One key way that people can tell whether they have low self-esteem or not is to analyze how they feel both before and after interacting with others. Those with high self-esteem will talk about how much they were looking forward to the event, and how great it was to chat with everyone. In contrast, those with low self-esteem will often agonize over every detail about themselves, their actions, and their words, both before and after their interactions.
In fact, the little worries mentioned below are almost solely in the province of those who lack self-esteem: their confident counterparts rarely even think about them.
1. That the people in their lives don’t actually like them.
Many people with low self-esteem assume that everyone around them is as fixated on their perceived shortcomings as they are. Furthermore, they’ll often worry that their so-called friends (or even their family members) don’t actually like them, but are just including and being kind to them out of pity.
They may also get paranoid that the people around them are talking about them when they aren’t around, such as colleagues trash-talking them when they leave the lunchroom. Meanwhile, other people go about their daily lives, acknowledging that people wouldn’t choose to spend time with them if they didn’t like them, and not giving others’ opinions much thought at all.
2. Agonizing over every text exchange to see if they’ve made someone mad at them.
According to my Gen Z and Alpha nieces, using periods (aka “full stops”) at the ends of sentences is aggressive, as is a lack of emojis in text-based communication. They’ll immediately ask if someone is angry at them if they use proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar in their texts, and try to determine whether there’s a subtext or other hidden meanings within them.
This behavior isn’t limited to younger generations: those with low self-esteem will take ages to pore through their messages and texts to determine whether the person talking to them is upset or not. As you may imagine, this is in stark contrast to other people who figure that if someone’s upset with them, they’ll say so — otherwise, everything is fine.
3. Wondering whether they’re using the right body language or not.
Most people with low self-esteem feel that they’re constantly putting on an act for others. Since they don’t think anyone would like them for who they actually are, they don different facades based on which group they’re with, and then exhaust themselves maintaining the masquerade that they think is most appealing to the group.
As such, at any given moment during a conversation, half of their attention is fixated on whether they’re using the “right” body language or not. Is their smile coming across as sincere? Have they been blinking too often, or too infrequently? What about their hands — are they moving awkwardly, or with grace? It’s no surprise that many of them get completely burnt out after most social interactions and then require a significant amount of time to regroup.
4. Anxiety that other people (including random strangers) are constantly judging them.
People with low self-esteem are often crippled by social anxiety. In particular, they worry that everyone around them is judging them all the time. They’ll agonize over what they wear, say, or do in public out of fear of being ridiculed, and may blow even the smallest blunder out of proportion and feel humiliated about it for years.
In reality, most people are far too wrapped up in their own lives — and personal worries — to pay much attention to anyone else. Those who don’t have low self-esteem will go grocery shopping in their PJs and not give a damn about what anyone thinks about them, because why would they? This viewpoint is pretty much inconceivable to a person who’s terrified of being thought of poorly by anyone.
5. Fear that they’re being “too much” (i.e., too loud, too big, too emotional, etc.).
Those who were raised by people who were constantly criticizing them often end up having cripplingly low self-esteem. Thanks to being constantly put down for their natural human behaviors, they’re constantly worried that they’re upsetting others simply by being themselves.
This leads them to be hypervigilant about policing their own behavior. They’ll try to moderate their voices and keep their physical movements well tethered so as not to be “too much” for those around them, and will often apologize profusely if they feel that they might have made others uncomfortable. They’re so afraid of criticism or punishment that they tamp down who they really are in order to be more palatable to those around them.
6. Making mistakes.
Most people recognize that making mistakes is part of any learning process. None of us has ever mastered a skill without messing up several times, and it’s often through making these errors that the greatest lessons are learned.
Unfortunately, those with low self-esteem are so terrified of making mistakes — and being punished or mocked for doing so — that many of them prefer to avoid doing things they may love so as to avoid ever messing them up. They’ll hold themselves back from art projects, dance or language classes, cooking, or any other number of endeavors, just so there’s no risk of failure.
7. Second-guessing all their decisions.
Those with low self-esteem often have a great deal of difficulty making decisions because they’re terrified of making the “wrong” one. Some will take ages to weigh every possible pro and con in order to lessen the chances of messing up, while others will hand decision-making over to someone else entirely: they just want to be told what to do by a person who seems to know what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, most other people just pick a direction and go with it. They know that if it turns out to be the wrong decision for them, there’s nothing stopping them from changing direction. They can try something out, decide “nope, this isn’t for me”, and take another route instead.
8. That expressing needs makes them a burden, or will cause serious negative repercussions.
People with low self-esteem often feel that they have to be easy and “frictionless” in order to be accepted. As a result, they won’t speak up for themselves when there’s something that they truly need, nor will they establish boundaries. In their mind, doing either may cause them to be discarded, either from their social life or their workplace.
A perfect example of this might be someone who’s afraid to ask for time off work to tend to a health issue, because they’re afraid that they’ll be fired for being an annoyance. Meanwhile, their coworkers will prioritize things in their lives that require attention because they know that they deserve care and that their needs are too important to ignore.
9. Assuming that temporary pauses in communication mean rejection.
Most of us have seen posts on social media in which people are freaking out because their partner didn’t text them back for a few hours, or their boss didn’t respond to a message or email immediately. They’ll immediately spiral into worst-case scenario land, sure that they’re about to be dumped or dismissed.
Meanwhile, their counterparts who don’t suffer from low self-esteem assume that the person they’re communicating with is likely busy with other things in their life and will get back to them when they can. They don’t immediately leap to the assumption that they’ve done something wrong, that everyone hates them, or that they’re going to be catapulted into the river without just cause.
Final thoughts…
If you or someone you know has such low self-esteem that the worries here are commonplace, it’s important to treat that behavior with kindness and understanding rather than mockery or condemnation.
People don’t develop terrible self-worth in a vacuum: it’s a perspective that most of them have learned via condemnation or cruelty in their past, usually from those who were closest to them. Positive self-esteem can be built over time, with positive reinforcement and encouragement, at which point the little worries mentioned here are almost certain to disappear.
