Epsychologist's Blog

3 main tips to boost your self-esteem

Hello, one more time. I posted two articles which are related with self-esteem. One of them “How to get rid of depressed mood and feel happy about you” is about actions. Change the way you act and you will change your life. Other one is “A power of the positive thinking or how to deal with depression, anxiety, perfectionism and low self-esteem. “ The main idea is that you need to change the way of thinking and then you can change your life.

Today I am going to talk about visualization. It is a bit similar to positive thinking, but now it is important to visualize ideas in your mind. The best way to do it is when you are totally relaxed and with an empty stomach. It is better to choose a calm, nice place that you won’t be distracted. For example I am afraid of public speech. I am afraid that I will fail against a very big auditory. Now I will go lie in my bed and try to imagine a different scenario. That I come to auditory and I feel confident, and I am well-prepared. An audience liked my speech and I hear applauses. It is better to make the good film in your head and try to repeat it until you are truly sure that it is the truth. Imagine every detail: the faces of the people, colors and so on. As more realistic it is as better it is.

The technique is not everything. This blog is a self-help blog and the main goal is to help people to help themselves. I am going to give myself one month time starting from today. I will try to use these techniques, combine them and describe my progress in this blog. The main goal of it is to feel more self-confident and get rid of a stress and a fear.

Boosting self-esteem in 3 simple steps

The basic idea in order to build your self-esteem is to understand your needs, and then do something in order to meet them. It means that first to all you should just care about yourself. You can just relax and think. What I want from this life? What are my dreams? Caring about yourself is the most important thing which will help you to boost your self-esteem.

Some causes of low self-esteem

• Too much critical parent: It can be that your parents criticize you and now you feel that you can never full fill their needs.
• Significant Childhood lost. Maybe your parents divorced or something else had happened. You felt abandon and lonely. That’s why you feel addicted to particular person, food, alcohol and so on.
• Too much care of your parents is also not so good, because you can start to think that the world is dangerous place, so you are afraid.

Maybe you can recognize what kind of reasons caused you low self-esteem. You can find them even more. However it doesn’t mean that you need to blame you parents, because probably they gave you the best what they could.

There are 3 main steps which help to gain self-esteem

1. Get to know your needs and meet them
2. Start to communicate with your “inner child”. Everybody have it. He/she is creative, but sensitive part of ourselves.
3. Making small steps every day in order to satisfy your needs.

Caring about you means to take care about an inner child. You can do that by being a good parent for yourself. It is important to learn how to be a good parent for yourself. There are some small tips what you can do about it:

• Take a warm bath
• Have special breakfast in bed
• Enjoy massage
• Walk in the park
• Relax with the book or music
• Watch sunrise and sunset
• Dance by your favorite music
• Make a special dinner
• Talk with the good friend
• Write for yourself love letter
• Visit some interesting places like museum or zoo
• Play with the puzzle
• Write an ideal scenario for you goal
• Write a letter to your old friend
• Write a diary about your achievements
• Exercise

The next step would be to find out what you really want from this life. The easiest way to do that just ask you inner child. You can write a nice latter for her/him, or just try to think about what you was dreaming about in your childhood.

The last but not the least step is to do something in order to meet you needs. Do you like dancing, but you never tried to dance. It is the right time to sign up in dancing classes.

Everything looks even simpler then I thought, however I believe that idea behind this three steps is worth to try.

Food which boost you mood or how to become more energetic in 3 days

I was writing in this blog for some days. But it doesn’t mean that I was not working or thinking about the possible themes which would be interesting to write and interesting to read for you. So I was continuing my experiment. I noticed these thinks:

• If you want long-term results, it is not enough to put efforts for 7 days in order to boost your self-esteem. So I decided to continue my experiment longer.
• During my experiment, I noticed, something what is not so good about me, and I need to improve it. (I will write about it in more details in other post)

As I said I tried some tips, which will help me to boost my self-esteem. One of them was to change my diet, and to eat the food, which improves the mood. I thought, it could be interesting to try, especially when in some articles it was written that good diet helps to deal with the depression as well. I start from Monday, so today is the 4^th day of an experiment. There is my diet:

• Breakfast: Every time I was eating 1 or 2 fruits (banana, orange or apple) and then corn flakes with pure chocolate. Maybe it is not very healthy, but I was not feeling hungry till the midday.
• Dinner: One time I was eating vegetables (which is half-baked) and other two times vegetable soup with the piece of bread and again some fruits or nuts.
• Supper: I was eating only raw or half-baked vegetables and a bit of rice, also nuts and fruits again.

I didn’t think that the food can affect your mood in such way. I feel much more energetic. Let’s say it is not hard for to wake up in early morning. Today I woke up even earlier then my alarm clock (It was half past 7) and I went to sleep only at 1 a.m. Normally I like to sleep long. Also I was not feeling tired in the evenings. On the other hand there is one disadvantage. Due to I change my diet, I need to go more times to the toilet. However it is not bad, because it means that my stomach is working well, but sometimes it could be a bit annoying. However I am happy with the results, and I will try to continue.

Food which boost self-esteem

I was interested in how food can affect  our mood. So I decided to post some useful tips which you can use:

• Try to eat fat fish like salmon, trout and tuna (I am going to do that when I will be in my study town)
• Prefer nuts, fruits and vegetables as a snack (I promise I will do that because I like nuts very much)
• Eat breakfast ( normally I am doing it, but maybe I can make my breakfast even better)
• If you are in not happy mood take just piece of dark chocolate
• Lots of vegetables and just fresh food. (I like it, but it needs some fantasy to prepare)
• Chillies? Let’s say I like spice food, and maybe sometimes I can use chillies as well.
• Seafood…I know it should be delicious, but sometimes I just can not stand it. I think for know I will eat just tuna.
• Water. I always prefer warm drinks, but I agree that a glass of water could help, so I will buy some bottles in the shop.
• It is advised to eat bananas, but in general I think all fruits could help.
• Dark bread, I will try to search it in the shop.
• There are some extra thinks which I am going to use my diet: honey, green tea, juice, also ginger, which is working very good, if you have a cold

I was reading a lot of articles related with this theme, and in some of them coffee and alcohol are in the bad list, in some of them it is considered as the food which helps to boost your mood. However I do believe that it is not so healthy, so I will try to put it away from my diet. (It can be quite hard for me, because I enjoy the cup of coffee in the morning)

How to boost your self-esteem by using critique

One day I was reading the article about how to keep your relationship is the good track.  I tried it practically and the results ware even better than I was expecting.

Have you ever had situation that you want to criticize  a person who you love. It is quite hard to do it, because yo don’t want to hurt him/her. But lets say you have the conversation with some special rules:

1. Your partner starts to tell what he/she didn’t like about you this week, it should be particular situations. For example I didnt liked when you get angry while we ware playing the card game.
2. Then you partner starts telling what he liked about you. For example I liked how you was supporting me yesterday when I was feeling bad.
3. while he/she is talking you are just listening.
4. Then you exchange possitions.

You can have such kind of conversation with you friend, life partner, parents.

I remember that when I was listening the critique about me I wasn’t very happy, and I want to start arguing however I decided to listen and just except, after very nice complements I felt really good, and I understood that everything what he said: the good and the bad part is the truth. This kind of conversation is also very helpful when you want to criticize. I remember that after conversation we both felt very good. It help to boost my self-esteem also I understood, that the critique could be very helpful in order to improve yourself.

How to gain self-esteem?

I was searching some quick tips which could help to improve self-esteem.

1. Do what you like.  Everybody could find an activity which give lots of pleasure.
2. Compare yourself with yourself. It is very useful tip, because I noticed that sometimes I used to compare myself with other people and after that I felt bad. There is no need to do it. Look to your past. Who you were yesterday, one week or one year ago.
3. Think positive about yourself. Even if something was not going as you ware expecting, think about the positive side of it.  Believe me, it is always existing
4. Accept compliments. Even if you dont agree, people who say it have a reason to do it, so listen and except just it.
5. Make sure that you are surrounded by positive friends, then it will be easy to be one of them
6. Try to look good. Believe me it helps,when you are looking to the mirror and smiling to yourself it is already good.
7. Be helpful. Try to help for other people, surprize them by making nice dinner, or just help to carry the heavy luggage.
8. Try to live healthy life.