Is our Happiness Realted to Self-Esteem?

Is our Happiness Related to Self-Esteem?

            What makes people happy? Is it pleasure from family, good friends, material things or money? Is there one specific thing that will cure anyone’s gloomy day? The simple answer is no, nothing can be the cure to everything, but what if we had the definition of happiness wrong? What if, happiness came from inside ourselves instead of from things around us? Society has pressed us to think that we need to be perfect. While in real life, everyone is different, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of our differences. Society has placed a nasty tag on people, who, though different, are happy with their lives. They have the one thing society’s “perfect” people do not. They have confidence in who they are. Confidence, or Self Esteem, I believe, is one of the most important aspects of happiness.

            Often, we forget that self-esteem is a part of our health. It is not just an emotion, that fades or changes with time. Though it can change and fluctuate, self-esteem is a necessary part of our overall mental health. Healthy self-esteem is often thrown to the wayside for other aspects of our health, but it is truly just as important. Since unhealthily low self-esteem often leads to depression, anxiety and stress, and high or healthy self-esteem leads to being able to deal with stress, happy relationships; healthy self-esteem should be a more important part of our focus on health (Pickhardt).

Self-esteem often leads to better relationships. When a person is dealing with low self-esteem, they often view themselves as “unworthy” of the friendships and love they do deserve. This plunges their self-esteem even lower, possibly causing depression and anxiety about their remaining relationships. In the same way, the worse someone feels, the worse they will treat others. This too might cause their relationships to end, and the person with the low self-esteem will put the blame all on themselves, worsening the situation (Pickhardt). Low self- esteem can lead to many negative outcomes, such as depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, and materialism, and these possible outcomes have a negative effect on happiness. They decrease self-worth, leaving the person as unsatisfied as when they started - possibly even more.

            As I continue, I want to make it clear that I do not believe that self-esteem is the “fix-it” for all problems of happiness, nor am I saying that the only way a person can be happy is with high self-esteem. Though I think that happiness is linked to higher self-esteem, and that self-esteem benefits a person’s contentment with life, I do not think that self-esteem is the cure all for depression and unhappiness. There are so many factors, that saying a person is unhappy singularly because they have low self-esteem is uninformed and even wrong.  I think that it is an underrepresented part of the whole, and that that needs to be addressed.

            In my own experience, self-esteem has had an immense impact in my own happiness. When I started my freshman year in high school, I was nervous, shy and easily intimidated. I also had very low self-esteem. I constantly compared myself to everyone else, and found all the flaws with myself that set me apart from them. I was constantly sad, depressed and lonely. When I finally settled in with a good group of friends who accepted me and my flaws, I started to grow in confidence as well as self-esteem. As my self-esteem steadily grew, I was happier and happier, due to content with myself and my past. Self-esteem is still a daily battle for me, but it gets easier every day as I grow in confidence. I am happier now than I ever have been, and as I grow into more self-esteem, I have a strong feeling that I will continue to be happier.

            One of the many roots of low self-esteem, as I alluded to earlier, is comparison with other people. As humans, we constantly compare ourselves to everyone else, hoping to be as pretty, as tall, or even as “perfect”. Now, I put quotation marks around the “perfect” because I believe there is no such thing as perfection – or at least how we have come to define it. Everything has a flaw, and as I said earlier, that is what makes it beautiful. But we constantly compare ourselves to that “perfection” in hopes of attaining that impossibility. This often leads to a massive drop in self-esteem, since we view ourselves as incompetent or ineffective. We are imperfect, and we punish ourselves for what we cannot control.

            This misconception of perfection in today’s society often leads teenagers to believe that their imperfections make them less than those portrayed as perfect. This leads to a severe drop in self-esteem. How often do we compare ourselves to the things we see? Song lyrics, magazines, movies, even television ads all portray a perfection that is unattainable but somehow expected. This causes pressure to fit in with a changed society, where that unattainable perfection is constantly sought (Elkind, 6). When a person is unable to attain this perfection, they feel that it sets them apart, increases negative thoughts about themselves, and often diminishes the meaning of their accomplishments in the light of their failure to be perfect. Some of the most important factors in self-esteem are having accomplishments accepted and acknowledged (cmhc.utexas.edu/selfesteem) and having positive thoughts about oneself (Maldonado). If neither of these is fulfilled, self-esteem plummets, taking a person’s happiness with it.

            In contrast to those with low self-esteem, people with high self-esteem often see themselves as worthy of the friendships they have, and often do not compare themselves to the misconception of perfection. They are content with who they are, what they’ve done, and what they have accomplished. Overall, these people are happy, not plagued by low self-esteem.

            Teenagers often struggle the most with comparing themselves to others.  In an era where social media dictates teen’s lives, self-esteem takes a serious hit. Teens are continuously comparing their whole life to highlights from someone else’s. They place their failures at the same level as the other person’s highlights, creating an awful juxtaposition. “People need to be loved and socially accepted; this phenomenon is referred to as ‘need to belong’”(qtd.  Gangadharbatla). This need to belong is exploited on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where users see exactly what others want them to see, which tends to be the happy or exciting things in that person’s life. As a teen myself, I hate going on Facebook, and I definitely think that is a huge factor in why teen’s self-esteem fluctuates the way it does. What you see on Facebook is everything you don’t need to know – who went to that party, who had that dress, etc. etc. And most of all, Facebook leads to the question, ‘If they can, why can’t I?’.  People are constantly seeing things on Facebook that normally would be private – pictures and updates from exciting events, pictures from dates and pictures of being with friends. Often, teens look and say to themselves, why am I not there, why was I not invited, or my friends don’t like me since they didn’t invite me. These thoughts increase the stress already present to fit in, creating more stress than is necessary. Speaking from experience, one of the most difficult things is when you log on Facebook when you are having a bad day, and you see everyone else is having good days. Then you wonder why you are the one who is sad or alone.

                        Figure 1                                                           (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397308000701)

Figure 1 shows that people with low self-esteem end up logging on to Facebook steadily more than people with high self-esteem. This leads to more comparison, and self-judgment, which hurts their already low self-esteem. People are only hurting themselves more instead of protecting themselves more and attempting to heal. In the same way, teens tend to criticize themselves harsh anyway, and their criticism of themselves does the same thing, hurts when they really need to heal. 
Facebook blatantly portrays what we all want in our lives – some form of success. On Facebook, other  people’s success is right in front of our eyes, with statuses such as ‘Just bought that new Maserati I’ve been dreaming of!’  and ‘ Great date tonight!’. We all see them, and most of the time, we compare. ‘Well, I haven’t got a Maserati, and my date went really badly the other night. I am hopeless.’ In the light of other peoples accomplishments, your own get lost in the jealousy an inadequacy you feel.

( (Figure 2 )

In this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Calvin makes light of the fact that self-esteem and feeling worthy in today’s world comes from how our accomplishments measure up to other people’s accomplishments, no matter how much they actually mean to us.

In contrast, a child whose accomplishments are rewarded and celebrated tends to have higher self-esteem (qtd. Ball ). With a basis on personal achievement and a redefined view of success, children grow up with more self-esteem. They look for confirmation of their beliefs, yes, but they search to confirm their already positive beliefs. People with low self-esteem also look for confirmation of their thoughts of themselves, though they are negative instead of positive. This is known as self-verification, and all people feel the need to verify their thoughts with others. The difference lies in the thoughts. We have all fished for a complement at least once in our lives – to confirm what we already believe to be true (Ball). 

By being happy with who they are and their accomplishments, people are able to cope with the world around them. If someone was unsure of themselves, and unsure of how they will handle things, how can they truly be happy? Anxiety can lead a person to not trust anything, including themselves. Their need for control can drive their own self-esteem down, causing them to believe that because they can’t control their life, life is too much to handle. As a person who struggles with anxiety, I can say that anxiety causes me to lose confidence in myself, making it hard to be happy. My anxiety isn’t a diagnosed anxiety, and probably is nowhere near what anxiety disorders can be, so I can hardly imagine what it would do to an individual’s self-esteem. If society didn’t press us to be its version of successful, this anxiety might disappear. But maybe it’s not society that needs to change. Maybe it’s how we view our own achievements. Maybe, if we started taking pride in who we are and not be ashamed of the failures we have had, we could be truly happy and ready to face the rest of the obstacles that come our way in life.

We are constantly in in need of someone’s approval, and this is where we make our mistakes. The moment we start making choices for other people is the moment we often lose confidence in who we are. Singer Ed Sheeran said “ I can’t tell you the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.” If we are only try to make others happy we will neglect ourselves, and we probably won’t even make others happy either.

Self-esteem is a huge part of happiness. They go hand in hand – without self-esteem happiness wouldn’t be possible, and happiness increases self-esteem. As a society, we need to rewrite the connotation of self-esteem from egotistical and snotty, to strong and sure. We all try so hard to strive for society’s unrealistic ideals, ye we don’t realize the power we have to change them. We are that society. We now have to take what we have believed and flip it, so it is possible to be happy. 

Works Cited

Ball, Aimee L. "Why Women Have Low Self-Esteem - How to Feel More Confident - Oprah.com." Oprah.com. N.p., n.d. Web.

Elkind, David. The Hurried Child: Growing up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA: Addison-        Wesley Pub., 1981. Print.

Pickhardt, Carl, Ph.D. "Surviving (Your Child's) Adolescence." Psychologytoday.com. N.p., n.d.             Web.

"Self-Esteem." Self-Esteem. Utexas, n.d. Web.

Staff, Mayo Clinic. "Self-esteem Check: Too Low, Too High or Just Right?" Mayo Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 23 July 2011. Web.

"What Every Adult Should Know About Self-Esteem." Web log post. Buzzle.com. N.p., n.d. Web.

Gangadharbatla, Harsha. "Facebook me: Collective self-esteem, need to belong, and internet        self-efficacy as predictors of the iGeneration's attitudes toward social networking   sites." Journal of interactive advertising 8.2 (2008): 5-15.