Self-esteem is the way you value yourself and the level of care that you believe you deserve. It is subjective and shaped by your experiences, relationships, and environment. Low self-esteem can show up as self-criticism, comparison, or feeling like you are not enough, while healthy self-esteem is balanced and not tied to performance. Your self-esteem can shift over time, and support through tools like online self esteem therapy can help you build a more stable foundation.
What is self esteem?
If you have ever wondered, “What is self esteem?” you are not alone. It’s a common question with huge applications.
Self-esteem is the way you value yourself and the level of care that you believe you deserve in your everyday life. It shapes how you speak to yourself, how you respond to challenges, and how you move through the world.
It’s helpful to note that your self-esteem is only one part of who you are. Your identity is shaped by your relationships, environment, and lived experiences, all of which continue evolving over time.
Taking the question “what is self esteem?” a step further
As you now know, self-esteem is how you value yourself and how much care and respect you believe you deserve.
In the moments when you feel the most tired or overwhelmed, questions around your self-esteem may surface more.
For instance, you may walk in the door after a long day at work. You remember that comment that your coworker made that felt a little passive-aggressive. You look in the mirror and realize that your makeup rubbed off and your hair is askew. Then, you see that massive pile of laundry you meant to start before running out the door… and the cat has knocked over your plant.
In moments like these, it can be easy to question your self-esteem. In fact, it is quite common.
Additionally, it’s worth highlighting that confidence is different from self esteem. You can feel very confident that you are an incredible ice-skater while still feeling insecure and depressed about yourself and your life overall. Confidence is skills-focused, while self-esteem encompasses your outlook on yourself and your life.
Lastly, self-esteem is subjective. You and someone else could go through similar experiences and feel completely different about yourselves.
Maybe in fifth grade, you and your best friend had the same teacher. She was strict, blunt, and introverted. Your friend may have found her intimidating and struggled to thrive under her care, while you may have found her clear expectations refreshing and helpful.
This is because self-esteem is shaped both by what happens to you and by how you interpret and narrate those experiences.
In other words: your perception of yourself matters.
Self-esteem is not believing that you are better than other people; it is believing that your worth does not disappear when life gets hard.
A simple way to reflect on your self-esteem
You might find it helpful to pause and ask yourself a few questions:
- Do you feel worthy of care even when you make a mistake?
- Do you speak to yourself with respect and kindness during stressful moments?
- Do you believe your value changes based on your performance?
If you want to dig even deeper, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale is used in research to explore these patterns of self esteem.
At the same time, you do not need a formal assessment to begin reflecting. Simple awareness can already begin shifting how you relate to yourself.
If your thoughts about yourself feel especially harsh or persistent, that can sometimes reveal deeper patterns that you may want to address through online self esteem therapy.
Why your self-esteem is fluid and shifts
If your self esteem feels inconsistent, that does not mean something is wrong with you.
Self-esteem is like a river: just as external factors like the seasons and the weather influence the flow of a river, so do different influences tend to impact your self-esteem.
Specifically, your self-esteem is shaped by several ongoing influences:
- How others treat you
- How you compare yourself to others
- How you explain your experiences
- What you base your worth on.
These influences are always present, even if you are not actively thinking about them.
You may be struggling with an ex who just won’t respect your boundaries, the tasks asked of you at work may be unreasonable, and you may feel frustrated that none of your dreams for yourself in high school seem to be coming true.
The river begins to overflow its banks, and you feel a torrent of disappointment in yourself and overwhelm coming on.
The good news is that, while your self-esteem is influenced by external factors, you can grow your self-esteem no matter what is happening around you.
The goal of this growth is to build up the ‘banks’ along your ‘river’ so that your self-esteem becomes more and more steady.
The self-esteem spectrum: finding balance instead of extremes
Self-esteem exists on a spectrum. Finding the appropriate balance in self esteem is essential to living a full and happy life.
What low self-esteem can look like in everyday life
When most people try to come up with a ‘low self esteem meaning’, it often includes insecurity or self-doubt.
At the same time, in everyday life, the specifics of that definition can feel quieter and harder to name.
For instance, a lack of self esteem might look like:
- Editing a text message over and over before sending it, then worrying about how it was received
- Sitting in a meeting and assuming everyone else is more capable than you and that they probably don’t like you
- Feeling like you need to prove yourself (abilities, beliefs, etc) constantly just to feel worthy of friendship and love
- Comparing your life to someone else’s and feeling like you are behind (who hasn’t fallen into that with their social media feed!?).
You might find yourself apologizing often, even when you have not done anything wrong… to the point that people get annoyed with you for how often you apologize.
You might struggle to accept compliments, brushing them off with a self-deprecating comment or questioning if the other person is being manipulative rather than sincere.
This lack of self esteem can develop gradually, especially in environments where your needs or experiences were not fully supported.
If you have experienced environments where your reality was questioned or dismissed, that can shape how you see yourself over time. For instance, if you experienced gaslighting in a relationship or from a parent, it is very normal to find balancing self-esteem challenging.
The good news is that your self-esteem is fluid and can grow into something stronger, stable, and confident.
What “too much” self-esteem can actually look like
While it’s important to have high self-esteem, moving too far on the other side of the spectrum is also destructive. That’s because you are moving from balanced, genuine self-esteem to being or appearing to be overly confident.
Self-esteem like this can easily become tied to external validation, overbearing success, and even attempts to control the situations and people around you.
It can look like:
- Feeling confident one day and completely unsure the next
- Realizing that you are frustrating your boss because being a team player and following directions feels unimportant
- Feeling shaken by small amounts of feedback
- Feeling worthy of love and acceptance because of your achievements.
This kind of self-esteem can feel unstable because it depends on things that change.
You may have your life together and feel very accomplished and worthy of love and respect one day, and then the next have the rug pulled out from under you.
Even if you seem to have it all together, sometimes, what appears to be high self-esteem can actually have very fragile foundations.
In both cases (low self-esteem or overly high self-esteem), your self-esteem is being shaped by something outside of you.
The question is this: What if you could have strong self-esteem no matter what your circumstances were? What if you could find stable self-esteem?
What healthy, balanced self-esteem actually looks like
In therapy, one of the most common misconceptions we see in our patients is that they believe self-esteem comes after success. In reality, healthier self-esteem often develops when you learn to treat yourself with respect before you feel successful. Many clients discover that constant self-criticism was never motivating them – it was exhausting them.
This is the key: healthy self esteem is not about thinking you are perfect.
It often looks like:
- Making mistakes and still treating yourself with care: Instead of replaying an incident all night, you allow yourself to move forward.
- Not needing to be the best all the time to feel okay: You can participate, contribute, and exist without needing to outperform everyone around you.
- Receiving feedback without assuming it defines your worth: You can hear what others are saying, reflecting on what you find helpful while disregarding the rest.
- Speaking to yourself with respect and kindness: You maintain a healthy, encouraging ‘inner voice’, even during stressful and embarrassing moments.
- Trusting yourself while remaining open to growth: You know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and you are willing to work on those at your own pace.
Healthy self-esteem feels steady. It does not disappear the moment something goes wrong.
The three foundations of stable self-esteem
If you want to build more stable self-esteem, it can be helpful to focus on three core foundations:
Self-awareness
Healthy self-esteem starts with understanding yourself honestly. This means noticing your strengths, weaknesses, emotions, and patterns without immediately judging them. Self-awareness allows you to respond to yourself with clarity instead of criticism.
Self-acceptance
Self-acceptance means recognizing that your worth does not disappear when you make mistakes, experience setbacks, or struggle. You can acknowledge areas for growth while still treating yourself with respect.
Self-respect
Self-respect is how you put your self-esteem into action. It shows up in the boundaries you set, the relationships you choose, and the way you speak to yourself during difficult moments. Self-respect communicates to yourself that your needs, feelings, and well-being matter.
Together, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-respect create a foundation that is less dependent on achievements, appearance, or the opinions of others.
Why your self-esteem changes when you are overwhelmed
Even if you have worked on strengthening your self-esteem, there will be times when it feels lower. That’s completely normal. This often happens when you are exhausted, stressed, or navigating uncertainty.
Imagine a day where you did not sleep well, your schedule feels overwhelming, and something small goes wrong. You might notice your thoughts becoming more critical or your confidence dropping.
Postpartum mamas, students studying for finals, professionals whose day just didn’t go right, no matter what…no matter what your circumstances are, there will be stressful days when it is easy to give in to those old patterns of low self-esteem.
This does not mean your self-esteem is gone. It means your internal resources are stretched.
You might just need a nap, a snack, and the mantra that you will come back to this thought later. Recognizing this without judging yourself can help you respond with more care instead of criticism.
How your environment can impact your self-esteem
Social media and comparison
You are often exposed to curated versions of other people’s lives.
You open your feed to see that your friend from college just had the perfect wedding, another friend had an adorable baby, and finally, your cousin got promoted at work. It’s easy to feel like you missed the boat or messed up because your life doesn’t have those same successes.
The reality is that you’re only seeing one piece of a complex puzzle. You’re not seeing when the bride’s gown ripped the day of the wedding, the grueling moments at 3am as that baby was being born, or your cousin’s anxiety that she may not be as fit for the job as it appears.
Then, add in that your feed is often full of the lives of people with whom you have no connection at all.
Over time, these observed moments without their context can shift how you evaluate yourself.
If you notice yourself feeling this way, you are not alone. Enjoy the piece of the puzzle that you see, remembering that it is only a piece and not the whole reality.
Relationships and external influence
Your relationships influence how you experience yourself.
A strong friend who was there for you through thick and thin can help you to maintain strong and healthy self-esteem. At the same time, if you keep striking out romantically because, over and over again, you feel used, it can become easier to believe the ‘reality’ that low self-esteem spins for you.
Supportive relationships can strengthen your sense of self. Unhealthy patterns can lead you to question your worth over time.
Family and early experiences
Some of your earliest messages about your worth come from your environment growing up.
You could have had a big sister who decided to help you navigate social situations and changes. She helped you to feel secure and confident because she shared her friends, clothes, and social savvy.
Or you could have had a big sister who decided not to take you under her wing. You started to question if you knew how to handle different situations or if people actually want to hang out with you or not.
These patterns can continue influencing your self esteem into adulthood.
The good news is that, no matter what your background looks like, it is still possible to achieve stable self-esteem.
What it looks like to move toward healthier self esteem
Small shifts often matter more than dramatic change.
You might notice yourself:
- Pausing before criticizing yourself
- Allowing something to be “good enough” even though you know if you spent more time on it, it could be better
- Questioning comparisons and accepting yourself as different, not worse
- Taking your feelings seriously.
You may have spent years believing that being harder on yourself will help you grow, when in reality, being too hard on yourself can keep you from growing!
Over time, it’s important for you to realize that constant self-criticism has not helped you move forward. It has only made things feel heavier. Your criticism became a weight, making movement and growth harder.
Think about it this way: If you have to be ‘perfect’ (whatever that may look like to you), and you want to switch careers, it can become utterly overwhelming to go through the process of even finding a new job.
You find yourself thinking about every step of the process in excess and worrying about it. Giving up and making do where you are can feel more logical.
If you feel free to make mistakes because you have self-esteem that is not tied to your circumstances, you are freer to try new things (like a new career) because you accept that if it does not go well, you, as a person, are still worthy.
Similarly, an important way to build self-esteem is to work on not comparing yourself to others.
In the beloved children’s book The Horse and His Boy, one of the main characters, Aravis, wants to know the fate of another girl that she knew.
The voice of wisdom in the series, Aslan the lion, replies, “Child…I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.”
This holds true when learning how to build self-esteem. You don’t need to compare yourself to anyone else anymore. You are building your own story and it is beautiful on its own, without comparing it to anyone else’s.
If you want to build on that foundation, you can explore practical next steps in our guide on how to improve self esteem.
Why self-esteem matters more than you think
Your self esteem influences how you make decisions, set boundaries, respond to challenges, and navigate relationships.
Research suggests that self-esteem is closely connected to emotional resilience and overall mental health. When your self-esteem feels more stable, you are better able to move through stress and uncertainty.
Some public policy leaders have also explored how self-esteem may influence how people respond to life’s challenges. In 1986, California created a task force focused on self-esteem and personal responsibility to study these connections.
What do therapists notice about people struggling with self-esteem?
You may assume that low self-esteem always looks obvious. The truth is, you can appear highly successful while struggling with self-esteem.
Therapists often see self-esteem challenges hidden beneath:
- perfectionism
- overachievement
- difficulty accepting compliments
- people-pleasing
- fear of disappointing others.
You can often appear confident on the outside while privately feeling that your worth depends on your achievements.
Can self-esteem be improved, and will online therapy help?
Your self-esteem is not fixed.
Online self esteem therapy can help you:
- explore patterns in how you speak to yourself
- navigate comparisons that used to feel natural to you
- understand the experiences that shaped your self-perception
- build a more stable relationship with yourself.
You do not have to handle this alone anymore.
Strengthen your self-esteem with Makin Wellness
You do not need to become someone new. You do not need to become someone you see on a screen. You do not need to become someone that you’ve been compared to.
You can begin by noticing how you speak to yourself and what you base your worth on. Even small awareness can begin to shift your relationship with yourself.
If you are struggling with a lack of self esteem, support is available. At Makin Wellness, you can connect with a specialized online therapist who understands your mental health journey.
Make an appointment or call (833)-274-heal to get matched today.
Further Reading:
FAQs:
Self-esteem is how you value and treat yourself. It reflects how much care and respect you believe you deserve, and it can shift over time based on your experiences.
A lack of self esteem can develop from comparison, criticism, or environments that shaped how you see yourself. Your interpretation of experiences plays a major role, and these patterns can build over time.
Yes, online therapy can help you understand patterns in your self-perception and build a more supportive relationship with yourself. It provides tools and guidance tailored to your mental health journey.
Self-esteem can become unstable when it depends heavily on validation or achievement. This can create a fluctuating sense of self, including times of great achievement and praise. Developing balanced self-esteem can help you feel steadier through the highs and lows of life.
You might notice self-criticism, comparison, or difficulty accepting compliments. A lack of self esteem often shows up in how you speak to yourself. Developing awareness of your ‘inner voice’ is an important first step.
