Try self-compassion instead of self-esteem.
There's a famous incident that happened at a conference in Dharamsala, India in 1990 between a group of Western meditation teachers, psychologists, and scientists, and the Dalai Lama. Sharon Salzberg, a well-known American meditation teacher, asked the Dalai Lama: "What do you think of self-hatred?" The Dalai Lama then looked extremely confused and had several back-and-forths with his translator (who also seemed bewildered) before asking the group "How can one hate oneself? I find this very strange." He then asked how many in the room had experienced such a thing, and almost everybody raised their hand.
This exchange points to the conditioned nature of our minds: the way we think of ourselves and others is highly dependent on the culture we grow up in. That self-hatred is so pervasive in our culture, but completely incomprehensible to someone from another culture, points to something in the water here. The human mind is naturally inclined toward social comparison. It was evolutionarily advantageous for us to be sensitive to any way in which we fell short of or violated the mores and expectations of our tribe, for fear of being ostracised or rejected. For most of human history, being outcast by our group was a matter of life and death: we would lose the benefit of collective knowledge, collective labor, and safety in numbers.
However, this natural tendency of the mind seems to have become exacerbated by our current culture. Late Capitalism, whatever its merits may be as an economic system, has been poisonous to the human mind. For one thing, it encourages people to view themselves and their lives in commodified terms: we see ourselves as products with a "worth" (or, more baldly put, "market value"); as things to be justified and marketed to everyone from potential romantic partners to employers to friends. This used to operate under the surface, but nowadays we even have people explicitly telling us to
"brand ourselves" like corporate entities. It seems that every moment of our lives is an opportunity to judge how "good" of a person we are, like how good a particular brand of ice cream is.
When we apply to logic of consumerism to our human relations, it creates a very toxic situation mentally. We feel constantly in need of maintaining our market value: to justify to ourselves and to others that we are worthy. But the very idea that we should apply the concept of "worth" in such a nonliteral sense only exists because the culture we live in sanctions such thinking. As it happens,
self-esteem is a relatively recent concept. And the emergence of this concept coincides with the emergence of capitalism in the era of mass media. I believe that the self-esteem movement emerged out of a necessity to preserve human sanity in a quickly dehumanizing culture -- the culture of consumerism. In order to survive in this society, we had to construct a way of relating to our world that essentially mimicked narcissism.... because who thrives in this society? Bombastic egotists like Donald Trump.
This sounds melodramatic, but this is actually the reason psychologists have recently started moving away from self-esteem as an end in itself. The research over the last two decades is showing that
self-esteem actually correlated with narcissism and aggression. And
there are other studies that show the opposite. How can this be? It's because
both low self-esteem and high self-esteem are two sides of the same exact toxic coin: the coin of self- and other-)judgment.
In the classical Buddhist texts, it is said there are three forms of conceit: 1.) thinking yourself better than another, 2.) thinking yourself worse than another, and 3.) thinking yourself equal to another. When I first heard this teaching, I was kind of blown away. If I can't even think of myself as equal to another, what am I supposed to even do?? The truth is, there is no need to play the game of judging your own worth or value. Instead, try self-compassion: that is, allowing yourself to be perfectly human. It is estimated that over 107 billion people have ever existed on the face of this earth. Every one of them has been imperfect. You are not going to be the first perfect human. Every one of them has dealt with limitation and inadequacy, pain, regret, and the frustration of their own human folly. They still lived out their lives as well as they could. You could rate them all according to some arbitrary value scale... but why bother?
If you want to learn how to train yourself in self-compassion, there is a really excellent workshop on Youtube of Dr. Paul Gilbert on Compassionate Mind Training. Here is the first video (there are 4):