HEALTHY SELF ESTEEM

Self-esteem is your subjective sense of overall personal worth or value. Similar to self-respect, it describes your level of confidence in your abilities and attributes.

Having healthy self-esteem can influence your motivation, your mental well-being, and your overall quality of life. However, having self-esteem that is either too high or too low can be problematic. Better understanding what your unique level of self-esteem is can help you strike a balance that is just right for you.

Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to address problems with your perceptions of yourself and faith in your abilities. How do you build self-esteem? Some actions that you can take to help improve your self-esteem include:

1. Become more aware of negative thoughts: Learn to identify the distorted thoughts that are impacting your self-worth.
2. Challenge negative thinking patterns: When you find yourself engaging in negative thinking, try countering those thoughts with more realistic and/or positive ones.
3. Use positive self-talk: Practice reciting positive affirmations to yourself.
4. Practice self-compassion: Practice forgiving yourself for past mistakes and move forward by accepting all parts of yourself.
5. Work On Body Neutrality: Another great way to build confidence is to learn to accept your body. This can mean working on body positivity, but it can also mean focusing on body neutrality. Body neutrality aims to keep the focus away from an overly negative or overly positive outlook and instead centers on acceptance and respect for your body. Some ways to practice body neutrality include:
6. Unfollow social media accounts that make you feel strongly one way or another about your body
7. Learn about and practice intuitive eating
8. Find types of exercise you can do just for fun, without focusing on changing your body
9. Practice identifying your bodily functions in a neutral way (i.e.“my arms can carry in the groceries,” “my brain can read this article”)
10. Practice Enforcing Boundaries: Boundaries are guidelines or rules someone creates that outline how they would like people to behave around them, and how they might respond if someone ignores those guidelines. For example, a person may explain to their partner: “I need to have a night out with my friends every once in a while” and expect that their partner will honor the request—emergencies aside.

Enforcing boundaries may cause you to feel guilty or even fearful at first, but the more you practice stating what you need clearly, kindly and calmly, the more confident you should end up feeling—and the stronger your self-respect will be.

In conclusion, building self-esteem takes time, so be patient with yourself. As long as you try your best, that’s all that matters. Let us know if any of these tips worked for you!

About the writer: Abdulhakim Bashir Tijjani is a mental health advocate with about 4 year experience working on projects centered around mental health, advocacy and suicide prevention. On a mission to strengthening mental health system in Nigeria and Africa at large. He is also a 2022 Leadership for Africa Fellow (LEAP Africa), a youth leadership program.

He is a medical student and a graduate of Human Anatomy. His hobbies include reading, research and traveling.

He can be reach via:

Twitter/Instagram/Facebook @abtddm

Email: abtddm92@gmail.com

REFERENCES

1) https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-esteem-2795868

2) https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/how-to-build-self-esteem/

3) https://www.hoytorg.com/6-ways-to-boost-your-self-esteem/