5 Critical Tips to Keep Your Self-Esteem Permanently Low

Having low self-esteem doesn’t just “happen.” It takes a lot of consistent work over a very long period of time.

Sure, it may start from humble beginnings. You know, you spill some juice and mom tells you, “You’re a bad person” instead of, “It’s bad that you spilled the juice” or you getting bullied at school and you conclude that it’s because you’re a terrible person, not because your bully is a wildly unhappy kid from a broken home who gets beaten up twice a week because his dad is a mean drunk. That kind of thing.

But, from there it takes years of relentless mental effort to keep your self-esteem low. Here are the keys to making it happen!

1) Don’t “get good:” There’s a natural way that self-esteem is built. You do things, you turn out to be good at those things compared to other people and you start to think better of yourself.

You know, “I got the best grade in the class. I must be smart. Wow, it’s awesome that I’m smart. That must mean I’m awesome.” Blah, blah, blah, yah, yah, yah. Sure, that might make you feel good, but if you get good at enough things, you may start to feel good about it and yourself. This makes it very hard to have low self-esteem.

So, first of all, start learning to fear failure. If you’re too afraid to try because you might fail, how can you succeed? You can’t! Embrace that fear! Stay nice and safe from the possibility of failure by staying in your nice, comfortable, bubble of personal failure.

When you do succeed at something, downplay it. It was no big deal. Anybody could do it. That goes double for any compliments you get. Those people didn’t mean those nice things they said. Why, they can probably just tell that you’re a loser and they’re trying to make you feel better. Heck, even if they did mean it and they seem pretty great, it’s just a sign that there’s something secretly wrong with them because how could they possibly think YOU are awesome? It’s totally ridiculous, right?

2) Ignore the arbitrariness of self-esteem: This is something most people have not quite figured out, so we are getting you WAY AHEAD of the low self-esteem curve here by revealing this to you.

Here we go… here’s the big secret -- at a fundamental level, self-esteem is mostly arbitrary. Some people would deny this, but the world is full of megalomaniacal conmen, serial killers, and ne’er do wells with six kids by six different women, all of whom think they’re God’s greatest gift to humanity.

Right now, as we speak, there is undoubtedly some junky living in an abandoned building who doesn’t have a job, stole $20 out of his aunt’s purse, and just had a rat run by his head who thinks he’s amazing. Granted, some of that is conditioning.

You know, kids who never had a red mark on their paper at school and who had mommy telling them that they were her “special little genius” even when they were picking their nose, but it doesn’t change the fact that these people objectively suck but think they’re incredible.

Even if you are really terrific, you can just reverse this type of thinking to feel like a piece of sh*t. Some things that help on that front are to focus on your weaknesses and have extremely unfair rules for yourself. After all, everyone makes mistakes, and you can use that to your advantage. You can be like the quarterback who throws for 500 yards and six touchdowns to lead his team to a big win but who thinks he failed because he also threw an interception.

You ever heard the expression, “Every cloud has a silver lining?” It does, but it also has a dirty, black underbelly that you can focus obsessively on to make yourself feel bad.

Even if you can’t find anything wrong, you can still make yourself feel like a failure if your rules are unfair enough. You can make a half million dollars per year and feel like a failure for not reaching your goal of a million or have 30 women clamoring for your attention but feel like an ugly loser because one girl you like doesn’t like you back.

Once you understand that you’re writing the rules, you can make them so incredibly unfair to yourself that you have no chance to like yourself at all.

3) Ask the right questions: The questions we ask ourselves are extremely powerful because our brain will work subconsciously, sometimes for hours or days, to find the answer.

You start asking questions like, “How can I succeed?” or “How can I make more money?” or “Why should I like myself?” and believe you me, you will come up with answers. That can be a big freaking problem if you’re asking the wrong questions and trying to keep your self-esteem low.

That’s why it’s important to ask the sort of questions that keep your brain mired in gloom, despair, and self-disdain. Questions like, “Why am I such a loser?” “Why do I always fail?” or “Why am I so ugly?” Even Michael Jordan or Taylor Swift could learn to hate themselves if they spent all day thinking about questions like that!

4) Don’t copy successful people: There are a lot of happy, mentally healthy, successful people and if you copy them, you might end up just like them. So, it’s very important NOT to listen to these winners with high self-esteem, well-meaning therapists, and happy people who want to help you.

Don’t consider what they tell you with an open mind, refuse to try things they suggest, distract yourself, and do whatever it takes to keep yourself mired in misery.

Stuff like that isn’t meant for someone like you. You are BAD! You don’t DESERVE SUCCESS and HAPPINESS! Changing is SCARY AND HARD! Start with those assumptions and fight like hell not to change how you think!

Just because you’re miserable and don’t like yourself while they’re happy and do like themselves doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong; it just means…..uh…..let’s just say that if you want to keep your self-esteem low, you don’t want to continue this line of thought.

5) Relentlessly criticize yourself: If you want to keep low self-esteem, then it’s very important to talk to yourself like an evil stepmother or sadistic bully.

You need to regularly say the sort of things to yourself that you would punch another person in the face for saying to a friend of yours. Be mean! Be nasty! Throw some low blows – and do it repetitively! All day long, day after day after day, until it’s a well-worn path in your psyche.

Things like, “I’m ugly,” “I’m a loser” or, “I deserve to fail” should just pop into your head multiple times per day. If you’re having trouble keeping this up, just convince yourself that it’s how you stay motivated! After all, what could be more motivating than telling yourself that you’re a “disappointment who was born for failure and deserves to suffer” several times per day? If that doesn’t get you jazzed up to achieve, what will?

---