Everyone has a moment of doubt now and then. You walk into a room and wonder if you’re dressed wrong. You send a message and reread it six times. That’s normal. It becomes a problem when the doubt stops being a passing visitor and moves in, deciding which jobs you apply for, which friends you call back and whether you open your mouth in a meeting at all.
Low self-esteem rarely announces itself. It sounds reasonable. It tells you to stay quiet “just this once”, to skip the party because you’re tired, to let someone else take the project because they’re obviously better at it. Each small retreat feels like protection. Over months, those retreats add up to a smaller life, and a smaller life gives the inner critic more ammunition.
Self-esteem isn’t fixed, though. It moves, sometimes a lot, and researchers now have a decent idea of what pushes it up and what keeps it stuck. Some of what they’ve found is surprising (repeating “I’m amazing” in the mirror can make some people feel worse). Some of it is boring and works anyway.
If the voice in your head has tipped past insecurity into something harsher, our guide on how to stop hating yourself is a good companion to this one. Below are 20 approaches, each backed by research you can check, with a concrete step at the end of every one.
1. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend
Watch what happens in your head after a mistake. For many insecure people the reaction is instant and brutal: idiot, typical, of course you messed that up. You would never say that to a friend who’d just spilled coffee on their laptop. You’d say something like “Ugh, bad luck, let’s sort it out.”
That gentler response has a name, self-compassion, and it can be trained. A June 2025 systematic review in the journal Mindfulness by Ashveen Kaur Randhawa and Dianne Vella-Brodrick of the University of Melbourne looked at 21 randomised controlled trials of online self-compassion programmes, covering 5,274 people. In 17 of those 21 trials, self-compassion rose and mostly stayed up at follow-up. The effects on broader well-being were patchier, about half the studies found at least one benefit, and programmes lasting four weeks or more tended to do better than short ones.
Why should this matter for self-esteem? The two travel together. Peter Muris and Henry Otgaar pooled 76 studies with more than 35,000 participants in a 2023 meta-analysis and found the two traits strongly correlated (around 0.6). That’s a correlation, so it doesn’t prove that one causes the other. Still, self-compassion is the easier one to practise directly, which makes it a useful handle.
Start small: the next time you catch a harsh line in your head, ask what you’d say to a friend in the same spot, then say that to yourself, out loud if you’re alone.
2. Skip the mirror mantras and affirm your values instead
Self-help shelves love affirmations. Stand tall, look in the mirror, repeat “I am confident and lovable.” The trouble is that for people who already doubt themselves, this can backfire.
In a 2009 study in Psychological Science, Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee asked people with low and high self-esteem to repeat “I am a lovable person.” Those with high self-esteem felt slightly better. Those with low self-esteem felt worse than a comparison group who didn’t repeat the phrase. The researchers’ explanation: a statement that clashes hard with what you believe triggers a flood of counterarguments.
A different kind of affirmation holds up much better. Instead of claiming a trait you don’t feel you have, you reflect on something you genuinely value, such as honesty, your family, creativity or the way you look after people. A meta-analysis published in American Psychologist in October 2025 by Yunian Zhang, Minhong Wang and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong pooled 129 studies with 17,748 participants. As summarised in the American Psychological Association’s release on the self-affirmation meta-analysis, these exercises improved self-perception and self-worth, general well-being and social well-being, and reduced anxiety and negative mood, with effects still visible about two weeks later on average. Wang put it simply: “Even brief, low-cost self-affirmation exercises can yield significant psychological benefits.” One caveat: most of the studies used American college students, so we know less about older adults and other cultures.
Your move: pick the value that matters most to you, then write for ten minutes about a time you acted on it. Don’t polish it. Nobody’s grading.
3. Use your own name when the critic gets loud
When you’re anxious, you tend to sink into the moment. “I’m going to blow this interview. I always freeze.” The first-person voice keeps you right in the middle of the feeling.
A small language shift creates distance. Instead of “Why am I so useless?”, someone called Anna might ask “Why is Anna feeling so rattled right now?” Ariana Orvell, Ethan Kross and colleagues tested this “distanced self-talk” in two experiments published in Clinical Psychological Science in 2021. Compared with first-person self-talk, using your own name or “you” reduced emotional reactivity across a range of negative experiences, mild and intense, past and upcoming. It also helped people who scored high on emotional vulnerability, which is exactly who you’d worry might not benefit.
The likely mechanism is perspective. Talking to yourself in the third person nudges you into the role of an advisor rather than a participant, and advisors are usually calmer and kinder. Picture this hypothetical: Tom is dreading a presentation. “I’m going to sound stupid” becomes “Tom, you’ve presented to this team before and it went fine. You know this material better than anyone in the room.” Same facts. Very different temperature.
If you like this sort of mental reframing, the techniques in our piece on Stoic exercises work in a similar way.
Next time, do this: before a situation that makes you nervous, write two sentences of advice to yourself using your own name, then read them back.
4. Spot the safety behaviours that keep the belief alive
A familiar pattern goes like this. You believe you’re boring, so at a dinner you stay quiet, ask lots of questions and avoid telling stories. The dinner goes fine. You walk home thinking “Phew, got away with it.” The belief survives untouched, because you never tested it.
Katharine Rimes, Patrick Smith and Livia Bridge, clinical psychologists at King’s College London, laid out this cycle in a refined cognitive behavioural model of low self-esteem published in Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy in 2023. In their account, a trigger such as a mistake or a perceived rejection gets read as a threat to your worth. The emotion that follows (shame, anxiety, low mood) pushes you towards protective moves: avoidance, hiding parts of yourself, seeking reassurance, over-apologising, overworking to compensate, checking likes and grades obsessively, or ruminating.
The cause and effect runs in a loop. Those moves feel protective in the short term, but they stop you from finding out that the feared outcome might not happen. Worse, some of them create real damage. Overwork strains relationships. Constant reassurance-seeking tires out friends. Then the damage itself becomes fresh “proof” of the original belief. It’s the same loop described in our article on self-sabotage.
So list your own safety behaviours. Most people have three or four favourites. Once they’re on paper, choose one low-stakes situation this week and drop just one of them, then notice what actually happens.
5. Put your harshest belief on trial
Low self-esteem tends to run on a few core beliefs that sound like facts. “I’m not clever.” “People only put up with me.” “I’m a failure.” Because they feel so obvious, you never cross-examine them.
The NHS advice page “Raising low self-esteem” (last reviewed in April 2023) recommends exactly that cross-examination. It suggests identifying the negative beliefs you hold about yourself, noticing when they started, and then actively looking for evidence that contradicts them. It also recommends writing down at least five positive things about yourself, including compliments others have given you, and keeping that list somewhere you’ll see it.
Why bother writing it down? Because memory is biased. When you feel low, you recall failures more easily than successes, so a mental search for evidence is rigged from the start. Paper doesn’t have that bias.
Say you believe you’re “bad with people.” A hypothetical evidence log might show that a colleague asked for your help twice this week, your neighbour stopped to chat, and an old friend texted to say she missed you. None of that cancels the belief overnight. It does make the belief look less like a fact and more like an opinion. If you find yourself going round and round the same negative thought instead, the tips on how to stop ruminating thoughts may help.
A quick experiment: write your harshest belief at the top of a page, draw a line down the middle, and spend a week collecting evidence for and against it. Only facts count, not feelings.
6. Notice who you’re comparing yourself to
Comparison is human. We size ourselves up against others to work out where we stand. The problem starts when the comparison is always upwards, and when the people above you are curated highlight reels.
The newest numbers here are sobering. A May 2026 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Yuqing Lei and colleagues pooled 54 samples with 36,583 participants. Online upward comparison was linked to psychological maladjustment with an average correlation of about 0.33. The link with lower self-esteem specifically was around 0.26, and the link with social-evaluative emotions such as envy and shame was stronger still. Most of the included studies were cross-sectional, so the authors are careful to say the direction isn’t settled: feeling bad may also make you compare more.
A smaller August 2025 study from Université de Montréal adds a useful detail. Justine Le Blanc-Brillon and colleagues surveyed 413 young adults and found that exposure to upward comparisons fully accounted for the link between Facebook or Instagram use and lower global self-esteem. In other words, scrolling itself didn’t seem to be the issue. What you compared yourself to while scrolling was. This is also a big driver behind imposter syndrome, where everyone else seems to have it figured out.
Test it this week: each time you feel that small sinking feeling while scrolling, note who triggered it. At the end of the week, mute or unfollow the top three.
7. Put a time limit on social media
Muting accounts helps. Using the apps less helps more, at least for body image, and there’s experimental evidence rather than just survey data.
In a randomised trial published in February 2023 in Psychology of Popular Media, Helen Thai, Gary Goldfield and colleagues at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute recruited 220 students aged 17 to 25 who were already showing signs of anxiety or depression. Half were asked to limit social media to an hour a day for three weeks. They cut their use roughly in half, to an average of 78 minutes a day, compared with 188 minutes in the control group. The reduced-use group felt significantly better about their appearance and weight, and the control group didn’t change. The study measured body esteem rather than global self-esteem, and three weeks is short, so treat it as a promising signal, not a final word.
The mechanism ties back to the previous point. Fewer minutes on image-heavy feeds means fewer upward comparisons, and fewer comparisons give your self-image less to compete with. If the problem is less about comparison and more about nasty comments, see our guide on how to deal with haters on social media.
Give it a go: set a daily one-hour limit using your phone’s built-in screen time tool, and keep it for three weeks before deciding whether it’s worth it.
8. Lower the bar from perfect to good enough
High standards aren’t the enemy. Being terrified of falling short of them is.
Viyona Khossousi, Sarah Egan and colleagues pooled 83 studies with 32,304 adults in a meta-analysis published in Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy in September 2024. They split perfectionism into two parts. Perfectionistic strivings, aiming high and working hard, had almost no link with self-esteem (a correlation of 0.06). Perfectionistic concerns, meaning harsh self-judgement, fear of mistakes and the feeling that others expect flawlessness, were moderately linked with lower self-esteem (minus 0.42). The data were cross-sectional, so we can’t say which comes first, but the split itself is useful. You can keep the ambition and still drop the panic.
Look at how you judge your own work. If an 85 per cent result feels like a failure, the problem isn’t the 85. Pick one task this week, decide in advance what “good enough” looks like, and stop when you reach it, even if you could keep polishing.
9. Pick up something heavy
Exercise is the advice everyone expects, so here’s the more specific version: lift things.
An October 2025 network meta-analysis in BMC Public Health by Sichen Zhou and colleagues compared 27 randomised trials involving 3,059 children and teenagers. Exercise overall improved self-esteem, and among the types studied, resistance training ranked highest for self-esteem. The authors rated the overall quality of evidence as low to moderate, and the trials were in young people, so adults should read it as encouraging rather than definitive.
Adult evidence points the same way. A November 2024 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports by Andrea Rodriguez-Solana and colleagues looked at 15 studies with 3,604 people during and after cancer treatment. Physical activity raised self-esteem (a standardised effect of 0.32), with stronger effects for mind-body exercise such as yoga or tai chi (0.70) and for programmes lasting more than 12 weeks (0.44).
There’s a plausible reason strength work in particular helps. Progress is visible and countable. Last month you could squat 20 kilos, now you can do 30. That’s hard evidence of competence that your inner critic can’t argue with.
Here’s a simple way in: two short strength sessions a week, bodyweight squats, push-ups against a wall, a few dumbbell rows. Write down the numbers each time so you can see them climb.
10. Spend more time with people who leave you feeling better
Self-esteem and relationships feed each other. Michelle Harris and Ulrich Orth tested this in a 2020 meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, drawing on longitudinal studies with more than 46,000 participants in samples whose average age ranged from about 4 to 77. Good relationships predicted higher self-esteem later on, and higher self-esteem predicted better relationships later on, with effects of similar size in both directions (0.08 each). The pattern held across the age range.
To be fair, not everyone accepts the “feedback loop” reading. In a 2023 reanalysis in Heliyon, Kimmo Sorjonen and colleagues argued that these cross-lagged effects could be statistical artefacts, and that the safest conclusion is a positive correlation. Even on that cautious reading, though, people with warmer relationships tend to feel better about themselves, and the NHS advice on self-esteem explicitly recommends spending more time with supportive people and less with those who drag you down.
Think about the people you saw last week. Who left you feeling lighter? Who left you replaying something they said? If meeting new people feels daunting, our tips on how to improve social skills are a practical place to start.
Your move: message one person from the “lighter” list today and suggest a specific time to meet.
11. Start saying no
People with low self-esteem often say yes to everything. Extra shifts. Favours they don’t have time for. Plans they don’t want. It feels like a way to earn approval.
Follow the chain of cause and effect, though. Each reluctant yes takes time from things you care about. Resentment builds, often towards people who had no idea you minded. You get tired and do the extra work less well. Then the critic chips in: you couldn’t even manage that. Meanwhile, every unwanted yes quietly reinforces the belief underneath it, that your needs count for less than everyone else’s. No single trial has tested this exact chain, so treat it as a reasoned mechanism rather than a proven one. It matches what Rimes and colleagues describe for compensatory strategies, which keep the problem going.
The NHS guidance lists “learn to be assertive” and “start saying no” as part of building healthy self-esteem, and makes a point that’s easy to forget: saying no usually doesn’t damage relationships the way people fear it will.
Next time, do this: when someone asks for something, buy time with “Let me check and get back to you.” Decide later, when the pressure to please isn’t staring at you.
12. Do something kind for someone you care about
This one sounds backwards. You’re trying to feel better about yourself, so why focus on other people? Because acting in line with who you’d like to be is one of the more reliable ways to change how you see yourself.
Oliver Curry and colleagues at the University of Oxford pooled 27 experiments with 4,045 participants in a 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Performing acts of kindness raised the actor’s own well-being with a small-to-medium effect (0.28), and the effect didn’t depend on age, sex or the type of kindness. A 2021 randomised trial from the University of Twente by Leonie Wieners and colleagues, with 222 students, refined the picture. Kindness aimed at close friends and family produced the biggest gains in mental well-being over four weeks. Interestingly, self-esteem itself didn’t explain the effect, so think of kindness as a mood and connection booster that makes the self-esteem work easier, not a direct fix. Both studies are older than two years. We didn’t find a more recent meta-analysis that replaces them.
If kindness doesn’t come naturally when you’re stressed, our guide on how to be friendly and kind has plenty of small ideas.
Start small: choose one person close to you and do one deliberate kind thing for them this week, a handwritten note, a coffee, an hour of help with something they’re dreading.
13. Shift your focus from how your body looks to what it can do
For many people, insecurity lives in the mirror. Trying to love every feature is a big ask. Appreciating what your body does is often easier.
A 2025 randomised controlled trial in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology by Silvia Cerea and colleagues tested a 15-day online programme with 231 young women. The programme combined psychoeducation with exercises on body functionality, things like how your legs carry you up stairs, how your hands let you cook or hug someone. Compared with a waitlist, participants improved in body appreciation and functionality appreciation. Among women at high risk for body image problems, eating disorder risk and extreme body dissatisfaction dropped too.
There’s also a real-world example of how hard it is to make such gains last. Dove, the Unilever brand, has run its Self-Esteem Project in schools for years, and one of its lessons, “Confident Me: Single Session”, was tested in a cluster randomised trial with 1,707 British pupils aged 11 to 13. Phillippa Diedrichs and colleagues reported in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 2015 that the single lesson improved girls’ body esteem in the short term, but the gains had faded within about four to nine weeks, and the authors concluded that a multi-session version was likely needed. The lesson for you is that a one-off pep talk won’t stick. Repetition might.
So every evening for the next two weeks, write down three things your body let you do that day. Keep it concrete and leave appearance out of it.
14. Get good at one thing
Becoming good at something is classic confidence advice. The data support it, with a twist. Competence and self-esteem push on each other in both directions.
Samantha Krauss and Ulrich Orth of the University of Bern pooled 30 longitudinal samples with 53,112 people aged roughly 17 to 64 in a meta-analysis in the European Journal of Personality (2022). Higher self-esteem predicted later job satisfaction, job success and access to resources. Going the other way, job satisfaction, income and having a job predicted higher self-esteem later on. The individual effects were small (around 0.05), which is typical when you’re tracking slow changes over years. Still, they add up over a working life.
The “thing” doesn’t need to be your job. Guitar, sourdough, chess, a language, coding. What matters is a skill where you can see yourself improve. Deep practice can also pull you into that absorbed state described in our guide on entering the flow state, which is a welcome break from self-monitoring.
Test it this week: choose one skill, block out three 20-minute practice sessions and keep a short log of what you could do at the start and what you can do by Sunday.
15. Fix the problems that are actually fixable
Not every insecurity is a thinking error. Sometimes you feel bad about a situation because the situation really is bad: debt, a dead-end job, a skill gap that’s holding you back. Reframing helps with distorted thoughts. It doesn’t pay the rent.
A study in Psychological Science (2023) by Wiebke Bleidorn, Ulrich Orth, Christopher Hopwood and colleagues followed 4,101 Dutch adults from 2019 to 2022, measuring self-esteem and income every year. Within each person over time, a rise in income predicted a later rise in self-esteem more strongly and more reliably than higher self-esteem predicted later income. The data come from one wealthy Western country, and the design is longitudinal rather than experimental, so it can’t prove cause. Still, it supports a common-sense point: improving real circumstances can lift how you see yourself.
The trick is to separate what you can change from what you can’t. You probably can’t change your height or your family history. You might be able to change your savings habit, your qualifications or your job. For ideas on building that base, read our guide on how to invest in yourself in your 20s (most of it applies at any age).
A quick experiment: list five things you dislike about your life. Mark each as “can change” or “can’t change,” then pick one from the first group and take the smallest possible step on it within 48 hours.
16. Act before you feel ready
Many insecure people are waiting to feel confident before they act. It rarely works that way round.
Think about learning to drive. Nobody feels like a confident driver before their first lesson. The confidence comes after dozens of hours behind the wheel, from stalling, recovering and stalling less. The analogy has limits. Driving has clear rules and instant feedback, and social or work situations are messier. But the basic order, action first and confidence later, holds for a lot of what low self-esteem stops you from doing.
The NHS guidance makes a similar argument from the other side. It notes that people with low self-esteem often avoid challenging situations, and that while avoidance feels safer at first, it tends to reinforce self-doubt over time. Its suggestion is to set yourself achievable challenges, such as joining a class or going to a social event, precisely so that you collect experiences that contradict the fear. That’s also the core idea in our guide on how to stop hesitating and start acting.
Give it a go: pick one thing you’ve been putting off “until you feel ready,” shrink it to a version you could do in 15 minutes, and do that version today.
17. Write down what went right
Gratitude journals have a reputation for being soft. A 2025 trial found they help some people more than others, which is worth knowing before you start.
In a randomised trial published in January 2025 in JMIR mHealth and uHealth, Chloë Fuller, Sandra Meier and colleagues gave 120 Dalhousie University students either a gratitude app or a comparison app for three weeks. Across the whole group, the gratitude app made no significant difference to depression, anxiety and stress scores. But among students who started with at least moderate symptoms, distress dropped noticeably (an effect size of 0.68), and so did negative affectivity, the tendency to feel low and irritable. The study didn’t measure self-esteem directly, and the subgroup was small (56 students), so this is suggestive rather than proven.
The practical takeaway is that a gratitude habit may help most when you’re struggling, which is exactly when it feels least natural. It also does something useful for insecurity in particular. It forces your attention onto things that went well, which counters the mind’s habit of replaying every misstep. For more small routines worth keeping, see our list of good habits to have in life.
Here’s a simple way in: before bed, write three specific things that went right today, and for at least one of them, note the part you played.
18. Remember that self-esteem changes over a lifetime
When you’re stuck in it, low self-esteem feels permanent, as if this is just who you are. The long-term data say otherwise.
The largest synthesis we have is a 2018 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Ulrich Orth, Ruth Yasemin Erol and Eva Luciano, covering 331 samples and 164,868 people aged 4 to 94. On average, self-esteem rose strongly from adolescence to about age 30, kept rising until around 60, held steady until about 70 and then declined slowly in old age. The pattern held across gender, country and birth cohort. The study is now several years old, but it remains the foundational reference on the question and we found no newer meta-analysis covering the full lifespan.
| Age range | Average trend in self-esteem |
|---|---|
| 4 to 11 | Rises |
| 11 to 15 | Roughly stable |
| 15 to 30 | Rises strongly |
| 30 to 60 | Keeps rising, peaks around 60 |
| 60 to 70 | Stays at its peak |
| 70 to 90 | Declines slightly |
| 90 to 94 | Declines more steeply |
Averages hide plenty of individual variation, of course, and time alone won’t fix everything. Still, self-esteem is clearly a trait that moves, so the effort you put in now goes into something that can change. Keep that table in mind the next time your critic tells you “this is just how you are.”
19. Build your days around what matters to you
A lot of insecurity comes from chasing approval: wanting to be seen as successful, attractive, interesting. The scorecard belongs to other people, so you never get to feel finished.
Some recent research points in a different direction. In a 2025 study in Acta Psychologica, Hermundur Sigmundsson, Michael Steger and colleagues surveyed 479 adults in Iceland about motivation, meaning and well-being. Meaning in life showed the strongest association with feeling good about oneself, ahead of factors such as grit and growth mindset. It’s a single cross-sectional study in one country, with more women than men in the sample, so it can’t show that meaning causes better self-regard. It does fit the logic of the values work in point 2. Your sense of worth is steadier when it rests on things you care about rather than on applause.
If you’ve been drifting through weeks without asking what you actually want from them, our piece on how to stop living on autopilot is worth a read.
A question to sit with this weekend: if nobody would ever see or praise it, what would you still want to spend your time on? Then put one hour of that into next week’s calendar.
20. Get professional help if the critic won’t quiet down
Self-help has limits. If low self-esteem is tangled up with depression, anxiety or an eating problem, or if it’s been running your life for years, a trained therapist can get further, faster.
The best-studied approach is cognitive behavioural therapy based on Melanie Fennell’s model of low self-esteem. Daniel Kolubinski and colleagues pooled seven studies with 821 participants, all from the UK, in a 2018 meta-analysis in Psychiatry Research. Weekly CBT sessions were linked to large improvements in self-esteem (an effect size of 1.12) and depression by the end of treatment. One-day workshops produced smaller but still meaningful gains three months later (0.34). Most of the included studies had no control group, which tends to inflate effect sizes, so the true benefit is probably smaller than those numbers suggest. Newer protocols, such as the CBT-plus-compassion approaches described by Rimes and colleagues in 2023, are still being tested.
In England you can refer yourself to NHS Talking Therapies without seeing a GP first. Elsewhere, your doctor or local mental health service can point you to a therapist, and if you go private, check they’re registered with a recognised professional body.
If your thoughts ever move towards harming yourself, please contact a doctor, a crisis line or emergency services straight away. That’s not a self-esteem exercise. It’s urgent care.
What to do when you slip
You will have bad days. You’ll skip the journal for a week, scroll for three hours, say yes to something you meant to refuse and then lie awake calling yourself names for it. Slips like these are a normal part of change.
It also takes longer than the internet promises. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, pooled studies with more than 2,600 participants and found that new health habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to form, with individual times ranging from 4 days to almost a year. Practising the habit often, at a regular time, and actually enjoying it all helped. So if you’re three weeks in and nothing feels different, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re early.
When you slip, the worst response is to treat it as proof that you’re hopeless. That’s the inner critic grabbing a new piece of evidence. Go back to point 1 instead. Ask what you’d say to a friend who’d just had a rough week, then say it to yourself. Recall from the Randhawa and Vella-Brodrick review that self-compassion programmes tended to work better when people stuck with them for four weeks or more. Consistency mattered more than intensity.
A few practical moves help. Pick up at the next scheduled time rather than “starting over on Monday.” Shrink the habit for a while, one line in the journal instead of a page. And if a whole day has gone sideways, our guide on how to get over a bad day can help you reset before tomorrow.
Conclusion
You won’t feel amazing all the time, and that isn’t the goal. The aim is to reach a point where a mistake stays a mistake and doesn’t turn into a verdict on who you are.
You don’t need all 20 of these. Pick two or three that fit your life right now, maybe one for your thinking (self-compassion or values affirmation), one for your habits (strength training or a social media cap) and one for your relationships. Give them a couple of months, not a couple of days. Then come back and add another.
For more on building confidence, habits and a steadier mind, browse the Self Improvement section of Perfect 24 Hours, and start with whichever article speaks to what you need this week.
