How to improve self-esteem in 7 steps using mindfulness
Clinically reviewed by Dr. Chris Mosunic, PhD, RD, CDCES, MBA
Self-esteem. We all know it's important, but why? We explore how cultivating self-esteem can boost your mental health and overall wellbeing with practical tips.
It’s interesting how sometimes a person you’ve never met can walk into a room and you can detect if they have high or low self-esteem. They might have a timid voice, poor social skills, or a lack of assertiveness.
But if they hold their head high, have a wide smile, or a confident, humble, kind demeanor – these are all qualities that embody someone with high self-esteem.
High self-esteem is something that everyone wants, but unfortunately you can’t just wish it into existence. Self-esteem is a complex concept that requires further digging to truly understand.
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem is a complex concept, so let’s start with the definition. Our self-esteem is based on how much we value ourselves and how competent we feel in life.
To be clear, it’s different from self-confidence. Our self-confidence is wrapped up in our ability to do something successfully. Self-esteem is our sense of how worthy and capable we are. It refers to the extent to which we like, accept and approve of ourselves.
What causes low self-esteem?
When it comes to having low self-esteem ,the question is where do these opinions come from?
The truth is that low self-esteem is a vicious cycle that we sometimes create for ourselves without meaning to. You might feel you aren’t where you want to be in life. You might be comparing yourself to other people. Maybe you wish your body was like someone else’s , or that you had their job, their relationship, their house, their vacations.
Low self-esteem can lead to self-doubt, negative self-talk, and a tendency to focus on perceived flaws, which just perpetuates it further.
Healthy self-esteem, on the other hand, fosters self-acceptance, resilience, and the ability to navigate life’s challenges with confidence. So how do we get there?
The good news about self-esteem is that it’s possible to improve with the right tools and an effort to change. And with a newfound sense of self-worth, we have the ability to become centered and confident in our true self.
Using mindfulness to cultivate self-esteem
When it comes to boosting self-esteem, the first place you’ll want to begin is with mindfulness.
Mindfulness practices take you out of your head and bring you back to the present moment. When you’re focusing on meditation, visualization, or mindful movement, it’s more difficult to backtrack into your negative thought spirals, worries, or the voice of your inner critic.
By staying present in your mind and body you can move yourself to a more centered place where you can implement positive practices to boost self-esteem such as affirmations, breath work, positive self-talk, or gratitude practices.
4 Mindfulness exercises for self-esteem
Here are a few mindfulness practices to begin prioritizing while you’re on the journey.
1 | Mindful breathing
Begin your mindfulness journey with a focus on your breath. Find a quiet space, sit comfortably, and close your eyes. Pay attention to the sensation of your breath entering and leaving your body. When your mind starts to wander, gently guide your focus back to your breath. Engaging in this practice for a few minutes each day helps anchor you to the present moment and build mindfulness skills over time.
💙 Looking for a breathing-related mindfulness practice? Try Breathing Room with Prof. Megan Reitz.
2 | Body scan meditation
This practice involves directing your awareness to different parts of your body, systematically observing any sensations without judgment. Start from your toes and work your way up to the top of your head. This technique enhances body awareness, promoting a deeper connection between your body and mind.
💙 Try this guided Body Scan meditation to get you started.
3 | Mindful observation
Engage your senses by mindfully observing an object in your surroundings. It could be a flower, a piece of fruit, or any item with interesting textures and colors. Examine the object as if you're seeing it for the first time, noticing every detail. This exercise heightens your awareness and cultivates a sense of curiosity in your daily experiences.
💙 Check out Working with Thoughts a guided meditation for helping with rumination.
4 | Daily mindfulness
Integrate mindfulness into your routine activities, such as eating, walking, or even washing dishes. Pay close attention to the sensory experiences, thoughts, and emotions associated with these activities. By being fully present, you prevent your mind from wandering into self-critical or negative territories.
💙 The Daily Calm can provide you with a mindful way to check in with yourself each day.
How mindfulness can support your self-esteem
By practicing mindfulness you can start on a path towards feeling better and better each day and ultimately boosting your self-esteem. Here are some ways that simple mindfulness practices can support you on the journey.
Enhanced self-awareness: Mindfulness encourages self-reflection and self-discovery. As you become attuned to your thoughts and emotions, you gain insights into patterns that influence your self-esteem. This awareness enables you to challenge negative beliefs and replace them with more empowering ones.
Reduced rumination: Rumination, the repetitive dwelling on negative thoughts, can be detrimental to self-esteem. Mindfulness interrupts the cycle of rumination by training your mind to observe thoughts without becoming entangled in them. This break allows you to create space for healthier perspectives to emerge.
Less stress: Chronic stress can erode self-esteem. Mindfulness practices activate the relaxation response, reducing the production of stress hormones. This leads to a calmer mind, increased emotional stability, and a greater sense of self-worth.
Improved resilience: Mindfulness equips you with the tools to navigate challenges with grac. By practicing non-reactive awareness, you become better at handling setbacks and failures without letting them define your self-worth. This resilience is a cornerstone of healthy self-esteem.
7 steps to boost your self-esteem
1. Challenge your core beliefs
Often, our critical beliefs are inspired by other people: our parents, our peers, or through media and culture. There may be a specific event that influenced a negative feeling you have about yourself. So you may be able to trace that criticism or belief back to a time in your past. Other times, it’s just a collection of moments, so finding a practice that boosts your overall mindfulness can be helpful.
When self-esteem is chronically low, people can grow so accustomed to hearing these negative thoughts and not challenging them. Then those thoughts loop through your mind out of habit and you start to believe them.
The more often our thoughts go by unchallenged, the stronger they become. So we want to pay attention to our inner critic and start to question the validity of our thoughts. Once we’ve done that, we can take the next step and reframe them.
Regardless of whether you can recall the origin of the criticism, ask yourself the following questions:
What if that belief isn’t true?
Or what if it’s only a partial truth?
What if it’s an exaggeration or an assumption or misinterpretation and that belief is hurting you?
2. Release limiting beliefs
Thoughts trickle into our unconscious mind and become our core beliefs, but the good news is no matter how ingrained they are it’s possible to let them go.
So the next question is, are you ready to do that? Are you willing to release that criticism? Or are you at least willing to see how it would feel to be free of that belief?
Keep in mind that all your strengths and weaknesses make you human and unique. And every moment is an opportunity to grow in your self-acceptance. Imagine how it would feel to believe the opposite were true.
Or if that’s too far-fetched, a kinder, more balanced version of that thought. You don’t have to try and create one now, just picture who you would be if you didn’t hold that critical belief about yourself. So instead of telling yourself you’re foolish for making a mistake, remind yourself you’re human, it’s okay to trip up, and you’re learning.
This can be hard to do at first so a helpful practice is to consider what you’d tell a friend who said the same thing. We tend to be far more kind and compassionate to our friends than we are to ourselves.
3. Resist comparing yourself to others
Self-esteem often persists due to the incessant internal dialogue of self-criticism that plays on loop. Mindfulness encourages detachment from this negative self-talk, but it’s also important to put practices into place that will reduce the moments when you’re comparing yourself to other people.
Social media can be a wonderful way to connect with people but it’s also a veritable showroom of everyone around you and their highlight reel (which isn’t the full picture of their lives or how they feel about themselves).
It’s tempting to get into the habit of comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. If you find yourself feeling badly after scrolling through people’s pages, take a break from social media to prioritize your mental health. It can also be helpful to remind yourself that most often what people post is heavily-curated and rarely shows their struggles.
💙 Try A Heart Less Heavy to support you during turbulent times.
4. Utilize positive self-talk
No matter how mindful you’re being, negative thoughts may still creep in from time to time. It’s important that you get into the habit of practicing affirmative self-talk. This means talking to yourself the same way you’d talk to your best friend instead of falling into negative self-talk where your inner critic rules the show.
You’d never look at your best friend and tell them they’re falling short, or failing, so try not to do that to yourself.
Plus, studies show that the brain likes to rebel, so criticizing yourself is a perfect way to make your brain want to do the thing you’re unhappy about even more! Take some time to give yourself a high five in the mirror every morning. Tell yourself, “I got this!” and see how that starts to shift your overall wellbeing.
Make it a practice to catch those negative self-critical thoughts and beliefs and reframe them. When that happens, you’ll begin to see the person you deserve to see when looking in the mirror. And you may begin to feel a kind affection for yourself.
5. Celebrate your achievements
Not every day is a great day, but when you have great days be sure to celebrate them. By celebrating yourself, even when you have small victories, you’re showing yourself that you’re capable of wonderful things.
New to this? Try keeping a notebook where you write in your victories and achievements. Then when you have days where your self esteem feels low, you can look through your notebook and see everything you’re doing well.
💙 Try our 7 Days of Gratitude to help cultivate feelings of gratitude towards yourself and your ahcievements.
6. Practice affirmations
It may sound cheesy, but reciting positive affirmations is good for the brain and it’s good for your self-esteem. When you feel down on yourself, think about the things you’re frustrated with and then turn them into a positive affirmation.
For example if you feel like you’re falling short at work, try reframing it as, “I’m doing the best I can and I’m improving and learning with every mistake.”
By flipping negatives into positives you can boost your overall feelings about yourself and help enhance your self-esteem.
7. Try the 7 Days of Self-Esteem
In our 7 Days of Self-Esteem program we explore how self-esteem is developed and how to improve it. You’ll learn techniques to challenge your thoughts, quiet your inner critic, soften your perfectionistic ways and drop your comparisons. You’ll also develop the ability to enhance your level of self-acceptance and self-compassion.
Self-esteem FAQs
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem refers to the extent to which we like, accept and approve of ourselves. With that said it’s normal to have higher opinions of certain aspects of ourselves and lower opinions of other aspects of ourselves. But if you’re walking through the day feeling pretty good about how you’re doing, it’s fair to say you have good self-esteem.
Is self-esteem the same as self-confidence?
The level of self-esteem we have is based on how much we value ourselves and how competent we feel in life, but this is different from our self-confidence. Self-confidence is based on our ability to do something successfully. So you can have days of feeling self-confident but still have lower self-esteem overall.
What can I do if my self-esteem is low?
Mindfulness practices force you to be fully present and engaged in the current moment without judgment. Mindfulness encourages self-awareness, fostering a deep understanding of one's thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, and this is the first place you want to go so you can pump yourself up.
How can mindfulness help boost my self-esteem?
Mindfulness practices take you out of your head and bring you back to the present moment. When you’re focusing on meditation, visualization, or mindful movement, it’s more difficult to backtrack into your negative thought spirals, worries, or the voice of your inner critic. By staying present in your mind and body you can move yourself to a more centered place where you can implement positive practices to boost self-esteem such as affirmations, breath work, positive self talk, or gratitude practices.
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