Overcoming Low Self-Esteem

If your self-esteem is low, if you feel inferior, inadequate, self-critical, or self-doubtful, these feelings may cause pain and difficulties. This book was written to help ease that pain, with insights and exercises designed to make a difference.

Dr Melanie Fennell is an award-winning pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, in the United Kingdom. She's developed courses at the University of Oxford and was a Founding Fellow of Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre.

"Overcoming Low Self-Esteem" is a classic in the field. It's been recommended by Reading Well, which is the U.K. National Health Service's program of recommended reading from health experts.

So keep listening to find out where low self-esteem comes from, what rules have to do with building your confidence, and how you can start accepting yourself more, right now.

Fennell begins by looking at the origin of low self-esteem and the problems it creates. It comes from negative beliefs about yourself and the type of person you are. These beliefs come from your experiences.

She outlines several factors that may lower self-esteem, such as failing to meet family or peer standards, not having needs met, experiencing family stress, being an outsider, or even experiencing something late in life that lowers your self-esteem.

So, your self-esteem often reflects whether you have had positive, mixed, or negative experiences in life.

Low self-esteem affects your thoughts, behavior, feelings, physical state, and all aspects of your life – from work, to relationships, to self-care. It's hard to enjoy life when your self-esteem is unhealthy.

Before working with the tools in the book, it's important to recognize if low self-esteem is your root problem or if it's caused by something else.

Sometimes low self-esteem comes from depression, and the book describes how to recognize this. If your low opinion of yourself is linked to depression, the first priority is to get treatment, though some of the book's tools could be helpful as a supplement.

Low self-esteem can also come from other problems, such as anxiety or relationship difficulties. If this is the case, your main focus needs to be the root cause, the problem itself.

And sometimes, low self-esteem is the cause of other problems. If you're suffering from social anxiety or an eating disorder, for example, these may be symptoms of low self-esteem rather than the causes of it. The best way to address these problems is to work directly on improving your self-esteem.

Some people experience low self-esteem in a wide range of situations. Their self-critical thoughts are easily triggered, they may feel that something's wrong with them, and they have a hard time accessing a positive perspective. This view of the self can hurt your life on many levels. If you relate to this, the book can be helpful and you might need other support too, such as therapy.

Other people find that low self-esteem only impacts them in particularly challenging situations. Most of the time, these people see their challenges as problems to be solved, rather than taking them to mean there is something wrong with them.

Most people's self-esteem falls between the two ends of this spectrum. These are the people the book was written for – those who struggle enough with their self-confidence to want to change it, but are able to consider other perspectives.

"Overcoming Low Self-Esteem" draws upon cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT for short. This is an evidence-based therapeutic approach developed in the 1970s that focuses on thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. It helps us see our thought patterns objectively and question them when they aren't useful. It includes acting in different ways, and observing how that affects your feelings about yourself.

The chapters are clear, focused, and user-friendly. They're broken into many short sections and end in handy summaries of key points. Each chapter includes detailed information, such as discussions of different aspects of self-esteem – along with diagrams and exercises, some of which have worksheets at the back of the book.

The diagrams will be more useful for some readers than others. If you're a visual thinker with a logical mind, you might find it useful to see how the author believes different aspects of your thought patterns feed into each other. Other readers might find them confusing, crowded with words and arrows.

The exercises and worksheets are more hands-on, with tables you fill in. This is where you put your reading about CBT into action. For example, Chapter Four has a "Predictions and Precautions" Worksheet. Here, you look at a situation where you felt anxious and predicted that something bad would happen.

The table asks you to list the situation, your feelings and body sensations, your predictions or thoughts, and any precautions you did to stop the prediction from coming true.

There's a blank worksheet for you to fill out, and a copy of the worksheet that's filled out using details of a case study in the book. This exercise helps you become more aware of your anxious thoughts, where they come from, and how they affect your actions. When you're aware of these things, you can consciously find alternatives.

In Chapter Three, we learn about how rules affect self-esteem. We're not talking about society's rules here. These are rules we make up ourselves for how we should live.

People with low self-esteem develop something Fennell calls a "Bottom Line," which is a foundational negative belief about themselves. Their negative life experiences lead them to draw faulty conclusions about what kind of person they are. For example, they might think they're bad, or stupid. Whenever they self-criticize, the Bottom Line plays over and over in their head. These beliefs might make sense to people in the context of their difficult life experiences, but they are not objectively true.

People with low self-esteem have two biases in thinking that keep their Bottom Line active: how they perceive themselves, and how they interpret these perceptions. They focus on negative aspects, screening out the positive. They over-generalize about their negative experiences, and may even view positive or neutral ones negatively. As a result, they expect bad things to happen, they put a negative spin on their experiences, and that whole cycle keeps their negative beliefs in place.

Even if you have low self-esteem, you have to function in the world. This is where your "Rules for Living" come in. These are rules in your mind that tell you how to act. As long as you obey them, you feel OK about yourself. But when you fail to follow one of your rules, your Bottom Line belief emerges and your confidence dissolves.

Here's an example from the book: Rajiv believes he's not good enough. His rules are that unless he always gets things right, he'll never get anywhere in life. And if someone criticizes him, it means he's failed. These rules serve him, up to a point. Because he holds himself to high standards, he performs well at work. But his rules for himself stress him out, preventing him from relaxing and enjoying the things he accomplishes. And because he over-focuses on his performance, his relationships and leisure suffer.

Our Bottom Line gets triggered in two ways. First, when we feel like we might break one of our rules, we have an anxious reaction. For example, when Rajiv is criticized, or fears he won't be able to meet his standards. We start making anxious predictions, which affect our body. We might sweat, tense up, or have our mind go blank. Then we react. We might avoid the situation that makes us anxious or handle it poorly. Whatever we do, it causes us to criticize ourselves more, and the cycle continues.

Second, when our rules are broken, we have a depressed reaction, skipping all the middle parts of the anxious cycle and going directly to feelings of hopelessness and low mood.

Fennell invites you to identify your own Bottom Line, your Rules for Living, and the cycles you get caught in that maintain low self-esteem. Then she focuses on breaking these cycles. She discusses different types of anxious predictions and leads you through spotting them in yourself, questioning them, and finding alternatives. Then you learn how to act on these alternative possibilities.

Detailed chapters guide you through questioning self-critical thoughts, enhancing self-acceptance by focusing on your good qualities, changing your rules, creating a new Bottom Line, and planning for the future. The idea is: becoming aware of our negative patterns allows us to work with and disrupt them.

To get the full benefit of the book's insights into how to improve your self-esteem, you'll have to read all the way through and work the exercises. This requires both openness and commitment. The exercises can bring out a lot of emotions, so you may experience ups and downs while you're doing them. And you have to want to do it. It's a long process, which doesn't offer shortcuts. But for people who are willing to work through all the steps, there's a lot of insight to be gained.

As a taster, let's go back to Rajiv, who believes he has to do everything right. Imagine he makes a mistake at work. He might use a worksheet in the book to identify his self-critical thoughts and how he acted after having them. There's a list of key questions that will help him find alternative thoughts that may be healthier.

He can ask himself what the evidence is for his negative judgment, what alternative perspectives might exist, and what his biases are? Is he using all-or-nothing thinking? Is he blowing up one event to say something bad about who he is as a person? Is he being fair to himself?

As he continues working with the book, Rajiv will look at his positive qualities. He'll find things he did that week and the positive qualities they represent. He'll acknowledge he doesn't have to embody these qualities 100 percent of the time to recognize them in himself. He'll also record his daily activities and how they make him feel. These are a few things you can try from the book right now, though it goes into much more detail.

By the end of the book, if you've worked through all the exercises, you'll likely have more awareness and objectivity around your thoughts. You'll come up with a new rule for living, do things to put it into practice, and bring balance into your life. You'll also be able to recognize and counteract negative thoughts when they crop up again.

Does the book do what it promises? Yes, as much as a self-help book can. It gives you tools for overcoming low self-esteem. You then have to put in the work. Fennell is careful to note that some readers will need more than a book to overcome low self-esteem, and that there's no shame in seeking outside help.

"Overcoming Low Self-Esteem" is a long book, but you may be able to get through it quickly, as it's clear and easy to read. The viewpoint is practical and nonjudgmental. And, importantly for a book meant to improve confidence, it never makes you feel bad about yourself. The tone is empathetic throughout.

Because of its title, this could be an awkward book to recommend to others, unless someone tells you they want to work on improving their self-esteem. We don't advise making judgments about someone else's self-confidence. After all, you're not inside their head! And if you gave this book to your work team, they might assume you don't think they're good enough the way they are.

But we do recommend this book to anyone who feels like they struggle with self-esteem and wants to actively work to improve it. As you heard, it requires introspection. You'll benefit most if you're willing and able to devote time to filling out a lot of worksheets and reflecting on your thoughts. If you're up for making this journey, we think you'll get a lot out of it.

"Overcoming Low Self-Esteem: A Self-Help Guide Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques," by Melanie Fennell, is published by Robinson.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.