What Are The Causes Of Low Self Esteem (And How To Fight Them)

This new article will show you everything you need to know about what are the causes of low self esteem.

Understanding Low Self-Confidence

Self-confidence is an important part of our self-perception, but it’s different from our entire self-image. Self-confidence primarily refers to our level of belief in our abilities and sense of self-worth. When confidence is low, it’s often marked by negative thoughts about oneself, like thinking, “I’m not good enough,” or “I don’t have what it takes to succeed.”

Most people have mixed feelings about themselves, but if you frequently feel inadequate, undeserving, or that you lack any real value, these thoughts point to low self-confidence. Persistent low confidence can negatively affect every part of life, holding you back from realizing your potential.

Signs and Effects of Low Self-Confidence

At the core of low self-confidence are negative beliefs about yourself. If you lack confidence, these beliefs are often expressed in various ways. You may:

Think Negatively About Yourself: You might often criticize yourself, blame yourself for failures, or doubt your abilities. Instead of focusing on your strengths, you fixate on your weaknesses, seeing them as definitive of who you are.
Avoid Challenges and Opportunities: Low self-confidence may lead to avoiding challenges, staying in your comfort zone, or hesitating to try new things due to fear of failure. You may find it difficult to assert yourself, or often feel apologetic even when unnecessary.
Struggle with Emotional Turmoil: Negative self-beliefs can bring about feelings of sadness, guilt, shame, frustration, or resentment. These emotions can become overwhelming, leading to emotional distress and often physical symptoms like fatigue, tension, or other stress-related issues.
Work Performance and Perfectionism: At work, low self-confidence can make you underperform, as you don’t believe in your abilities. Alternatively, you may push yourself toward perfectionism, driven by fear of failure, making it hard to be satisfied with your achievements.
Relationship Difficulties: In personal relationships, low confidence can cause hesitation, over-sensitivity to criticism, or a strong desire to please others. You might also feel a need to control situations or prioritize others’ needs excessively, believing that otherwise, people won’t value you.
Hesitance in Leisure Activities: During free time, you may avoid activities where you risk judgment or criticism. You might even feel unworthy of relaxing and enjoying yourself.
Self-Neglect: People with low self-confidence often fail to take good care of themselves, ignoring signs of illness, drinking excessively, or resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

The Impact of Low Self-Confidence on Daily Life

The extent to which low self-confidence affects you depends on how deeply it has integrated into your life. Sometimes, this feeling of low confidence arises due to specific circumstances, like a rough period at work, or from underlying mental health issues like depression.

In these cases, addressing the immediate cause—like seeking support for depression—might boost your confidence as a natural outcome.

Low self-confidence can also be triggered by broader, long-standing issues, such as difficult relationships or chronic health problems. Tackling the root causes directly may provide relief. However, in many instances, low confidence makes people more vulnerable to additional struggles, such as depression, self-harm, eating disorders, or social anxiety. When this is the case, improving your confidence is essential to reducing the risk of these associated issues recurring in the future.

Ultimately, addressing low self-confidence means recognizing the areas where it impacts your life most and understanding that building a healthier sense of self-worth is a gradual process. Over time, positive self-beliefs can open doors to opportunities, fulfillment, and resilience against future challenges.

What Perpetuates Low Self-Confidence?

People often develop certain “Rules for Living” to manage their low self-confidence and feel in control. These rules might give short-term relief, but in the long run, they often reinforce low confidence because they create unrealistic standards that are nearly impossible to maintain, such as always being perfect, staying in complete control, or avoiding any situation where failure is a possibility.

These standards mean your self-worth can feel fragile. When you inevitably encounter a situation that breaks one of these rules, your underlying “Bottom Line” belief about yourself—like “I’m not good enough”—comes back to the surface.

This Bottom Line is often triggered by everyday events. For instance, if you believe “I’m a failure if anyone criticizes me,” then even a minor piece of feedback at work or from a friend can activate this belief, fueling a cycle that reinforces your low self-confidence.

How This Cycle Works

Anxious Predictions When your Bottom Line is triggered, it often leads to anxious predictions—worst-case scenarios about what could happen. For instance, if you have to give a presentation at work, and your Bottom Line is “I’m uninteresting and no one cares what I have to say,” you might predict that everyone will be bored or silently judging you. This anxiety feeds into a negative cycle where these fears amplify your sense of inadequacy.
Physical Reactions and Negative Interpretations Anxiety often manifests physically, with symptoms like a racing heart, sweating, and shaking. If you struggle with low self-confidence, you might interpret these symptoms negatively, assuming they reveal your weakness. For example, if you feel shaky during your presentation, you might worry that people can see how nervous you are and assume you’re incompetent. These interpretations only add to your anxiety and reinforce your belief in your Bottom Line.
Behavioral Responses to Anxious Predictions Low confidence can lead to several behavioral responses, each one perpetuating the cycle of self-doubt:

Avoidance: If you’re afraid of failure, you might avoid situations that trigger your Bottom Line altogether. For example, you might skip giving the presentation entirely, which offers short-term relief but prevents you from learning that your fears may not be accurate. You miss the chance to challenge your predictions, which could show you that things might actually go well.
Excessive Precautions: Sometimes, people take extensive measures to prevent anything from going wrong. You might rehearse obsessively or over-prepare, thinking this is the only way to avoid failure. But by doing this, you never discover whether you can handle the situation without all these extra precautions, leading you to feel your success was solely due to them rather than your own abilities.
Performance Impairment: Anxiety affects performance, and low confidence makes this worse. Instead of seeing anxiety as a normal reaction to stress, you might interpret any shaky performance as a sign of your inherent inability. This only reinforces the belief that you’re not good enough.
Downplaying Success: Even if things go well, you might discount your achievements. You might dismiss a successful presentation as “just luck” or assume that any positive feedback was just people being polite rather than genuine. This dismissal reinforces your negative self-view by making success seem accidental rather than deserved.

How Low Self-Confidence Becomes Self-Sustaining

This cycle of anxious predictions, negative interpretations, and unhelpful behaviors makes it hard to break free from low self-confidence. By reinforcing these beliefs with avoidance, excessive precautions, and downplaying successes, each experience confirms the Bottom Line that you are not good enough.

Overcoming this cycle means gradually challenging your anxious predictions and learning to interpret your experiences more realistically. With practice, you can develop healthier responses and start building confidence in a more stable, sustainable way. Recognizing that setbacks are normal and interpreting them with kindness is a big step toward interrupting the cycle of low self-confidence and fostering a more positive self-view.

How Low Self-Confidence Reinforces Itself

When you respond to anxious thoughts or predictions by avoiding situations, over-preparing, or doubting your achievements, you reinforce the belief that your negative self-perceptions are accurate. This creates a sense of confirmation for your “Bottom Line”—your fundamental belief about yourself, such as “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t deserve success.”

Feeling like your self-doubts are “confirmed” often triggers a flood of self-critical thoughts, which deepens your sense of inadequacy and reinforces your low self-confidence. This cycle can easily lead to feelings of despair and even depression, which further distorts how you see yourself and keeps your Bottom Line activated.

These beliefs about yourself often feel like absolute truths, even though they’re actually just interpretations influenced by past experiences. Many of these interpretations come from early experiences that shaped your self-image.

How Early Experiences Shape Low Self-Confidence

Negative self-beliefs often stem from significant life experiences, particularly those in childhood when we’re most impressionable. For example, if you experienced:

Strict discipline, neglect, or mistreatment – You may come to believe you are unworthy of kindness or respect.
Constantly falling short of parental expectations – This might instill a sense of never being “good enough.”
Difficulty fitting in with peers – Leading to thoughts like “I’m different, and that makes me less valuable.”
Family or social prejudice – Growing up in a group that was judged negatively can lead to internalizing that bias.
Lack of warmth, praise, or attention – Leaving you with a feeling that you don’t deserve positive attention.

Even events later in life, such as workplace bullying, toxic relationships, ongoing stress, or traumatic events, can shape negative beliefs. These experiences can add layers to your Bottom Line, making it even harder to feel confident in yourself.

The Bottom Line: The Core of Low Self-Confidence

Our Bottom Line is often the internalized voice of important figures from our past, like parents, teachers, or peers, who may have criticized, compared, or doubted us. Over time, we may begin to see ourselves as they once did, hearing their critical voices in our own thoughts.

The Bottom Line is often formed in childhood, when our understanding of the world is limited. A child’s perspective can lead to misunderstandings about events that create a distorted sense of self. For instance, if a parent was critical, you might have thought, “I must be bad if I keep disappointing them,” without recognizing that the parent’s behavior wasn’t your fault.

Although these beliefs might now be outdated and unhelpful, they made sense at a time when you were just trying to navigate life as a child.

How Biases Maintain the Bottom Line

Once the Bottom Line is established, it’s hard to break free because of biased thinking. Biased thinking means you naturally pay attention to information that confirms your negative beliefs and ignore anything that contradicts them.

Two types of bias reinforce low self-confidence:

Selective Perception – You become highly attuned to anything that aligns with your negative self-views and overlook anything that contradicts them. For example, you may focus only on your mistakes and ignore your successes, reinforcing your belief that you’re inadequate.
Selective Interpretation – You interpret experiences in a way that fits your Bottom Line, even if they’re positive. If someone compliments you, you might think, “They don’t mean it; they’re just being polite,” or “I must have looked bad before if they’re complimenting me now.”

These biases make it easy to expect negative outcomes and interpret events as confirming your Bottom Line, keeping your memory of experiences tilted toward the negative.

Negative Self-Beliefs as a Form of Prejudice Against Yourself

Negative self-beliefs work like internalized prejudice—beliefs that ignore the full picture and are based on selectively chosen “evidence.” Just like prejudice, they aren’t a fair assessment of reality but are built on a distorted view that’s biased against yourself.

Recognizing these biases is the first step to challenging them, allowing you to see yourself more clearly and begin developing a self-image that includes your strengths and true potential. Replacing this negative cycle with more balanced, compassionate self-reflection can help you rebuild confidence and form a healthier view of yourself.