Living with low self-esteem and anxiety can make life difficult. Although these are natural to experience, it is essential to manage them. Having a perfect set of teeth can boost your confidence. Remember that you cannot maximize the gift of life if you let your anxiety and low outlook control and decide your journey. In short, take approaches to conquer yourself and make your life fruitful.
About Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is confidence in how you see yourself. It has a vital role in social anxiety and general anxiety disorder. While reduced self-confidence may put you in danger of later social anxiety, having an anxiety issue can likewise feel worse about yourself. This way, these two difficulties interact to proceed with a negative cycle.
If you want to defeat your social anxiety, begin by really investigating how you see yourself. Over time, low self-esteem can form loneliness and anxiety, which only strengthens your negative self-image.
Main Beliefs and Self-Esteem
If you have social anxiety, you probably have central convictions about your self-image. For example, thinking about you do not have enough abilities to adapt to social and performance situations. Or you believe that you cannot control your anxiety around people. As you can notice, these beliefs help to make your anxiety remain and might be established in low self-esteem.
While most individuals have brief sensations of making errors, they ordinarily bounce back. Then again, if you have low self-confidence, how you feel in a specific circumstance may control how you view your overall self-image. Your beliefs on how you view yourself are subject to the moment. Hence, any misstep can increase negativity about your self-image.
Interestingly, individuals with healthy self-confidence can precisely assess themselves, their strengths, and their weaknesses and still accept worthwhile individuals.
The pattern of Low Self-Esteem
Living with social anxiety can probably experience unreasonable social principles and difficulty choosing achievable goals.
For instance, you may accept that everybody should like you and never say or do some unacceptable thing.
In friendly and performance circumstances that you discover challenging, you will probably move your attention internally toward your anxiety. This will result in seeing yourself negatively, maximizing the undesirable consequences of committing mistakes.
Furthermore, you perhaps fall back on plans that you feel have worked for you previously, for example, keeping away from circumstances or applying safety behaviors. Then, once it is all over, you possibly think about everything you did wrong, over and over again. Along these lines, low self-esteem and social anxiety propagate each other in an endless loop.
Is Low Self-Esteem a Mental Health Issue?
Having low self-confidence is certifiably not a mental health issue in itself. However, low self-esteem and mental health problem are closely connected. In case bunches of things influence your self-esteem for quite a while, this may prompt mental health problems such as anxiety or depression.
Some experiences of low self-esteem can be indications of a mental health issue. Especially if they keep going for an extended period or influence your everyday life. For instance:
- hating yourself
- feeling miserable or useless
- blaming yourself unreasonably
- worrying about being not able to get things done
Having a mental health issue can likewise make you have low self-esteem. Additionally, it may feel more difficult to adapt or find ways to improve your confidence.
Reasons For Low Self-Esteem and Anxiety
Some people may wonder how they develop low self-esteem and anxiety. While on the other hand, others have a clear idea when they began to feel this way.
Experiences that can promote anxiety and low self-esteem incorporate the following occasions during childhood and later life:
- Bullying or teasing
- Criticism from guardians
- Neglect or being ignored
- Ridicule by peers
- Physical, emotional, or sexual maltreatment
- Unrealistic assumptions or impossibly high expectations of others
Nevertheless, individuals who grow up being heard, regarded, adored, celebrated, and acknowledged are more averse to develop a poor self-image. Obviously, numerous individuals with challenging upbringings can have great self-confidence. Also, even those with loving guardians and incredible encounters with peers may still develop low self-esteem. This underlines that low self-esteem and anxiety are not something you need to live with.
Improving Self-Esteem and Reducing Social Anxiety
Living with low self-esteem is not a life sentence. You can start to roll out some improvements that will enhance your outlook on yourself, which can have positive results in terms of your social anxiety.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is often recommended to facilitate indications regarding social anxiety and may also help your self-esteem. However, you can still get things done all alone to help support your capacity to precisely see and acknowledge who you are:
Be Compassionate
Treat yourself just as you would treat a dear companion or relative. Remember that you can develop healthy self-esteem if you listen, love, respect, celebrate, and acknowledge yourself.
Stay in the Present
One error does not imply a lifetime of disaster. See beyond transient circumstances, for example, an individual frowning at you. It might have nothing to do with you. It would be better to ask how you can help the person or if something is not correct. Try not to look excessively far into the future and anticipate that things will go badly. No one can predict or know what will happen tomorrow, a week from now, or in about a year.
Challenge That Inner Voice
Start paying attention to what you say to yourself. Then, at that point, when you are critical, attempt to recognize what you did well as opposed to beating yourself up over what you fouled up.
Forgive Yourself
In particular, forgive yourself for anything that has been keeping you down. This is your opportunity to start all over again. Remind yourself that you are human and will not do all perfectly. Acknowledge terrible feelings, yet do not allow them to clear you away in their current.
Takeaway
Suppose you end up living with low self-esteem and anxiety that is hard to defeat all alone. In that case, consider reaching out to a family member, friend, doctor, or somebody in the community to clarify how you have been feeling.
At times, feelings of low confidence and anxiety are extreme to the point that they need professional support in treatment or medication. Nothing is shameful in reaching out for help. Instead, this may permit you to push ahead and help other people similarly situated as you.
References:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).
https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad
How to Overcome Your Negative Self-Image.
https://www.hypnosisdownloads.com/blog/self-image
Mental health problems – an introduction.
February 17, 2018. The Psychology of Expectations.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201802/the-psychology-expectations
May 07, 2021. What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-behavior-therapy-2795747
