Self-Esteem: What It Is, Where It Comes From, and Why It Matters

Have you ever wondered why some people spiral after a rejection, but others bounce back quickly? Maybe you’re struggling with rejection and how you feel and think about yourself afterwards; this is all to do with your self-esteem.

High self-esteem is a healthy trait that predicts better outcomes in relationships, school, work, mental health, physical health, and social behavior.¹ The Attachment Project’s own research found that 32% of our audience have high self esteem, based on 1,531,676 responses from 2022-2026; we can sometimes associate self-esteem with vanity or being self-centred, but having high self-esteem isn’t negative or morally wrong – it could actually help you to help others.

In this article, we’ll talk about the psychological definition of self-esteem and how it differs from similar concepts of self-confidence, self-worth, and self-efficacy, examples of different levels of self-esteem, how your attachment style influences your self-esteem, and how to build higher self-esteem.

What Is Self-Esteem?

One of the most common conceptualizations of self-esteem in psychological literature is by Dr. Morris Rosenberg, who defined self-esteem as “a positive or negative attitude toward the self as a totality”.² Rosenberg and colleagues would later specify that this refers to global or overall self-esteem, but that our specific self-esteem in certain domains can vary, e.g. we can have high self-esteem in general but low self-esteem when it comes to giving work presentations.³

“For example, knowing that someone has high global self-esteem will tell us little about that person’s assessment of his or her competence as a pole-vaulter or as a writer of sonnets. Conversely, the fact that I consider myself totally inept as a pole-vaulter in itself offers little indication of my overall feeling of self-worth.”³

Rosenberg also developed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), a widely used self-esteem test measuring both self-competence, also referred to as self-confidence, and self-liking. Self-confidence describes your ability to achieve goals and overcome challenges, while self-liking describes self-acceptance and positive self-regard without factoring in personal achievements.

Self-Esteem vs. Self-Worth

Self-esteem and self-worth can sometimes be used interchangeably in psychological research.⁴ We can also think of self-worth as whether we believe we are worthy of love and compassion regardless of external signals like success and social acceptance. In psychology, this is also often referred to as self-compassion.

Self-Esteem vs. Self-Confidence

Self-confidence as one facet of Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale can be thought of as one component of self-esteem, related but separate to self-liking. This means that you can be confident in your abilities without necessarily having a strong sense of self-worth, and vice versa: you can have a strong sense of self-worth without confidence in your abilities.

Self-Esteem vs. Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy is closely related to self-confidence. Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of achieving the tasks you set out to do. If you have high self-efficacy, you might be more likely to set high goals, and less intimidated by them, and have higher motivation and more effective systems in place to achieve them.

Self-Esteem Examples: What Does Self-Esteem Look Like in Everyday Life?

Self-esteem can impact every part of everyday life, from work, to relationships, and even hobbies. Below, we have a few scenarios and examples of how someone with high vs. low self esteem might react.

Where Does Self-Esteem Come From?

Self-esteem is influenced by lots of factors as we grow up, including the culture we grow up in. There are also different values on which we might base our self-esteem – one measure suggests 7 different values relevant to self-worth: family support, academic competence, our ability to compete with others, how closely we stick to our moral principles, our perceived approval from others, our perceived physical attractiveness, and our felt love from God (this study took place in Michigan, USA in 2003; 84.2% of participants described themselves as religious in some way).⁶

Childhood Attachment and Self-Esteem: Exploration Behavior and Self-Confidence

Attachment theory suggests that the development of your self-esteem has a lot to do with your attachment style in infancy. During the Strange Situation Experiment, one of the behaviors used to measure attachment security is whether children explore their environment.

Secure children tend to explore their environment happily with their caregiver present, using them as a secure base.⁵ Avoidant children also happily explore, but don’t refer back to their caregiver, appearing not to use them as a secure base. Anxious children do not explore the environment as much, showing more focus on their caregiver instead.

We can’t assume what children this young are thinking and feeling, but we theorize that because anxious children don’t explore their environments as much, they don’t develop the self-confidence later in childhood to take risks like their peers might. Not being able to take risks can further diminish self-confidence, leading to a downward confidence spiral.

In the same vein, avoidant children might take more risks, but they still don’t have a sense of a secure base to fall back on. We might theorize that this would make failure more painful, and repeated painful failures might lead to lower self-esteem over time.

Childhood Attachment and Self-Esteem: Internal Working Models and Self-Liking

Another core feature of infant attachment styles is the development of internal working models, which act as mental guidelines for the way we see ourselves and others. When we have a secure attachment style, as children we learn that we are worthy of care and attention from other people. When we have an insecure attachment style, we learn that, since others aren’t reliably there for us, we must not be inherently worthy.

This experience of not feeling worthy of other people’s care and attention could lead us to develop a low sense of self-liking that persists into adulthood. This might help to explain why both anxious and avoidant adult attachment styles are associated with low self-esteem, even though avoidant infants outwardly appear to be independent.⁷

How Adult Attachment Styles Influence Self-Esteem

The most popular model of adult attachment styles, by Barholomew & Horowitz (1991), categorizes us into 4 different attachment styles based on dimensions of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance – this is the same scale we usually refer to and the one we use in our attachment test.⁸

Self-esteem is integral to Bartholomew & Horowitz’s model – they propose that secure and dismissive-avoidant styles are associated with positive self-views, while anxious-preoccupied and fearful-avoidant styles are associated with negative self-views. This is because attachment anxiety is thought to lead people to feel unworthy of other people’s attention.

Studies have found that secure and dismissive-avoidant styles do show higher self-esteem than styles with high attachment anxiety.⁹ Attachment style differences in perceptions of competency, however, only show up in social domains (social skills, sports skills, romantic relationships, and creativity) – but when they do, they follow the same pattern.

Although dismissive-avoidants maintain a positive self-view, our self-esteem is still affected by how we perceive others see us. Low self-esteem also leads us to believe our partners see us as negatively as we see ourselves, which can drive us to create distance.¹⁰ This might explain why other studies find that higher avoidance is associated with lower self-esteem, which can be true at the same time as findings that attachment styles higher in anxiety are lower in self-esteem than dismissive-avoidance.

Signs of Healthy vs. Low Self-Esteem

While 32% of our audience have high self-esteem, The Attachment Project research also found that 40% had medium self-esteem, while 28% reported low self-esteem scores.

If you have low self-esteem, you might notice difficulties in how you handle criticism, conflict, and boundaries. You might engage in a lot of negative-self talk, or hold negative beliefs about yourself that are difficult to shake off.

You might also have low self-esteem if you have an inflated sense of your abilities – sometimes, we increase our explicit (controllable, outward) sense of self to mask a low implicit (automatic, deeply ingrained) self-esteem.¹¹

On the other hand, if you have healthy self-esteem, you might have a more realistic view of yourself – you know what you find challenging and where your strengths and weaknesses are, and you both believe you have the ability to achieve your goals and take steps towards them. You don’t judge yourself by your failures, treating them as lessons instead of loss.

To help you get an idea of your self-esteem, take our free and easy self-esteem test based on Rosenberg’s Self Esteem Scale. This will give you an insight into your self-liking, self-confidence, and overall self-esteem scores and whether each are categorized as low, medium, or high.

How to Build Healthier Self-Esteem

If you think you might be having trouble with low self-esteem, there are things you can do to work on building healthier self-esteem.

Working towards a secure attachment style could help to improve self-esteem. This takes time and positive experiences in relationships, but it can be supported through self-help and reflecting on your attachment patterns.

Cognitive behavioral therapies have also been found to be very effective for self-esteem.¹² These can target negative thoughts and negative self-beliefs, helping you to recognize and change these and the behaviors associated with them. Compassion-focused therapy can also help us to see ourselves in a more forgiving light. These therapies could be delivered individually or as a group – groups often have the additional benefit of social support.

The study finding that we base our self-esteem on different things is important – this tells us that what makes you feel good about yourself is unique to you.⁴ Take time to think about what makes you feel proud of yourself and how you can incorporate more of that into your daily routine, whether it’s practicing a skill, helping others, or any other way of spending time in alignment with your values.

Conclusions

Self-esteem helps us to bounce back from failure, achieve our goals, and feel confident in our choices. It can affect every aspect of daily life, although it is possible to have higher self-esteem in some domains over others, e.g., we might feel better about ourselves in relation to the things we’re good at.

This also shows up in attachment patterns and self-esteem. Secure and dismissive-avoidant attachment styles have positive self-views, and tend to have higher self-esteem and higher self-confidence in social domains. However, at the same time, both high attachment anxiety and high attachment avoidance are independently associated with lower self-esteem.

This might be because both forms of attachment insecurity are associated with negative experiences with others, which can lead to lower self-liking. As infants, both are associated with an inability to explore from a safe attachment base; avoidant infants lack a safe base, while anxious infants lack exploration. Both can result in lower self-confidence.

Cognitive-behavioral approaches, self-compassion, and building attachment security can help to increase self-esteem.

FAQs

How does self-esteem impact your life?

Self-esteem can impact how you approach challenges and goals – if you have higher self-esteem, you might find it easier to bounce back from failure and feel motivated to achieve your goals. This can affect every aspect of life, e.g. at work, at home, and in your social life.

Can low self-esteem be fixed?

Self-esteem can be improved upon with time, effort, and self-compassion. Challenging negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself can be key to boosting self-esteem, and building attachment security can sometimes help. Unraveling negative self-beliefs can be emotionally difficult, and support from a qualified mental health practitioner can be useful.

How does attachment affect self-esteem?

Self-esteem is a core element of attachment theory. Attachment security is associated with self-esteem, and attachment anxiety is associated with negative self-view. Attachment avoidance is associated with positive self-view, so we often find that secure and dismissive-avoidant styles have higher self-esteem than highly anxious style, but higher attachment avoidance has also been associated with lower self-esteem.

What is the root of self-esteem?

Self-esteem is affected by lots of factors throughout life, but our early attachment experiences can play a central role in self-esteem development. Insecurely attached infants don’t get to explore and play with a safe base to return to, and they don’t learn that they’re inherently deserving of care and attention, so an insecure attachment in infancy can form the beginnings of low self-esteem later on.

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