The Self Esteem Trap – Why High Self Esteem is Unhelpful
Yes, you read the title right! High self – esteem can be unhelpful.
We all are familiar with listening to people talk about their low self- esteem issues and how it made them under-confident. So, we think having high self-esteem could make our lives better. In contrast, higher self-esteem can cause us more harm than it does any good for us.
Defining Self Esteem
Self Esteem is described as a person’s positive evaluation of the self in terms of his own worth and abilities. Self-esteem is necessary in order to stay positive and motived in accomplishing different tasks in life. It helps one reach towards their full potential. Early experiences in life play an important role in forming healthy self-esteem.
A person with healthy self-esteem is confident and ready to take on the tests and trials of life. It gives him the courage to move ahead since he believes in his own capabilities. One who has developed constructive opinion about himself leads happier life, maintains good relationships with family and friends and assesses his life to be an overall good place.
When compared to healthy self-esteem, low self-esteem hinders one to be pro-active and always accompanies the person with self-defeating and self-pity thoughts. The reasons for low self-esteem can be many including prolonged illness during childhood, parental separation, disharmony in the household to name a few. Having the same abilities as the one with healthy self-esteem, people with low self-esteem often do not take actions and end up unhappy or depressed about life.
Why is high self-esteem unhelpful?
We understood how healthy self-esteem can be beneficial for an individual in terms of his own self- worth. However, when healthy self-esteem moves north and becomes high self-esteem, the effects are often extremely adverse.
In 2003, top psychologists from American Psychological Association conducted a study on Self-Esteem and concluded that higher self-esteem links with egotism, narcissism and arrogance. All these traits make people place themselves above everyone by developing a sense of entitlement than by genuine accomplishments. Also, they do not accept their mistakes and become defensive when faced with honest feedback.
The higher self-esteem creates an impression of being a winner and successful. In order to keep up the momentum of winning, they go through tedious work leading to chronic stress and anxiety. It also lead to fragile self-esteem when the streak of winning ends and encountered with failure. The sudden failure can cause high self-esteem dip to low self-esteem making way to depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol.
What are the alternatives to Self-Esteem and why are they better?
Self-esteem is mainly associated with judgments. When people have higher self-esteem, they judge themselves as winners or successful. When having lower self-esteem, they judge themselves to be losers or failure. Giving into such judgements will not help us in having a richer and meaningful lives. The alternatives to self-esteem can help us understand us better by delving deeper into oneself and making way to richer lives.
We have two important alternatives (from many others) to self-esteem – Self-acceptance and self-awareness.
Self-acceptance: Letting go off all self-judgements that arise in our minds is the first step towards self-acceptance. It helps us analyse a situation by assessing the actions we undertook while performing a task instead of listening to the words that pop up our mind. Ultimately, we all stand for our actions rather than what we think of ourselves.
Self-awareness: Being aware and mindful of one’s own thoughts, feelings and actions is termed as self-awareness. We can attain maximum self-awareness by receiving honest feedback from others who are trust worthy and non-judgemental. It enables in self-reflection and examine ourselves to improvise and lead the lives we want for ourselves.
What’s next?
When you hear someone advising you to improve your low self-esteem, it means you are judging yourselves harshly. Or when you notice yourself appreciating yourself more than needed, you are judging yourself highly. It is the moment to realise you are falling into the self-esteem trap. When the trap is too tight to break, life goes haywire.
A therapy session can guide you through your inner self by providing alternatives to self-esteem and boost your self-confidence. A therapy can reduce the judgements, you have on yourself and make way for self-acceptance and self-awareness get near you. More of self-acceptance and self-awareness is more understanding of oneself to embrace life of fulfilment and abundance.
Mallika is keenly interested in writing and human psychology. She loves to interact with people from various walks of life and add value to the society from the learnings through interactions.
Mallika is keenly interested in writing and human psychology. She loves to interact with people from various walks of life and add value to the society from the learnings through interactions.
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