How to Stop Hating Yourself and Embark on the Path of Self-Esteem
We all tend to get a little self-loathing at times, and sometimes it’s a dark path that can only get worse. Fortunately, resisting is not that difficult if you set yourself up right.
Confidence is important , but sometimes it’s easier to get bogged down in self-doubt so deep that confidence seems like a distant goal. Self-loathing is another game in which you are so obsessed with your flaws that you refuse to accept the good. You are sitting in front of the audience applauding you, but that does not mean that you are saving the world. You have the perfect job at the perfect company, but you don’t manage the people you want. You have completed 10 km, but you cannot complete the marathon. It can go on and on. No matter what you accomplish, you still hate yourself. Let’s fix this.
Find a place to change your mind
Often these moments of self-loathing are fleeting, overturned by a hard day at the office or a particularly unpleasant breakup. In such cases, you can approach it the same way you would any other mental hiccup: find a quick fix. Using an example from Anneli Rufus’s book Unworthy , Psych Central suggests finding a place where you hate yourself less:
For starters, Rufus found a place where she hated herself less: on the seashore … in a stormy, stormy, lapping sea. “The sea expects nothing from me,” she explains. “I cannot disappoint the sea. He does not care. It does not hate me, does not love me, does not care who I am and what I wear, because it does not care whether I am there or not. The sea is roaring, anyway. “
Your place can be anywhere. This could be a local coffee shop, a hacker space in your city, a specific park, or something else. The point is to find a place where you can go and where you will be reminded that the world is much bigger than you. If you are anything like me, it means that you need to get as far away from work or home as possible. I ended up in a strange place on the beach along the bike path, where few people hang out. It’s quiet, private and a great place to get rid of all the stupidity in my head.
Define your niche
Likewise, find your niche in the world. Once you identify the traits that make you cool, it will be much easier for you to focus on them and feel better about yourself. Instead of feeling bad about what you cannot do, you can think about everything that you can .
There is a mind trap that is easy to fall into when you hate yourself, when your accomplishments seem insignificant. This is most likely partly because you are concentrating on the wrong things. I may not be the best small talker, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to talk. It’s easier to scold yourself for what you can’t do instead of figuring out what you’re best at.
Finding your niche also works on many levels. Your niche can be a personality trait (you are kind, good at problem solving, etc.) or a skill set. It doesn’t really matter what it is, it’s important to focus on your strengths rather than your weaknesses.
You have many tools to figure out what you are best at. The most obvious one is to just list your traits, but if you’re unsure about your niche, it’s time to think more like a researcher . Try new things, find what you do better than most people, and run with it. It’s amazing that having “one good thing” can boost your overall self-esteem.
Practice a little self-discovery
One of the problems of self-loathing often stems from over-humility. Humility itself is not a bad trait. Going too far can become an obstacle that prevents you from acknowledging your accomplishments and accepting compliments.
The trick is to try to get to know yourself better. The hater does not see himself as others see him. In turn, it’s easy to ignore someone’s compliment because it doesn’t seem genuine. Psychology today breaks it down like this :
But there is no right or wrong way to see yourself, there is no Archimedean point of reference around which the perception of others should revolve. The other person’s assessment of you is as true as yours, and perhaps more so in relation to how you treat other people, be it a family relationship, a friendship, or a romantic one. Simply put, people who think they are good may seem like nasty jerks to others, and people who think they have nothing to offer to others may be considered very interesting by others. The thing is, you don’t know as much about yourself as you think …
This is one of those cognitive truths that is difficult to correct. If you hate yourself, this feeling of inferiority is there no matter what you do. The trick, according to Psychology Today, is to do your best to remember that your self-image is neither complete nor more “correct” than anyone else. You can learn a lot from how other people see you, but you need to accept what you are learning and try to integrate it into your own views.
Attack your prejudices
Once you’ve accumulated a little more of this self-knowledge, it’s time to attack the biases you have about yourself to see how many of them are true.
When you hate yourself, you tend to focus on your failures and ignore what you really are. We see over and over how wrong these self-prejudices are. Shyness is nothing more than a habit , you can completely change your outlook with a little effort , and when you expect failure it is much easier to deal with . We think we know ourselves well, but often we don’t.
Dealing with this takes a lot of work, but most of it is breaking out of your comfort zone and challenging your own “standard view” of the world . In David Foster Wallace’s opening speech “This Is Water” above, he reminds us that we tend to automatically think in ways that leave us limited. Wallace talks about the views that we tend to oppose about others, but his point of view is just as relevant about the self-loathing that we all tend to relate to ourselves. Take a step back from your default gaze and you’ll likely see how wrong your self-beliefs are. If you feel like a failure, ask yourself how badly you failed. If you are feeling ugly, remind yourself of everything you are good at. If your default opinion is that you are the worst person, think about how much harm you have actually done to the world.
Stop caring what others think
While you have to do a lot of mental upheavals to overcome self-loathing, one of the biggest reasons for self-loathing comes from what you think other people expect from you. The trick is to really stop giving a shit about what other people think. Author Julien Smith says it better than many others :
If you drop things that don’t matter; if you get these things out of your head and focus on what needs to be done; if you understand that your time is limited and decide to work now; only then can you reach the finish line. Otherwise, you will be discouraged from leading a life that you are not interested in.
Note: You need to better deal with setback and the unknown. You may be in a difficult place right now where you feel lonely or a failure. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. But it’s time to realize how common this is and that even the most successful and happiest people in the world face them. These people pass them by, and so do you.
Once you accept all these awkward moments, setbacks, labyrinths and toxic social encounters as normal, it will be much easier to look inward and see yourself as you are: just a different person trying not to screw up more than anyone else.