Source: American Express
Self-esteem describes how a person perceives his/her value or worth. Self-esteem is a prime topic in psychology. It is knowing where you stand and believing in yourself. In the modernised world everyone is talking about accepting yourself and believing in yourself no matter what.
Self-esteem is based on a few factors such as genetics, thoughts, life experiences, personality, social situations and reactions of others. Self-esteem is not only about what you perceive about yourself but also how your friends and family view you. The people surrounding you help in building a positive outlook of yourself with their words, thoughts and actions.
Low Self-Esteem
Low self-esteem leads to feelings of worthlessness, incompetence and underconfidence. This is a major issue people face in the world. Everyone deals with one or the other situation where they feel low about themselves. Sometimes, when we see a person who we think is better than us, then we start to feel terrible about ourselves.
Low self-esteem is a thinking disorder and constantly thinking as such could lead to anxiety and depressive disorders or even suicidal thoughts. Low self-esteem develops when you continuously think negative about yourself and your surroundings, believe that others are better than you, focus on weaknesses, frequently experience self-doubt and fear, have low self-confidence, have trouble saying no and setting boundaries with others and fear of failure.
High Self-Esteem
High self-esteem leads to feelings of overconfidence and superiority. High self-esteem is sometimes labelled as narcissism, which is wrong. They both are different concepts and can’t be used interchangeably. People with extreme self-esteem consider themselves perfect, focus on always being right, believe they cannot fail, and they are more skilled or better than others.
Now as you know about low self-esteem and high self-esteem, you can figure out the middle ground and that is healthy self-esteem. As the name suggests, it is a practical way to think about yourself and a healthy approach. Having proper self-esteem thoughts is also an important part of personality. You need to have trust and faith in yourself. Healthy self-esteem assists you in building better relationships with others and yourself.
How are Self-Esteem and Body Image Related?
I can’t be wrong when I say that most of us are influenced by social media. It could be the latest trends, fashion, humour, thoughts, concepts etc. Everything we see around us is present on the web. When we see something, we start to believe that this is how it must be, this is how everyone must function. What we forget to notice is that reel and real life are completely different.
How a person behaves on a social media platform is not how he truly is. The influencers hold distinctive beliefs and thoughts than how it is portrayed on a social media account. This also holds for body image as well. Body image is the perception a person has of their physical self. The skinny body type or the slim-thick shape is so popular that each of us is chasing those measurements.
Women starve themselves to look good in their LBD (little, black dress) just for the sake of a picture on their Instagram handle. They wear tight-fitting clothes and stiletto heels just to fit in on social media. Wearing clothes smaller than your body size or wearing heels for a longer duration of time harms the body leading to harm to muscles and bones.
Having an hourglass figure is the trend of the time. But not everyone can have it or wants to have it. And when we don’t see ourselves fitting in, we start to find faults in ourselves. We bring forward every minuscule detail which makes us feel more terrible about ourselves and constantly thinking as such develops our low self-esteem. We then do not like how we look; we don’t look good in any outfit and often tend to be jealous of other people.
Little do we know that each person is fighting these tiny battles with themselves. Social Media is not the real world, and we need to take that into account before we jump to any conclusions. We bring forward the tiniest flaws of ourselves whereas others might not even notice them. We need to accept ourselves with love and care. The love that you want others to give to you, you need to provide that to yourself first.
Written by Vanshika Rathour
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