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The Importance of Self-Esteem in Mental Health

Casie Johnston, LPCC
Clinician

On a scale of 0/10 how much do you love yourself? Where would you rate your self-esteem? What do you love about yourself? What are your strengths or something you are great at? What is something you’re not so great at? Or what do you want to change or work on in your life here in counseling?

These are some questions I’d ask in sessions. Self-esteem, confidence, and self-love is very important. Nothing breaks my heart more than having a 16 year old female in my session telling me her self-esteem is a 1/10. Or when a 50 year old women tells me she hates 100% of everything having to do with her and her appearance.

So the million dollar question…. How do you improve self-esteem and improve confidence? Below are some tips!

Celebrate your strengths! You are SO unique; you are you!! You may be great at certain things, good at some things, and not so good at some things. Celebrate and overly love all your strengths. Are you kind? Intelligent? Compassionate? Have a huge love of animals? Love your hair? Do you tell funny jokes?

What strength will you start to celebrate!?

Sometimes people can have difficult time coming up with things they love about themselves. If this is the case for you, someone close to you. What do they love about you? This may spark something that you also love about yourself!

Are you still having trouble? Maybe you thinking too big about this? You don’t have to have a Nobel Prize to be able to celebrate your accomplishments! I will always tell my clients to celebrate “small” wins, because any improvement is HUGE!!

Recognize and accept your weaknesses or flaws
Again, you are unique! You cannot be perfect, because no one can be. Make sure your expectations are not too high for yourself or too unrealistic. If you have a flaw/weakness accept it and try to move forward and learn from them. You cannot change something that is out of your control so make sure these flaws or weaknesses don’t start to control you!

Use positive self talk
In a well-known intervention, cognitive behavioral therapy, it explains how negative self-talk impacts your feelings and behaviors as well. This adds to lower self esteem. Negative self-talk contributes to your mental health, self-esteem, and confidence. These thoughts can become stuck inside your brain and continue to negatively impact your mental health.

Practice self-care
Self-care is extremely important in the mental health field. What do you enjoy doing? What are you good at? These are things that can help improve your self-esteem. If you are actively taking part in activities that bring you joy and you can gain a sense of fulfillment, your confidence may improve. If you are taking part in an activity that you are not as good at and continue to lose, your confidence can decrease until you practice enough to learn and this can then boost your confidence.

Break down your self-esteem
It’s easy to say “I don’t like myself” or “I don’t like my looks.” But what specifically don’t you like? Are you able to control any of it? What can you control? If you don’t like your hair, can you cut it? If not, how can you learn to love it? You don’t like how angry you get? Let’s work on it together 😊

Don’t compare yourself to others
This can be detrimental to your mental health. If you compare yourself with others, your expectations may become too high and this can bring you down. I often hear adults in my office compare their trauma to someone else. “Yeah that happened to me, but other people have it worse than me, so it’s not that bad.” This is saying to yourself that you are not able to feel a certain type of way about a traumatic situation in your life that causes you distress

As a side note, I often hear parents compare their children to other children their age. This can also be detrimental…. to the child and the parent. Every child is different, therefore, if you compare them to others, this can decrease their self-esteem if they feel like they are not as good as other children their age. This can also be a problem if parents think their children need to developmentally be meeting a milestone but in reality they are just taking a little bit longer to meet this milestone and aren’t technically delayed.
To conclude, your confidence and self-esteem is important for your mental health. If you don’t love yourself, it makes it difficult to let others love you as well! Celebrate who you are, celebrate your strengths, learn from your weaknesses, and never compare yourself to anyone else. No one else is YOU and that’s so important to remember! 😊