self esteem, of course, but a step in the right direction.
allanboy
Well-known member
I´m with clevain on this one. Get yourself in a (punishing) physical activity. Yeah, there is a whole lot of endocrins and creatins that get stimulated and all that morphological talk, but you´ll see yourself in the mirror and start to like what you are seeing. Thats where comes my next advice, get your looks up. Try some new hair style, new clothing, tattoos, collars, handwrists, whatever you like to see in other people, try it in YOU.
Positive thinking, i donno what else to say. Good luck with that.
Positive thinking, i donno what else to say. Good luck with that.
racheH
Well-known member
I think it will depend on what's causing your self-esteem to be low. Reading books like that might well help you to understand exactly what the issues are. My social phobia was a major cause of my low self-esteem - I thought that the reason I was scared of things that other people weren't was that I was just weaker and inferior somehow. When I realised it was just bad luck that I had come to be that way, I felt a lot better. And now that I can do the same things as other people, and often with more ease, I feel better still.
This is important though: it can be a vicious cycle. If you believe that you are inferior to others for whatever reason, you will be more likely to believe what they say. Sometimes someone will likely be a better judge of your abilities at something than you are, like your teacher or trainer, but much of the time, no one knows your abilities better than you, as you're with yourself for longer than anyone else. If you don't credit your own judgements enough, you're likely to give also a disproportionate amount of credit to those of others. Remember, there's not necessarily reason to assume that someone else's evaluation of you is more accurate than your own.
I still have this problem a bit, and it's not the same as social phobia. Most of the time, I don't believe what people think about me or anything else - I'm verging on paranoid, actually...
This is important though: it can be a vicious cycle. If you believe that you are inferior to others for whatever reason, you will be more likely to believe what they say. Sometimes someone will likely be a better judge of your abilities at something than you are, like your teacher or trainer, but much of the time, no one knows your abilities better than you, as you're with yourself for longer than anyone else. If you don't credit your own judgements enough, you're likely to give also a disproportionate amount of credit to those of others. Remember, there's not necessarily reason to assume that someone else's evaluation of you is more accurate than your own.
I still have this problem a bit, and it's not the same as social phobia. Most of the time, I don't believe what people think about me or anything else - I'm verging on paranoid, actually...
relaxed_attention
Active member
And remember we CAN change ourselves. We are dynamic creatures. Read some success stories. They'll get you motivated.
In my case, increasing self-esteem is incredibly difficult. I have been at this for a long time and I've come to one conclusion: My brain knows the difference from fact and fiction.
I've tried self-talk, programming my subconscious with positive input, and that sort of thing, but only real feedback from real-world experiences seems to make any difference. My only hope is that my positives continue to outpace my negatives.
For me, the key to increasing self-esteem was the exact thing that took it away – social interaction. The big difference would be in how I interpreted everyday events.
I've tried self-talk, programming my subconscious with positive input, and that sort of thing, but only real feedback from real-world experiences seems to make any difference. My only hope is that my positives continue to outpace my negatives.
For me, the key to increasing self-esteem was the exact thing that took it away – social interaction. The big difference would be in how I interpreted everyday events.
racheH
Well-known member
Definitions of self-esteemCrazy said:
Self-esteem is a group of thoughts and feelings relating to quality of one's self. It presumably exists to the same extent as thoughts and feelings about the quality of other things do - brain activity that somehow results in perception. You could argue that thoughts and feelings, along with other base perceptions such as our experience of colour and sound, are the only things we can say with real certainty do exist in an objective world, as we actually experience them. We don't actually experience other 'truths', we just assume them. It's the whole 'I think, therefore I am' thing (which should rather be 'I think, therefore there is thought').Crazy said:
Um, is that the kind of answer you wanted, or am I barking up the completey wrong tree? :?
AnthonyJ31
Active member
maria1 said:
I agree with you Maria. I think the self-esteem aspect is the main force behind alot of peoples battles with social anxiety disorder - at least that's how I feel personally in regards to my situation. In fact, I am 99% sure that my self-esteem/self-concept issues are what kicked off this condition to begin with. The way I look at it is this: If a person has a healthy level of self-esteem and they like who they are, then that person is not going to be all that concerned with how other people perceive them. The fear of embarrassment and of ridicule that most all of us Socially phobic people have would not be much of an issue. I know that I have ALOT of work to do personally; I have so many scars that need to be healed stemming from my childhood and adolescence that it often times seems like it's a hopeless, pointless battle. If only I could like who I am and feel comfortable in my own skin; boy, what a wonderful feeling that would be. But I'm not even close to that......But I wish you the best and I wish everyone on here the best, and I hope for the best for me also...Because things have been awfully tough lately.
racheH
Well-known member
Hmmm I think caring how others perceive you because you believe that how they perceive you must be how you really are is different to caring because you have a phobia of being perceived a certain way. I used to believe the same as you about it, but the more I've thought about it I've realised that in my early life I had high self-esteem, yet also a severe irrational fear of being judged negatively. A phobia is a physiological response that is initiated before someone has time to think about what they're responding to. If a phobia is causing you to care about what people think, then changing beliefs about yourself won't work, anymore than it would cure any other kind of phobia. The conditioned response we have to something must be reconditioned. This is far harder with social phobia than most others, partly because what we actually fear (disapproval) is hard to recreate in a therapeutic setting. Instead, it seems that we have to take what disapproval we can get our hands on in everyday life and apply therapeutic methods to it, without the help of a professional.AnthonyJ31 said:
So for me at any rate, social phobia lead to low self-esteem, not the other way round. My personal opinion is that treating it like any other phobia, rather than an underlying cognitive process (although faulty cognition will hinder attempts at reconditioning, I find), will offer the best chance of curing it. I hope however, that I'm wrong and others will find success however they go about it
