Self Esteem: The Key to Happiness

If you don't take care of your self esteem, you won't achieve happiness on your own, nor with someone else. To achieve a balance in your environment, you have to love and respect yourself first.
Self Esteem: The Key to Happiness

Last update: 27 May, 2022

Self-esteem is the appreciation or regard we have for ourselves. The death of a family member, heartbreak, or other situations that hit us hard can cause our self-esteem to falter.

However, just because it waivers, it doesn’t mean that it’s completely destroyed.

The lack of decision making, unresolved problems and the accumulation of emotions can all be factors that lead to a tremendous feeling of unhappiness that derives from low self-esteem.

Raise your self esteem to achieve happiness

Woman making a heart shape with her hands

Being happy isn’t just feeling at peace by realizing all of the that makes us feel good on the inside and in harmony with everyone and everything around us.

Our beliefs, issues that we’ve had since childhood and the blows that life gives us, can send our self-esteem spiraling into a bottomless pit.

What causes our self-esteem to be so low is that we occasionally take refuge in victim-hood and complaining. We unconsciously look to our comfort zone for help.

All of a sudden we put our lives on pause. We don’t live our lives fully, fear surrounds us, insecurity overtakes us, and time passes by as if it wasn’t worth a thing.

However, we are the ones not valuing anything. We hurt ourselves thinking this is true and behaving in a way that’s damaging to our well-being.

How many times have you been in a toxic relationship that you didn’t know how to end? How many times have people humiliated you and you just stood there not knowing what to do?

The fear, doubts and shame are the type of thoughts that sabotage our self esteem. They make us feel bad inside.

Make yourself a priority, everyone else comes second

Woman shaking her head in the wind

If there is something that significantly affects your self-esteem, is believing you’re not enough. Not knowing your worth or value causes you to think about others before thinking about yourself.

Others deserve everything, but you don’t; you should love others, but you don’t deserve to be loved; these types of thoughts cause you to wait for others to give you what you don’t give yourself.

When you don’t give yourself a priority and push yourself to the side, you suffer. Your self-esteem hits rock bottom and with that attitude, you won’t be able to lift yourself up.

It’s possible that you think you’re being egotistical for making yourself a priority, for thinking about your well-being before thinking of that of others.

However, if you’re not OK, how are you going to help others be OK? At the cost of your own happiness? By sacrificing yourself? What do you gain from that?

Nobody is going to look after you, love you, or value you like you deserve, if you don’t do it yourself first.

But mostly, because you can’t give what you don’t have. Every time you love, it will be empty. You can’t give something you don’t give to yourself; you simply won’t have it!

Will you choose to be happy?

Hugging a heart

The majority of problems that arise in our relationships, those that become a cycle that we don’t see the way out of, may have something to do with our self-esteem.

That’s why we have to pay special attention to it; because if we feel bad, that means there’s something on the inside we need to fix.

We cannot wait for others to do it for us, or ignore the fact that we’re pouring into others, giving them what we don’t give ourselves. This is emotional suicide.

We will feed into our sadness, emptying ourselves and turning into a black hole that absorbs all of the negativity surrounding us.

Your self-esteem is the key to your happiness, but for that, you have to truly see yourself, make yourself a priority, value and heal yourself of everything that’s hurting you.

There’s no point in pouring into others when you don’t pour into yourself. You’re the most important person who you will spend the rest of your life with.

Take care of yourself, because if you don’t do it, no one else will do it for you.


All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.


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This text is provided for informational purposes only and does not replace consultation with a professional. If in doubt, consult your specialist.