The Silent Saboteur: How Low Self-Worth Fuels Anxiety
It’s your time to stand up straight and embrace your life without fear
Studies such as ‘The Mediating Effects of Self-Esteem on Anxiety and Emotion Regulation’ published in Psychological Reports in 2022 proved that self-esteem has a significant impact on mediating levels of anxiety.
The same results were found in a study conducted by the National Institute of Health. Loades (2017) concluded that high anxiety and low emotional regulation was present in the participates with self reported anxiety and depression.
Self Worth
Self worth can be loosely defined as the sense of what we think our value is as a person. This notion will drive many behaviors for a person (conscious and unconscious).
Anxiety/Emotional Regulation
Anxiety is very much ruled by physical sensations like shakiness, racing heart, sweaty palms, feeling cold, feeling hot, etc. There are also the mental symptoms like excessive worrying and the obsessive (at times compulsive) thinking that something “bad”, possibly catastrophic, will happen.
Emotional regulation is a person’s ability to have control over one’s own emotions — to be able to diffuse and regulate difficult emotions in a healthy way.
Core Beliefs
With the thoughts of-
“I am worth nothing, I can’t even get a grip over my anxiety”
“I don’t have the skills to cope with my anxiety”
“I’m just a depressed, anxious person”
“I cannot control my anxiety around people. They’re all going to think I’m weird and not want to be my friend”
All these thoughts have sprung up from somewhere. Be it from having grown up with critical parents, having experienced some form of abuse as an adult, ridicule by friends, unrealistically high expectations, etc. it’s no doubt these events impact a person in a profound way.
Building Confidence and Strength
Renowned Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson said in his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos:
“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”
Low self-esteem manifests in the belief that you are not good enough and because of that, life is hard and all these unimaginable things will happen and you are not strong enough to handle them so you are living in a constant state of fear (anxiety).
What that quote by Dr. Peterson says is that in order to improve the ability to handle the anxieties of life, one must begin by standing up straight and embracing life for what it is.
Embodying the strength innate in all of us to be firm in the face of life’s uncertainties.
You are no longer that child or adult who was victimized by horrific events. Those things have happened and they are real. You didn’t just get to a place where you doubt yourself on your own.
This is begging to tune into the part of the self that begins to believe that you are strong and capable to handle what life throws at you.
We don’t have control over things outside of ourselves and that’s a heavy burden to bear. But it’s our responsibility as humans to throw ourselves into the adventure of life instead of running away from it.
When you’re walking through the woods and you hear a squirrel, but you think it's a bear, you will react as if you just saw a bear. In reality, it was just a squirrel. Not saying that sometimes you won’t encounter a bear, but most times the fear and self beliefs are more in our imagination than they are reality.
Overcoming the Inner Voice
There’s a great metaphor by Dr. Kapil Gupta comparing the human mind to a dog on a leash.
If you see a dog running around with a leash, you think okay, that dog is running around with a leash on it’s neck. If you see the dog running around on a leash and now you’re holding the leash and the dog is dragging you all over, you would probably feel some sort of discomfort to say the least.
Now imagine that your thoughts are attached to a leash and you go anywhere that your thoughts take you. Pretty insufferable, right?
Versus imagine that you cut that leash between you and your thoughts. Your thoughts will still happen, but you are not dragged by them.
That is the inner voice exerting control over your life and by imagining that you are cutting that leash, you are metaphorically, setting yourself free.
You begin the process of overcoming that voice by accepting that you do not have to believe everything that voice says. It’s going to talk and it’s going to say some awful things at times, and some decent things at times too.
Either way, we cannot be subdued to the slavery of the Mind.
Breaking free of the hell living with anxiety can create is real and it’s possible. It’s hard work and the path is narrow, but you can do it.
You are deserving of the courage to face your fears and no longer be dominated by them.