Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence, two similar sounding features of human beings can affect and change our lives in a different way. Let’s define them and see how we can improve on our own today!
Self-esteem – is our vision of our very own self. Self-esteem determines how we see our strengths and weaknesses.

And it’s quite important to differentiate it from self-confidence. For example:

You can achieve quite a lot professionally and have a lot of confidence in your mastery, yet still have quite low self-esteem.

You can continue and “up your game” here and there, boost your skills and confidence in various areas, yet still you will be far from adequate perception of yourself as a person.

Self-criticism: When it’s becoming suspicious?

We all make different remarks on our own life and behaviour from time to time, but you can suspect low self-esteem if:

• You’re constantly criticising yourself
• Obsessed with self-deprecating jokes
• Focus on your mistakes and ignore your achievements
• Apologize over anything and feel guilty
• Don’t feel/create personal boundaries
• Constantly comparing yourself with others and assuming that other people are better than you by default
• Trying to suit other people, suggesting your help neglecting your own needs/by buying needlessly expensive gifts
• Consider yourself not worthy of fun
• Don’t know how to accept compliments
• Avoid difficult tasks due to fear of failure
• Sharply react to any criticism towards you
• Most of the time you are in the state of anxiety or annoyance, feel guilty and powerless

If you have collected most of the symptoms, please treat this with more seriousness than irony.

Medical science has a very good grasp on what comes out of such treatment to oneself.

Low self-esteem has been proven to be associated with development of such mental disorders like: depression, anxiety (including social phobia), alcoholism and addiction to psych-active drugs, eating disorders and many more.

In case of depression low self-esteem can appear both as a reason and a consequence: patients suffering from depression often begin to experience feelings of guilt, powerlessness, so it is important to spot such symptoms in your loved ones at an early stage.

How do we cope?

Yet good side of this is the fact that self-esteem can be successfully corrected  with means of psychotherapy (including self-care techniques)

Here are basic steps that anyone can take to improve their self-esteem:

• Try to find the reason behind your low self-esteem (bullying, not meeting expectations of parents/friends etc.)
• Make a list of your positive qualities, life values, achievements and goals
• Make sure to cherish and reward any of your achievements.
• In case of mistakes, remind yourself “Everyone makes mistakes” and mistakes are the basis behind our growth and development.
• If you feel that you’re beginning to blame yourself for problems that happened. Try to reason with yourself: Define what exactly happened and what alternative issues might have influenced the appearance of this problem.
• Don’t chase blindly the ideal state of yourself, nothing and noone is perfect. Instead there is a possibility to see beauty in people's differences and variety.
• Let yourself do what brings you joy, even if it feels dumb or senseless.
• Most important and yet most difficult: find strength to exclude toxic people away from your life. You probably know them by that “bittersweet aftertaste” they leave after communicating with you. (By the way unsubscribing from accounts in social media or even blacklisting them is also fine thing to do if they make you feel bad/ugly/stupid)
• Training motivation not the “I hate how I look”, but “I will feel better once I’m healthier”
• You are wholesome and complete person in the state you are now, so please try to prevent yourself from comparing with others
• Think before agreeing to the request of help: Just stop for a second and assess whether it would conflict with your interests and priorities
• Last but not the least: Never consider your own problems “Not significant enough” to ask for a mental health professional. If you realise you can’t cope on your own, it’s alright and you are already worthy of help. Don’t be ashamed of it, because One thing is true:

Your Mental Health is just as important as Physical Health

Goodville Science Team will continue their endeavours on making psychological help accessible to more people worldwide and bring you more information in our articles.

Yet if you can’t wait, you can always play Goodville and speak with our in-game specialists Doctor Socool and Digital WHO Assistant Florence, they have lots to share every day!

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