Every day when you open your phone or step outside,
you're reminded that your face could be less wrinkly, you could be more fit,
or perhaps you'd look better if your cheeks were rosier. There's no shortage of signals
to make you stop and question: am I good enough? How can I be better?
Self-esteem is your evaluation of your worth value or importance. And I think
that self-esteem is one of the most underrated topics in psychology and
mental health. It's not talked about as much as it should be or taken seriously.
Positive self-esteem is a basic feature of good mental health.
And when your self-esteem suffers it can lead to self-criticism, sadness,
anxiety, shame, and even depression. And a lot of our self-esteem is suffering:
almost half of you who voted in this poll said your self-esteem is on the lower side.
So I set out to figure out how we can feel less crap. I tried
not just one but five research fact ways to improve self-esteem.
We're talking self-esteem interventions that have
been used in clinical trials. And it turned out I really needed them.
This video is sponsored by 3M. Their science can help you solve problems
in your daily life – stick around for more later.
Okay but first let's take a crash course in the
science of self-esteem – what do we know about it in the first place?
It's a common assumption that high self-esteem leads to doing better in school or amazing
job performance. It's also been claimed that those with high self-esteem are more likeable,
attractive and have better relationships. This led to an explosion of self-esteem
books for kids parents and teachers in the 80s and 90s. The state of
California even set up a government task force to promote self-esteem.
The problem with these early studies is that self-esteem
was only linked - correlated - with school success or higher job
performance. We didn't actually know if self-esteem led to those benefits.
And later studies found that performing well at school or work actually led to
a boost in self-esteem - not the other way around. As for being attractive or likeable,
people with high self-esteem tend to exaggerate their successes and their good traits,
so it's hard to measure objectively. But also self-esteem is one of those trades where being
too high isn't necessarily good because it's linked to high in narcissism. As one paper put it,
narcissists are charming at first but tend to alienate others eventually.
What we do know is that low self-esteem can lead to self-doubts and self-criticism which
can trigger feelings of sadness, shame, not feeling good enough,
even anxiety and depression. This can really be a problem for people who are at risk for
depression or anxiety and that's mostly who these self-esteem interventions are designed for:
patients with cancer, at risk teenagers, older people and nursing home residents,
and like all psychology research... university students. So over two
weeks I set out to try five interventions: yoga, Beauty care, relaxation techniques,
compassionate mind training and identifying strengths, for those of you playing along at home.
Alright so of the five interventions I'm trying,
two are focused on relaxation and to be honest I was pretty skeptical of them.
One is yoga which involves postures breathing and meditation and the other
was relaxation techniques, progressive muscle relaxation and deep breathing.
This involves tensing all the muscles in your body and then releasing them. These are both great for
your overall chill but I was struggling to see how they could help myself doubts.
So I'm doing yoga every day for a week but I'm kind of struggling with it because it
makes me feel weak and I don't really see how it's related to self-esteem.
But actually I was just being a silly goose because the research on this is fascinating.
Okay I just learned something so cool that I need to share it with you:
so self-esteem and stress have this interesting relationship low self-esteem can contribute to
higher levels of cortisol secretion if you experience stress (this is a hormone that's
related to stress) and this has been found in multiple studies. I'm kind of nerding out
here! These studies suggest that increasing self-esteem can be protective in managing
stress and potentially managing stress well can lead to improvements in self-esteem,
so that's why these interventions use yoga and deep breathing and muscle relaxation
because it's calming and relaxing and helps you regulate your emotional response to
things. And that can limit your negative self-talk and decrease that. So cool.
Aside from stress, some self-esteem issues are
more physical - particularly if illness or disease has changed someone's appearance.
Now these can be really serious challenges to work through and the experiences of someone
like me who isn't going through this kind of appearance change are likely going to
be very different from the people who were in the study. But still I was curious to see
how this would affect my own feelings of self-doubt, so I'll give it a try.
I'm on my way to get a makeover and photo shoot because one clinical trial found
that it improved self-esteem. This is just what I normally look like.
I get that to some people a clinical trial that involves a makeup workshop and photo
shoot might seem flippant, but for the participants in this study those in the
intervention group reported less symptoms of depression, higher self-esteem and quality
of life compared with the control group. And this was still true at a two-month
follow-up. For those who may benefit, it's a short, low-cost way to improve self-esteem.
Even for those of us without sudden appearance changes navigating our
appearance in a world filled with unrealistic beauty standards and celebrity photoshopping
can be difficult. Ads and products tell us that aging is a problem that
can definitely be solved by expensive creams or even anti-aging sleep masks?
The photo shoot made me feel really good about myself -especially as a YouTuber it's easy to
get stuck in a whole of mean comments. People have been commenting about my appearance for the
past 10 years and there's been times when it's hit hard. A lot of you might assume that I have
of really high self-esteem because I'm presenting on camera etc etc it wasn't until a few years ago
when I actually went to a therapist, a counsellor, a psychologist, and spoke to them about issues
that I had with doing this work that I actually started to feel a lot more comfortable with it and
confident with it and realised that I had these self-esteem issues that were holding me back that
I kind of wasn't aware of before and it just came out of some conversations I was actually having
about anxiety and I realised this and then I went fully into self-esteem and this video is kind of a
result of that. Glad that I'm getting content from my own therapy... turning into a real YouTuber.
A lot of content creators feel this way - even research shows that working under an algorithm
influences your personal value. Shout out to this paper because I actually wrote it lolol
And for me, one of the interventions that helped the most was writing a letter to
myself where I could basically invent really good comments.
I'm writing myself a letter as part of compassionate mind training following
these instructions from Kristen Neff. The letter is from the perspective of an imaginary friend
who loves me unconditionally. It's very difficult but there's something really cool about imagining
and kind of creating this person in my mind who is just my biggest cheerleader.
And finally the strengths and reframing approach addresses your attitude and how
you frame your thoughts. The study I used as a model was based on work, so the method helps you
shift your focus to the more positive aspects of your work by identifying and using your
strengths. You can ask yourself questions like: what are my strengths? What are the positive
contributions I bring to my job? You can then try to reframe your attitude to be more optimistic and
hopeful by asking questions like: How can each work situation be an opportunity for growth?
This is normally done in a group and I can't emphasise
enough HOW difficult this is to do yourself with pen and paper.
Honestly I felt like I was melting just trying it so I turned to my only friend in the moment,
chat gpt, and it helped me Identify some of my strengths and contributions in making science
videos. Please give it a description of what you do for work and try this!
I then went a step further and printed out one of my strengths as a motivational quote just so
I could be reminded of it constantly - who doesn't love motivational messages for their self-esteem
in the bathroom? Honestly I loved reading this every day - it was just motivational and made me
feel like I'm doing really important work. And then... every time I went in to wash my hands
it reminded me that I'd been working on this video for over a month and I really needed to finish it!
So there's three main things that I have taken away from the process of making this
video and the first is something that I really truly believe - which is you should
always make time to do something nice for yourself. Whatever that looks like for you,
because it'll probably be a little bit different for everyone. Because that's what a lot of these
interventions are doing with the yoga, and the makeup tutorial, and the photo shoot,
and even the relaxation, the deep breathing and the progressive muscle relaxation - people are
just trying to relax and de-stress and feel a bit better about whatever is going on in their
lives. And that has some kind of link with self-esteem, with negative thought patterns,
and being critical of yourself. Ao whatever that is for you - do something!
The second thing is that there is no best one-size-fits all self-esteem intervention
for everyone, because what you choose to do depends on what you're struggling with. So for me,
I already have stuff like deep breathing that I try to do every day to manage my stress levels,
but I don't really do a lot to tame negative thought patterns and self-criticism that I
have. So for me the best things are things that I found the most useful were actually
the compassionate mind training - thinking of this imaginary friend
who thinks I'm awesome and kind of writing a letter from their perspective. And then
also doing some of the skills and attributes kind of stuff. I found that really useful.
And the last thing to remember is that wherever you are, however you feel about yourself,
developmental psychology research shows that self-esteem increases across the
lifespan until you hit about 60 to 65. So if you are younger than that wherever you are,
it's only going up here - keep that in mind.
I actually met the 3M scientist who invented these water resistant command strips. People think I'm
like a biker chick -I'm not a biker chick! I am a chemist, okay? So I'm here with Audrey
who actually invented a type of command strip for 3M which is amazing. Audrey has 159 patents. Do
you have more than that? I have more than that in the patent office, they just haven't allowed
them yet. I've never met someone so passionate about innovation in adhesives. This one is got
a blue foam on it. This video is sponsored by 3M and Audrey gave me a crash course in their
adhesives. It's actually very interesting! There's two different ways that sticky things that can
stick or be removed - one is called peel strength and then the other is called Shear strength.
Post-it notes have low peel strength that's why you can peel them up and restick them so easily
but they're really hard to peel down because they have high sheer strength - that's why
they don't fall off the wall. It's really hard! But the command strip is the opposite - if you
incorrectly peel it straight up it will probably take off some wall. But you can remove them later
because you can sheer it. So satisfying it's stretches so much! Pull it down, down, down like
Silly Putty until it comes right off. Oh, clean break! Look at this and your wall still intact!
Thanks to 3M for supporting me and the channel. It hangs something on a mirror
with this oh that's such a good idea your bathroom and it can be a message
to improve my self-esteem. It can be and you'll see it while you see the message!