How Is Your Self-Esteem?
How high it is, and what it is resting on
Self-esteem is usually treated as a single number that you want to be as high as possible. That turns out to be half the picture and the less interesting half. What matters at least as much is what your sense of worth is standing on: someone whose self-esteem is high because things are going well has a different life from someone whose self-esteem is high regardless, and only one of them sleeps through a bad quarter.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you generally feel about yourself, not about today. This is not a clinical assessment and nothing here is a diagnosis.
What it measures
Two things. Level is how positively you regard yourself overall - the classic measure, essentially unchanged since 1965. Contingency is how much that regard depends on things going well: approval, achievement, appearance, being needed. The two are close to independent, which means high self-esteem can be either sturdy or fragile, and the second bar is what tells you which.
Based on: Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965) and contingencies of self-worth (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001)
Possible results
Level
How positively you regard yourself overall.
Contingency
How much your sense of worth depends on things going well.
Common questions
How do I raise my self-esteem?
Not by telling yourself good things, which is the approach with the weakest evidence and which in low scorers has been shown to backfire - a statement you do not believe invites your mind to produce the counter-argument. What works better is unglamorous: doing difficult things and letting the result be evidence, and treating yourself with the ordinary decency you would extend to a friend in the same position. That second one has its own measure on this site, and it predicts wellbeing better than self-esteem does.
Is high contingency always bad?
It is a motivator with a bill attached. People whose worth depends on achievement do tend to achieve, which is why the pattern persists and why it is often rewarded. The cost shows up in two places: the ordinary setbacks hurt more than they should, and you become quietly unwilling to attempt anything you might be bad at. If your contingency bar is high and your level is also high, you are currently winning, and the useful question is what the arrangement will feel like the first year you do not.
Is self-esteem the same as confidence?
No, and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion. Confidence is about a specific thing - you can be confident driving and not confident speaking in public, and both can be accurate. Self-esteem is a global judgement about your worth as a person, which is a much stranger thing to hold an opinion about. Someone can be highly competent and confident in six domains and still score low here, which is more common than it sounds and is roughly what imposter feelings are made of.
Sources
- Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image (the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). Princeton University Press.
- Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review.
- Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles?. Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
An honest note This is not a clinical instrument and a low score is not a diagnosis of anything. Two honest points about the field. First, the self-esteem movement of the 1980s and 1990s promised a great deal that did not arrive: a major review in 2003 examined the evidence and found that high self-esteem does not reliably cause better grades, better job performance or healthier behaviour, and that the correlations largely run the other way. Second, the level measured here is stable enough to be meaningful but does move with circumstances, so a reading taken during a difficult period is partly describing the period. If how you feel about yourself is affecting your sleep, your eating or your willingness to leave the house, that is worth raising with a doctor - not because of this test, but because those are the things worth mentioning.
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