Habits for good self-esteem: It’s how you behave and what you think

In my continuing series on habits, I now turn to habits to help you have good emotional health. In this article, I discuss habits which help you to have good self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to how well you value yourself.

Having good self-esteem is associated with better emotional health and being less prone to emotional health issues. The most notable of these issues is depression, of which low self-esteem is a key symptom. Having good self-esteem is also predictive of better relationships and success in various endeavours including academics and career.

Fostering good self-esteem to help you achieve these benefits can be accomplished by incorporating habits into your routine. These habits focus on cognitive and behavioural strategies which have been demonstrated help you to think positively about yourself on a regular basis. In the following sections, I will describe these habits and how to make them part of your self-esteem-building routine.

Behavioural habits: Make mastery activities part of your routine

The best behavioural habits to build self-esteem entail regularly engaging in mastery activities. These are activities which allow you to feel good about yourself while you perform them. They involve you accomplishing something and using your talents and skills in activities which you find interesting and challenging.

Regular exercise is a mastery activity I encourage all my clients to pursue for its benefits to self-esteem in addition to making it easier to manage stress and maintain good physical health. Other mastery activities you should include in your routine are hobbies and interests from which you derive enjoyment or are talented at. Music, art, writing, dance, public speaking, carpentry, cooking, knitting, working on cars and playing a sport are just a few examples of these self-esteem building activities.

Your self-esteem will get an additional behavioural boost if your career or academic pursuits are mastery activities. Although considerations such as job prospects and income must also play a role in these matters, choosing a career or academic program which is a mastery activity for you makes maintaining good self-esteem much easier given how much time you spend at work or studying.

Cognitive habits: Increase awareness of your positive qualities and change your negative thoughts

Cognitive habits to build self-esteem involve ways of thinking which allow you to feel good about yourself. One such habit is to regularly remind yourself of your positive qualities such as personality characteristics and talents or abilities.

Dr. Melanie Fennell, author of Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, has a reliable technique to help you accomplish this goal. First, make a list of your positive qualities on your own or with the help of people who value you. Next, track these positive qualities regularly in a ‘positives notebook’ to bring them to your awareness regularly. In doing so, note the situation in which you displayed a positive quality and name the positive quality. For example, one person’s positives notebook might contain the following entries for a particular day: “Spent several hours completing a large landscape painting (hard-working)’ and ‘Called Mother as it was her birthday (kind)”.

A second cognitive self-esteem-building habit is catching negative thoughts you have about yourself in everyday situations and changing them to less negative thoughts. Situations in which you do not perform as well as you would like and those in which you are criticized make you susceptible to ‘hot thoughts’. These are negative beliefs about yourself which can affect your self-esteem.

Using CBT skills such as thought records (from the book Mind Over Mood) and Dr. Christine Padesky’s ‘assertive defense of the self’ technique can help you to challenge these negative beliefs with evidence and replace them with more positive thoughts about yourself. This will help you to keep your self-esteem intact when you face criticism or do not perform as well as you would like.

You may find it helpful to receive some guidance in implementing these self-esteem-building habits by meeting with a psychologist who specializes in CBT. I help my clients in self-esteem counselling learn and practice these and other skills in my work as a Calgary psychologist and a Cochrane psychologist.

May you think and behave your way to good self-esteem,

-Dr. Pat