Lacking confidence and self-esteem is an issue that can affect all aspects of your life. Not to mention that it can affect your mental health as well. However, this isn’t something you can’t deal with. Many people have battled with a lack of self-esteem and came out as winners. In that respect, boosting your confidence and changing the way you feel about and view yourself is not an impossible mission. To ease your way into the battle, you can introduce the following practices and habits into your daily routine.
Phase-out the negative thoughts
Thinking bad things about yourself is something that happens to everyone, but if you only focus on the negative all the time, this can really drain all of your confidence and self-esteem. It can also lead to depression and stress. It might be difficult to do this at first, but it’s crucial for a healthy start. Take a piece of paper that’s a bit longer and write all the positive things you can think of about yourself. Leave room to add more things as you remember them. Keep that paper somewhere you can easily see or reach it. Every time you start losing yourself in bad thoughts, take a look at this piece of paper and read the positive things out loud until you completely replace the visualization of bad things with the good ones.
Embrace the self-care
Self-care includes many different things; in general, it’s about the way you treat yourself on a daily basis. For starters, it means eating healthy and getting the right amount of exercise. Furthermore, it involves rejuvenating activities such as skin and hair care. Finally, you can’t skip the much-needed “me” time where you get to do the things that simply make you happy, be that going out with friends or watching a movie at home. Keep this in mind and try to come up with a meal and exercise plan as well as skincare regimen which will work for you. Once you start treating yourself with care, you’ll soon feel the boost of self-esteem, too.
Focus only on those things that you can actually change
People tend to revel in their own inability to affect the things that are completely out of their control far too often. Unfortunately, this mindset can really affect one’s confidence and self-esteem negatively. Therefore, try to shift your attention to things that you can change. Set some achievable and reasonable goals for yourself in the future, which are possible to accomplish with continuous effort and work. Even if you fret about some aspect of your physical appearance, you can check out the best options for cosmetic surgery in Sydney and start saving up in order to reach this particular goal. Things that are truly impossible to change are not worth your constant worrying and stress.
Try something new
As you get stuck in a rut of completely the same routine every single day, you might find yourself missing the motivation to deal with once simple tasks, which can affect your self-esteem in a pretty bad way. The best way to deal with this is to try something completely new. It can be a course, class, sport, activity – literally anything that you haven’t tried before but you’ve always wanted to or had been curious about. Such a change of pace is not only fun and enjoyable but can successfully break the passivity and the rut you might have fallen into. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to recover your motivation and energy, and gradually build up your confidence, too.
Surround yourself with positive people
This is one of the most important but also one of the hardest things that you must do for yourself. The matter might be even more pressing if you’re clearly aware of the people in your immediate surroundings who constantly bring you down, be it intentionally or unintentionally, and feed you toxic thoughts. The best thing you could do for yourself and your self-esteem would be to completely cease contact with these people. But if you can’t really do that, at least try to minimize the contact as much as possible, while putting the conscious effort to spend more time with other, more positive and brighter people. It might not seem fair at first, but you owe this to yourself; who you spend time with can tremendously influence your mood as well as the way you feel about yourself and the world.
Keep in mind that nobody’s perfect. There’s no need to waste time comparing yourself to others and belittling your own worth when you can take that time to grow and practice self-acceptance. The only person responsible for your confidence and self-esteem is you.
