This Is How To Increase Self-Esteem: 4 Secrets From Research

There are days when you feel like you can do anything. And then there are other days…

Days where your self-esteem is playing hide and seek, and let’s just say it’s really good at hiding. You’re looking for it like, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and it’s under the bed, snickering and reading old issues of “Inadequate Weekly.”

We hear a lot about how to increase self-esteem. Unfortunately, most of that stuff should be filed under “Hooey and Nonsense.”

No, repeating “I am a strong, confident person” into the mirror doesn’t help. It just confuses your reflection. The research shows positive affirmations don’t work for people with low self-esteem because the afflicted don’t really believe them. It’s a clumsy dance of self-deception where you’re both the magician and the skeptical kid at the birthday party.

So what really works? It’s a trick question — because the whole idea of self-esteem doesn’t work.

That’s what famed psychologist Albert Ellis said. Ellis, for the uninitiated, was a psychotherapist who spent much of the 20th century trying to shout humanity out of its own delusions — and nowhere was his shouting more furious, more spittle-flecked, than in his treatment of the concept of self-esteem.

And he knew what he’s talking about. A survey of American and Canadian psychologists ranked him as the #2 most influential psychotherapist in history. Freud came in third.

Ellis looked at humanity’s slavish devotion to the cult of self-esteem and, with the bluntness of a man who had clearly given up on being invited to dinner parties, called it what it was: an elaborate, self-defeating fraud.

Curious? I thought you might be. It’s time to dive into the wildly entertaining world of Albert Ellis. His book is “The Myth of Self-Esteem.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Self-Esteem Doesn’t Work

You’re rating yourself as a human being. And how do you really do that? What if I do a thousand good things and then one absolutely horrible thing? Am I good or bad? What if I’m a bad employee but a good parent but a horrible spouse but a great friend? How does that math work out?

Better yet, you can’t even make a decent estimate because you don’t even know all the good and bad you’ve done. What if you’re a total jerk but you inspire a kid to go to medical school and that kid ends up curing cancer after you die? Rating yourself is impossible.

And here’s the main problem Ellis had with self-esteem, boiled down for the attention span TikTok left you with: Self-esteem is contingent. Conditional. It’s a rating. And once you agree to rate yourself — good, bad, six out of ten, needs improvement — you’re trapped in a game you cannot win, at least not for very long.

You constantly need to prove yourself. We spend so much time trying to inflate our self-worth with the equivalent of emotional jumper cables — compliments, achievements, Instagram likes — that it’s exhausting. We’re on a nonstop treadmill that drives us to do the things that win us status and approval, sometimes at the expense of what really makes us happy.

So what’s the solution?

Ellis called it Universal Self Acceptance (USA), which sounds like a patriotic self-help group. USA is based on the idea that one’s self-worth should not be contingent on achievements, performances, or the approval of others.

It’s the radical, terrifying, frankly suspiciously easy idea that you don’t actually have to earn your right to be okay with yourself. You’re a human being, which means — congratulations — you’ve already won the cosmic lottery of “good enough.” You’re in. You’re done.

How should you rate yourself? Don’t. Accept yourself as worthy because you exist. Not because you finished Duolingo Portuguese faster than your cousin. Because you are. Full stop. There is no scoreboard. No grand performance review. Sometimes you’re magnificent. Sometimes you’re chaos in a human suit. Either way, you don’t get demoted from “person” status.

That said, you should rate your thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

You should judge what you do, not what you are.

If this isn’t fully clicking, let me ask you a question: Why do you love a baby? Do you love them less when they cause you problems or fail at something? No. The love is unconditional. We might not love when the baby vomits on grandma, but that doesn’t make you love the baby any less. Apply the same principle to yourself.

Accepting yourself doesn’t mean you stop trying to improve. Ellis said, “I can acknowledge my mistakes and hold myself accountable for making them, but without berating myself for creating them or defining myself by them.”

Self-esteem is a treadmill that only speeds up the harder you run. The real trick, the only trick, is realizing you don’t have to run at all.

(To learn how to feel better and achieve your goals, click here.)

Make sense, right? But we still have an issue — how do we get this to sink in?

 

Dispute Irrational Beliefs

Ellis felt that the code running in your brain has bugs. We believe some irrational things and that leads to a lot of the problems we have around self-esteem:

• “If people disapprove of me, it means I’m inferior.”
• “I’m only as good as the work I do. If I’m not productive, I’m no good.”
• “If I try hard enough, all people will like me.”
• “If I try hard enough, my future will be happy and trouble free.”

None of these things are true. But we often act like they are.

When we have distressing thoughts related to self-esteem we need to ask, “What underlies this?” Often, it’s an irrational belief like one of the above.

Ellis suggests we challenge these ideas, which basically means having an argument with yourself and hoping no one calls the authorities. Take those underlying, core beliefs and revise them to something more rational:

• Core belief: Everyone I consider significant must love or approve of me.
• Rational response: I want most people to love or approve of me, and I will try to act in a respectful manner so they will. But it is inevitable that some people, for their own reasons, will not like or accept me. This is not catastrophic; my self-esteem can’t depend on the whims of others.

Or:

• Core belief: I must be thoroughly competent and adequate in everything I do. I should not be satisfied with myself unless I’m the best or I’m excelling.
• Rational response: I will strive to do my best rather than to be the best. I can enjoy doing things even if I’m not particularly good at them. I’m not afraid to try things that I might fail at; I’m fallible, and failing does not mean I’m a lousy person.

When you detach your self-worth from external factors you end up with a more stable and resilient sense of self.

(To learn how to become an expert at anything, click here.)

Still seem hard to internalize? It can be. But Ellis had a little homework assignment that could help accelerate the process in your brain. And it’s not hard to understand at all.

You just have to be willing to look a little crazy…

 

Shame Attacking Exercises

How do you quickly learn to depend less on external factors for your feeling of self-worth?

Ellis suggests: “Think of something you and most other people would think foolish for you to do in public and deliberately do this ‘shameful’ or ’embarrassing’ thing.”

Yes, you’re going to intentionally humiliate yourself in public to desensitize yourself to embarrassment. It’s basically exposure therapy for people who looked at normal exposure therapy and went, “Not terrifying enough.”

The examples he suggests sound less like therapy and more like lost pages from a masochist’s day planner: wearing “unsuitable clothes to school and to parties.” Or “singing at the top of your lungs in the street.” The two methods he deemed most effective were “yelling out the stops in the subway or on a bus; and stopping a stranger on the street or in a hotel lobby and saying, ‘I just got out of the mental hospital. What month is it?’”

I know, you’re cringing so hard that you’re two sizes smaller. But what was the result of him doing these things?

“Few people actually noticed or criticized me; and when they did, I soon didn’t give a damn.”

Yes, singing in public while wearing a clown suit is extreme. But you get the point. What other people think doesn’t have to affect what you think of yourself. In fact, other people usually aren’t thinking about you at all.

You don’t have to commit full-scale social seppuku or get arrested for disturbing the peace at Arby’s but doing some version of his Shame Attacking Exercises will rewire your brain to understand that the world doesn’t end when people raise an eyebrow.

(To learn the 6 secrets to a long awesome life, click here.)

What if you’re not up for screaming out subway stops? Yes, there’s another way to address self-esteem issues, but it doesn’t come from Albert Ellis…

 

Self-Compassion

Researcher Kristin Neff says it has three parts:

1) Be A Friend To Yourself

Neff’s approach is like wrapping yourself in a warm, fuzzy blanket of kindness every time you screw up, which, in my case, is approximately seventy-eight times a day.

Instead of talking to yourself like a criminal defendant facing trial at The Hague, use a voice that’s more nurturing and human. Like a slightly hungover Mr. Rogers saying, “Don’t sweat it. You tried your best. That’s what counts.” Give yourself the same pep talk you’d give a friend who’s down on their luck, except you’re both the friend and the wise sage.

2) Remember Our Shared Humanity

More bluntly: keep in mind that everyone else is also an idiot.

Remember: even the terrifyingly put-together mother at school pickup who manages to simultaneously coordinate her children’s violin lessons and Instagram influencer career has, at some point, backed into her own garage door.

The loneliness of failure is an illusion. If screwing up were an Olympic event, the human race would have so many gold medals we’d need a second planet just to store them.

3) Mindfulness

Neff isn’t asking you to levitate in the lotus position. Here mindfulness means not over-identifying with your screw-ups. She’s talking about noticing your train-wreck thoughts without getting on the train. It’s similar to Ellis in that you realize that your actions can be bad or stupid but that doesn’t make you bad or stupid.

Neff’s self-compassion is not sexy. It does not promise a “new you” in five easy steps, nor does it offer the bracing moral superiority of relentless self-critique. It is, instead, embarrassingly humble: an ongoing practice of treating yourself like someone who deserves to exist.

(For more on self-compassion from Kristin Neff, click here.)

Okay, time to round it all up – and learn the dead simple thing you can start doing right now to start feeling better about yourself…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to increase self-esteem…

• USA: Universal Self Acceptance isn’t just a way to deal with self-esteem issues. It’s a rebellion against the idea that you need to be a constantly evolving showroom of human perfection. It’s understanding that life isn’t about becoming a masterpiece; it’s about being a work in progress and occasionally spilling paint on the floor.
• Dispute Irrational Beliefs: You might never say, “Everyone must like me or I’m broken” but it may be your underlying belief. And it’s irrational. You need to take a weed whacker to your brain’s overgrown garden of nutty thoughts.
• Shame Attacking Exercises: Make yourself look ridiculous to feel less ridiculous.
• Self-Compassion: It’s about realizing you’re not perfect and forgiving yourself. Messing up isn’t a you-exclusive event; it’s a global party, and everyone’s invited.

So what’s a simple thing you can do to start feeling better?

Stop comparing yourself to other people.

The whole concept of “I’m better than him” or “I’m worse than her” is a trap — one designed to guarantee that you will forever oscillate between narcissistic delusion and pitiful self-flagellation. You’re sentencing yourself to a prison of chronic anxiety, punctuated by brief, jittery highs that dissipate the moment someone else posts a better vacation photo. If your self-worth depends on comparisons, you are always five minutes away from crashing harder than me trying to do a cartwheel after three bourbons.

Think about it: if you’re constantly comparing yourself to others, there’s no finish line. Oh, you finally make partner at the law firm? Great. Now you’ll compare yourself to the guy who owns the joint. You get a million YouTube subscribers? Adorable. MrBeast just bought a country. Enjoy feeling like plankton again.

And while you’re busy comparing your blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight reel, you’re missing the most spectacular show of all: your own life. It’s like going to the movies and spending the whole time watching the other audience members.

Stop comparing. Forget external factors. Instead, join the Albert Ellis fan club.

He didn’t promise that practicing Universal Self Acceptance would make you happy, or successful, or even particularly well-adjusted. Just free. Free from the sick little voice in your head that keeps whispering, “Maybe tomorrow you’ll finally deserve it.”

Adopting Ellis’ philosophy is not a cinematic, slow-motion transformation where you suddenly beam self-love out of your nipples and float off to an ethereal plane. You’ll still be an imperfect, occasionally tragic, often hilarious human mess. The real benefit is this:

You get to really live, not audition.