When Trying to Raise Your Self-Esteem Starts to Hurt - How It Differs from Acceptance

The harder you push, the more it hurts

Advice to raise your self-esteem shows up everywhere. Count what you managed to do, stack up small wins, praise yourself. So you try it.

Within a few days you hit a wall. You sit down to write what you managed to do, and nothing comes to mind. You force something onto the page and think, is this really all I have. You try to praise yourself and find no ground to stand on.

What is left is one more piece of evidence: you failed at raising your self-esteem too. The more effort you put in, the lower your rating of yourself drops.

This wall does not come from a bad method. It comes from a mismatched direction.

Raising the rating and setting it down

There are two ways to put your relationship with yourself in order, and they are different in kind.

One is to rate your own worth highly. You expand what you can do, confirm your results, and conclude that you are capable. That is what raising your self-esteem points at.

The other is to stop treating the rating as the issue at all. Without judging whether you are capable, you deal with yourself exactly as you are. The version of you that is not doing well is also fine as it stands.

The first moves the mark up the scale. The second stops looking at the scale. Because the directions differ, what each one requires differs too.

What matters here is the condition under which the first one works. Raising the rating is effective when you are in a state where results can accumulate. If you try it during a period when you are depleted and nothing produces results, it fails, because there is no material to work with.

The limits of counting what you managed to do

Counting what you managed to do is widely recommended, but there are conditions under which it does not work.

One is when your basis for comparison sits high. If you habitually measure yourself against other people, writing down what you managed to do also triggers the verdict that others are doing far more. The act of writing summons the comparison.

The other is when you cannot accept the level of the result yourself. Write down took a bath or sent a reply as an accomplishment, and a judgment kicks in about a person for whom those count as accomplishments.

When these two are in play, keeping a record works in reverse. What this stage calls for is not raising the rating, but stopping the act of rating.

Acceptance is not resignation

Setting the rating down is often misread as giving up, or as a lack of drive to improve. The substance is different.

Accepting means handling facts as facts. Results are not coming. Things you used to manage are out of reach. You register this state without a verdict of good or bad.

Once the verdict is off, you can think about what to do from here. While the verdict is running, the work of blaming yourself comes first, and your strength is spent there.

In practice, a shift in wording is available. Replace I am hopeless for not even being able to do this with I am in a state where I cannot do this. You keep the factual part and drop the evaluative part.

Until it becomes familiar, this shift takes conscious work. Repeat it, though, and the verdict starts arriving automatically less often. A practice for not being too hard on yourself treats this shift systematically.

Which one your state calls for

Which of the two directions to choose is decided by your state. Here are some markers for the judgment.

Raising the rating is effective when you are in this state: daily life is running, there are things you can work on, your rating of yourself is low but the strength to move remains. Here, accumulating results and correcting the rating works.

Setting the rating down is necessary when you are in this state: maintaining daily life is hard, nothing brings a sense of achievement, the thinking that blames you will not stop. At this stage, the verdict has to stop before results can accumulate.

And in many cases there is an order. Stop the verdict first, and stack up results once the load has come down. Try it in the reverse order and you fail at the first stage.

If you have tried methods for raising your self-esteem and ended up in pain, the order was likely wrong. This is not the failure of a method. It is a mix-up of stages.

The order for stepping away from other people's ratings

Whichever direction you choose, your distance from other people's ratings has an effect.

When your worth is settled by other people's ratings, yours moves every time theirs does. Praise lifts it, being ignored lowers it. In this state, no amount of accumulated results makes it steady.

The first step toward stepping away is to notice where a rating came from. Is this sensation your own judgment, or somebody's words? Once you can tell them apart, you can receive their ratings as information and keep them separate from your rating of yourself.

Next is to build your standard for judgment inside yourself: what you treat as important, and what counts as enough. With that standard in place, a rating can reach you and you can still remeasure it with your own yardstick.

Then, limit who you compare yourself with to your past self. Comparison with others is asymmetric in information: you end up comparing the visible part of them with the whole of you. Compare yourself with your past self and the conditions line up.

Think this through alongside a procedure for rebuilding how you rate yourself, and you can use the lifting work and the setting-down work in the situations that suit each. Neither one alone is the right answer.