The Key Effects of Low Self-Esteem

Low self-esteem is a psychological condition that influences all sides of a person’s life: their career, relationships, health, sex life and social life. The vast majority of its consequences are ugly.

When a person has low self-esteem, it means they’re making an unwarrantedly negative evaluation of themselves and they develop strong self-focused negative feelings. From there on, it’s all downhill in terms if impact.

A low level of self-esteem has a wide range of negative effects. Here are some of the noteworthy ones:

1. Missed Career Opportunities

People with low-self esteem are afraid of taking risks and failing. Even a small failure has a strong negative echo, given the mindset these individuals have. This means that they’ll dodge opportunities and they won’t take initiative.

In their career, due to this tendency to stick to what’s easy and safe, individuals with esteem problems will make little progress. They may complain how their career isn’t going anywhere, but this is entirely their fault.

2. Poor Health

First of all, consciously or not, people with low self-esteem don’t see themselves as worthy of taking care of themselves. They’ll let themselves go because their health and physical state is not emotionally important to them.

Secondly, people with esteem issues are so busy pleasing everybody else so they won’t get rejected, or procrastinating and seeking immediate gratifications that they can’t find the time or the energy to take care of their health.

3. Poor Social Life

It’s common for individuals with low self-esteem to spend an unordinary amount of time alone. They tend to have a very small social circle, usually with the same people in it since high-school or college.

The interactions they have with other people are usually brief, predictable and infrequent. They’ll often have much longer interactions with a video game or a cat than with actual human beings.

4. Shallow Relationships

Even the relationships people with low self-esteem do have, either friendly or romantic, are typically very shallow. Due to their extremely negative self-view, they tend to be very quiet and reserved as individuals.

Thus, people with esteem problems find it hard to connect with others in a deep and intimate way, because they don’t put themselves out there. A true connection only happens when individual express themselves fully and authentically.

5. Sexual Problems

It’s frequent for a person that struggles with self-esteem issues to encounter sexual problems as well. These problems can vary from lack of sexual arousal in women, to addiction to porn or premature ejaculation in the case of men.

It’s all connected. Because these individuals are very insecure, their sexual behavior and impulses get messed up. Ironically, they may end up seeking help for issues in their sex life, only to discover that there is a deeper self-image problem that needs to be handled.

Considering the disturbing effects that low self-esteem has, it’s easy to see how such a psychological condition needs to be addressed quickly and devotedly. The longer it exists, the more damage it will do.

Self-esteem problems are not easy to deal with. Overcoming them requires a lot of psychological work and a fundamental shift in ones perceptions about their person, others and life. However, as people who have beaten their self-image issues can testify, the personal development effort required is all worth it.