How Social Isolation Can Fuel Low Self-Esteem

When we socially isolate ourselves, our self-esteem suffers. Our social life helps us to build and maintain our self-esteem in so many important ways. Friends, family, partners, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers – all these people can help to boost our self-esteem when it’s low, as well as allow us to view ourselves in a more realistic, down-to-earth fashion. (Of course, people can have the opposite effect on our self-esteem, too, but it’s important to distance yourself from such toxic people.) When you don’t surround yourself with others on a regular basis, when you are socially isolated, your self-esteem can suffer. Here are the reasons why this can occur.

Social Isolation Can Fuel Negative Beliefs About Yourself

When you’re socially isolated for long periods of time, it can put you at a higher risk of ruminating. Rumination involves replaying negative events over and over again in your head. These events could be mistakes you’ve made or social interactions that didn’t go how you wanted them to go. Rumination is a key aspect of mental health conditions like depression but everyone can experience it. When you spend a lot of time ruminating, it can end up fuelling negative beliefs about yourself, beliefs that simply don’t match up to reality. This is why it’s important to get out your head when you need to and spend time with others.

Social Isolation Prevents Us from Having a Positive Influence

In some sense, it’s vital that you are able to build self-esteem using your own internal resources. When others aren’t around to lift you up during difficult times, you should have the confidence in yourself to know that you are still worthy, capable, and a person with an abundance of positive and valuable qualities. However, it’s also true that no person is an island. Your sense of self depends on other people. For example, many positive attributes are only really meaningful in the context of being with others. This would include attributes like kindness, friendliness, having a sense of humor, being an attentive listener, and so on. In order to fully express these dimensions of yourself and appreciate them, you need other people to bring these qualities out and validate them in the process of social interaction.

If you spend a lot of your time locked away in your room, then you remove opportunities to have a positive influence on the lives of others. When you are socially isolated, you can’t carry out in-person acts of kindness or generosity, be they small or big actions. And these are the types of actions that often make us feel valuable and capable. Being around others – especially those we deeply care about – often motivates us to be loving, helpful, and considerate, and the more we build on these qualities through social interaction, the stronger our self-esteem will be.

Others Help Us to View Ourselves Realistically

If you suffer from low self-esteem, self-criticism, social anxiety, or depression, you may have a warped opinion of yourself. You may believe negative things about yourself that no one else really feels to be the case. And if you told others about these negative beliefs, they may react with surprise about how you could view yourself in a harsh and unrealistic way. This is why getting feedback from others about yourself is so important. When you think about yourself in a distorted way, it can be hard to challenge your thoughts on your own. Getting to know yourself through others, however, allows you to take a step back and gain a healthier perspective on what you’re like as a person.

Have you ever socially isolated yourself? Did it help or hurt your self-esteem? Tell me about it in the comments.