If you want to know how to build self-worth as an adult, you’ll love this article.
You get the promotion and spend the evening waiting to be found out. A friend cancels and, within ten minutes, you’ve decided it’s because you’re boring. Someone compliments your work and you explain, at length, why it wasn’t actually that good.
None of that makes you broken. It makes you an adult who picked up a shaky sense of your own value somewhere along the way and never got around to repairing it.
Self-worth is the quiet belief that you matter and deserve decent treatment, including from yourself, whether or not today went well. It isn’t the same as confidence, which is about specific skills. You can be a brilliant surgeon and still feel, at bottom, that you’re not enough.
Good news first: this is fixable, and much later in life than most people assume. Below are twelve approaches, each backed by research or a documented source, each with one small thing to do. You don’t need all twelve. Pick two that feel doable this week and leave the rest for later.
1. Know that your self-worth is still moving
A lot of people quietly believe the die was cast in childhood. If your parents were critical or school was rough, that’s just who you are now. The data say otherwise.
In 2018, Ulrich Orth, Ruth Yasemin Erol and Eva Luciano at the University of Bern pooled 331 longitudinal samples covering 164,868 people aged 4 to 94. Their meta-analysis of self-esteem from age 4 to 94, published in Psychological Bulletin, found that self-esteem rises through childhood, holds steady around puberty, then climbs strongly through young adulthood and keeps rising, more gently, through midlife. It peaks somewhere around 60 to 70. The pattern held across gender, country, ethnicity and birth cohort.
These are averages, so your own line can zigzag. But the direction for most adults is up, which means the years ahead are working for you, not against you. If you’ve been treating your low opinion of yourself as a fixed trait, it’s worth reading about how to stop underestimating yourself too.
Start small: write down one belief about yourself that you’ve held since you were a teenager. Then ask whether a 40-year-old version of you would still sign off on it.
2. Take an honest baseline
You can’t tell whether something is improving if you never measured it. Vague feelings (“I’m just bad at liking myself”) are hard to work with.
The most widely used tool in this field has a surprisingly modest origin. In 1965, sociologist Morris Rosenberg published Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (Princeton University Press), based on a survey of 5,024 high school juniors and seniors from ten randomly selected schools in New York State. The ten-item questionnaire he built for it, now called the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, is still used in research six decades later. According to the University of Maryland’s sociology department, which hosts it, the scale is in the public domain and free for anyone to use. Common scoring gives a total from 0 to 30, with higher meaning healthier self-esteem.
It isn’t a diagnosis. Think of it more like stepping on a bathroom scale: one reading tells you little, but a few readings months apart start to show a trend. Find the ten statements online, answer them honestly tonight, save your score with the date, and put a reminder in your calendar to retake it in three months.
3. Skip the big, shiny affirmations
This one surprises people. Standing in front of a mirror saying “I am amazing” sounds harmless. For some of us, it backfires.
Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo, with Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, tested exactly this in a 2009 study in Psychological Science. Participants repeated the statement “I am a lovable person.” People who already had high self-esteem felt slightly better afterwards. People with low self-esteem felt worse than a comparison group who said nothing at all. The researchers’ explanation: when a statement is far from what you believe, your mind starts arguing back, and the counter-arguments win. In a follow-up, low self-esteem participants who were allowed to acknowledge negative thoughts ended up in a better mood than those told to focus only on positive ones. The authors warned that positive self-statements can backfire “for the very people who need them the most.”
That doesn’t mean all self-talk is useless. It means believable beats grand. If you want a gentler route into a more hopeful inner voice, these ways to think positively every day lean on realism rather than hype.
Next time, do this: swap “I’m a great person” for something you can’t argue with, like “I showed up for my sister today, and that counted.”
4. Talk to yourself like you’d talk to a friend
Most people with low self-worth have an inner critic who would get fired from any real job. It’s harsh, repetitive, and never once offers a useful suggestion.
Kristin Neff, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the best-known researchers of the alternative. She describes self-compassion as three things working together: being kind to yourself instead of judging yourself, remembering that struggle is part of being human rather than proof you’re uniquely flawed, and noticing painful feelings without either burying them or blowing them up. Her key point is that self-esteem tends to depend on feeling above average, so it collapses when you fail. Self-compassion doesn’t need you to win.
Her 2009 study with Roos Vonk in the Journal of Personality, which surveyed more than 2,000 people, found self-compassion predicted steadier feelings of self-worth than self-esteem did, and was less tied to outcomes going well. It was a correlational study, so it shows a link, not proof that one causes the other. Still, the idea is cheap to test. And if your inner voice has gone well past criticism into something darker, this guide on how to stop hating yourself goes further.
Your move: the next time you mess up, ask what you’d say to a close friend who’d done the exact same thing. Say that to yourself, out loud if you can.
5. Notice where you’ve hung your worth
Everyone bases their self-worth on something. The trouble starts when it’s something you can’t control.
In 2002, Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research published a study in the Journal of Social Issues that followed more than 600 college freshmen through their first year. At the start, students rated how much their self-worth rested on seven foundations. Here’s what they said mattered:
| Foundation of self-worth | Share of students who cited it |
|---|---|
| Academic competence | More than 80% |
| Family support | 77% |
| Doing better than others | 66% |
| Being a good person | About 66% |
| Appearance | 65% (70% of women) |
| Religious faith | 40% |
| Approval from others | 37% |
Only 4% said none of them mattered. The results that followed were striking. Students who staked their worth on external things, like appearance, beating others or approval, reported more stress and anger, more drug and alcohol use, and more symptoms of disordered eating. Those whose worth hinged on grades studied more hours but didn’t get better marks, and had more run-ins with their professors. Crocker’s summary was blunt: “The pursuit of self-esteem is ultimately self-destructive.”
College freshmen aren’t you, of course. But the pattern rings true at 35 or 50, swapping grades for job titles or follower counts.
A quick experiment: look at that table and circle the two foundations you lean on hardest. Then ask yourself how you’d feel about yourself if either one disappeared next month.
6. Keep small promises to yourself
Here’s a mechanism that explains a lot. Your opinion of yourself is partly built from evidence, and the most convincing evidence is what you actually do.
Albert Bandura laid this out in a 1977 paper in Psychological Review on self-efficacy. He proposed four sources of belief in your own ability: doing the thing yourself, watching others do it, being encouraged, and reading your body’s signals. In the snake-phobia research he summarised, people who handled the snake themselves gained more confidence than people who only watched a therapist do it. The logic runs step by step. You act, you see the result, and your brain updates its forecast of what you’re capable of. Repeat that enough and the forecast shifts.
Bandura was writing about efficacy, which is about tasks, so this is theory applied to self-worth rather than direct proof. But think about how you’d judge a friend who kept cancelling on you. Eventually you’d stop trusting them. The comparison holds because you watch your own track record the same way; it breaks down because you’re far harsher on yourself than you’d be on a friend. Either way, every broken promise to yourself is a small vote of no confidence. Pick one tiny commitment for tomorrow, something like a ten-minute walk or a single email, and keep it. The guide on how to keep a promise has practical ways to make that stick.
7. Check the bar you set in secret
Low self-worth often hides behind standards nobody asked you to meet.
William James spotted this in 1890. In Chapter X of The Principles of Psychology, “The Consciousness of Self,” he proposed a simple formula: “Self-esteem = Success / Pretensions.” By pretensions he meant what you’ve backed yourself to be and do. The fraction, he pointed out, can go up two ways. You can increase the top number by succeeding more. Or you can shrink the bottom number by dropping some of the claims you’ve made on yourself.
That second route is the one people forget. If you’ve quietly decided you must be the best parent, the fittest person at the gym, the smartest in every meeting and the friend who never forgets a birthday, the denominator is enormous. No amount of success will balance it. Spotting where those standards came from, and whose voice they really are, is a core part of emotional intelligence.
Test it this week: list every “should” you hold about yourself. Cross out one that you never chose and don’t actually care about.
8. Spend time with people who see you clearly
Self-worth sounds like a solo project. It isn’t.
Michelle Harris of the University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Orth of the University of Bern looked at this in a 2020 meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They combined longitudinal studies of people aged 4 to 76 from at least ten countries. Across 48 samples with 46,231 participants, good relationships predicted later rises in self-esteem. Across 35 samples with 21,995 participants, higher self-esteem also predicted better relationships later on. Harris and Orth’s 2020 study found both effects were about the same size, which points to a feedback loop.
The individual effect is small. But a small push that keeps repeating adds up over years, in either direction. Low self-worth can make you withdraw, withdrawing weakens your relationships, and weaker relationships pull self-worth down again. Breaking that loop often starts socially, and if that part feels rusty, here’s how to improve your social skills without forcing it.
Give it a go: text one person who makes you feel more like yourself, and suggest a specific day to meet.
9. Watch what you compare yourself to
You already know comparison steals your mood. What’s less obvious is how fast it works.
Erin Vogel and Jason Rose at the University of Toledo, with Lindsay Roberts and Katheryn Eckles, ran two studies published in 2014 in Psychology of Popular Media Culture. The first was a survey: people who used Facebook more often had lower trait self-esteem, and the link was explained by more frequent upward comparisons, meaning comparisons with people who seem better off. The second was an experiment. Participants viewed a fake profile with signs of a thriving social life and healthy habits, or one with the opposite. A brief look at the upward-comparison profile was enough to lower their self-esteem in the moment.
The first study only shows a correlation, and these were students on a 2013-era Facebook. Still, today’s feeds are built on the same highlight-reel principle. For more on this, see how to stop comparing yourself to others, and if the scrolling itself is the problem, these steps to stop doomscrolling are a good place to begin.
Here’s a simple way in: for one week, mute or unfollow every account that leaves you feeling worse after you look at it. Don’t overthink who. Your gut already knows.
10. Practise saying no
People-pleasing and low self-worth feed each other. You say yes because you don’t feel entitled to say no, and every unwanted yes confirms that your needs come second.
Brittany Speed, Brandon Goldstein and Marvin Goldfried of Stony Brook University made the case for an old fix in a 2018 paper in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. They describe assertiveness as acting in your own interest and expressing your feelings without trampling anyone else’s rights. It sits on a line between submissiveness and aggression. Assertiveness training was popular in the 1970s, then faded. By their count, publications on it dropped from about 23 a year to about 11 a year after 2000, partly because funding shifted toward diagnosis-specific treatments. Yet the authors point to several studies linking it to better self-esteem and self-concept, though they note the number of trials is small. They argue it deserves a comeback.
Say you’re asked to take on a weekend task at work you don’t have time for. The submissive answer is “Sure, no problem.” The aggressive one is “Are you kidding me?” The assertive one is “I can’t this weekend, but I can look at it Monday.” Same request, three very different messages about what you’re worth. If the person asking tends to steamroll you, these tactics for working with a controlling person will help you hold firm.
Start small: say no to one minor request this week, without a long apology attached.
11. Chase competence, not a feeling
At one point, a US state tried to raise its citizens’ self-esteem by law.
In 1986, the California legislature passed a bill authored by Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (Statutes 1986, Chapter 1065) creating a three-year, 25-member Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. The idea was that raising self-esteem would be a cost-effective way to cut crime, drug abuse and school failure. Garry Trudeau mocked it in Doonesbury that same year. In 1990 the task force delivered a 144-page report, Toward a State of Esteem, which, according to The Christian Science Monitor, called self-esteem a “social vaccine.” Members disagreed so much about how to even define self-esteem that they formed a separate committee for it.
The research didn’t back the hope. In 2003, Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed the evidence for Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They found high self-esteem was partly a result of good grades rather than their cause, and they found no evidence that boosting self-esteem through therapy or school programmes caused benefits. What they did recommend was praise tied to real effort and improvement.
The lesson for you is practical. Feeling good about yourself works better as a by-product of doing things you respect than as a goal on its own. Pick one skill you’ve been putting off, and if delay is the real obstacle, try these strategies to beat procrastination before you book your first lesson, class or practice session.
12. Get support if it runs deep
Some low self-worth is a habit of thought. Some of it is tangled up with depression, anxiety or old trauma, and self-help lists only go so far with those.
The NHS covers this in its guide “Raising low self-esteem,” last reviewed in April 2023. Alongside many of the ideas above, including challenging negative beliefs, being kind to yourself, learning to be assertive and saying no, it says talking therapies such as counselling or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help. In England, you can refer yourself to NHS talking therapies directly or see a GP first. If you go private, the NHS advises checking that the therapist is registered with a professional body. Outside the UK the route differs, but a family doctor is usually a sensible first stop.
Asking for help isn’t a failure of self-worth. Arguably it’s one of the clearest signs of it, because you’re treating your wellbeing as worth the time and money. If your body is stuck in alarm mode while you wait for an appointment, these quick resets for your nervous system can take the edge off.
Your move: if your low opinion of yourself has lasted months and is affecting sleep, work or relationships, book a GP appointment this week rather than waiting for it to pass.
When you slip back into old habits
You will. Someone criticises you at work and, by evening, you’re back to the old script about being useless. That doesn’t erase the progress.
How you treat yourself after a slip matters more than the slip. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at the University of California, Berkeley tested this across four experiments, published in 2012 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They had participants recall a personal weakness or something they’d done wrong, or sit a deliberately difficult test. Some then spent about three minutes writing to themselves in a compassionate way, or were told the test was hard for everyone. Those people were more motivated to improve, not less. They were more interested in studying for a retest, more keen to make amends for past wrongs, and more optimistic that their weakness could change. Self-criticism, in other words, isn’t the motivator it pretends to be.
Habits research points the same way. When Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London tracked 96 people building a new daily habit, reported in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010, it took an average of 66 days for the behaviour to become automatic, with a range of 18 to 254 days. Missing a single day didn’t significantly affect the process. Only people who were very inconsistent failed to form the habit.
So when you slip, name it in one sentence (“I talked to myself like garbage today”), offer yourself the line you’d give a friend, and pick the smallest action from this list to do tomorrow. If a bad day is dragging you down, here’s how to turn a bad day around. And if you’d like to build a sturdier routine underneath all this, these good habits to have in life make a solid base.
Pick one and start today
Self-worth tends to grow from the bottom up, through small kept promises, kinder self-talk, better company and a few honest refusals, more than from big declarations.
You don’t need to overhaul your personality. Choose the one idea from this list you could actually do tomorrow morning, and do it. In three months, retake that baseline from item 2 and see what moved.
For more practical guides on getting a little better every day, browse our Self Improvement section.
