How Low Self-Worth Quietly Shapes Your Life

"Struggling with feeling good enough can all at once be both a lifelong struggle and something you tend to forget about on a day-to-day, conscious level. So instead of being aware of how low self-esteem impacts your life, you may be prone to moving from one self-esteem crisis to the next. This is exhausting and all-consuming, so much so that you may lose sight of how your self-esteem might be what is perpetuating your unhappiness."

"Feeling not good enough, like you don't quite measure up or you don't belong, or that you need to dupe people into thinking you are enough, all define low self-worth. For most, these kinds of thoughts start in childhood and eventually become a default mental state. You may not even be conscious of these thoughts as they play out, yet they have a great deal of power and contribute to your distress."

"Frequently, people with low self-esteem look like they have it all together on the outside while on the inside they quietly feel that the ground below is shifting. As a way to gain stability, they may obsessively try to keep themselves and their lives in check. The inevitability of this strategy eventually giving way reinforces their sense that they are not good enough and must be hypervigilant to avoid the next misstep."

Low self-esteem can become deeply integrated into identity, leading to habitual feelings of not being good enough, unworthiness, and the sense of needing to deceive others about competence. These beliefs often originate in childhood and calcify into an unconscious default that drives distress. Individuals may present as composed externally while experiencing internal instability, prompting obsessive control and relentless striving for reassurance. Such strategies temporarily stabilize but ultimately fail, reinforcing feelings of inadequacy and necessitating hypervigilance. Increasing self-worth requires recognizing how low self-esteem shapes choices, relationships, and daily behaviors and assessing the costs of perfectionistic control.

Read at Psychology Today