Accept yourself as you are, both positive and negative things, and love yourself. These maxims could summarize the recommendation made by the psychiatrist Srini Pillay, professor and blogger at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), to improve our emotional well-being.
This is always closely linked to our health –physical and psychological–, since it allows us in general to improve our lifestyle and, in particular, to control factors such as stress, worries or depression, among others. When Professor Pillay speaks of “self-esteem,” he means accepting our bodies, learning to protect ourselves from negative criticism, and believing in our own abilities.
Likewise, he warns in his last article that low self-esteem directly affects our physical well-being. “If you have a physical illness like rheumatoid arthritis, not accepting yourself can make you feel more distressed about your body. In that context, your negative thoughts will increase ”.
Low self-esteem damages the brain
A low self-esteem will also affect your brain : “If you feel bad about yourself, the brain regions that help you control emotions and stress will have less gray matter than in someone with a higher degree of self-acceptance”, highlights the professor. Pillay.
“This lack of gray matter can also appear in regions of the brain stem that process stress and anxiety. Stress signals from these regions, in turn, alter the regions that affect emotional control. Therefore, poor self-esteem can affect emotional control in two ways: directly, by disrupting the brain regions that control it; and also indirectly, increasing stress signals in your brain, ”he continues.
There are many reasons for low self-esteem, according to Dr. Pillay, and one of the theories suggests that it is something that people around us have left us. For example, if a person’s parents showed their child little empathy in childhood , the child, as an adult, will need the acceptance of others much more than usual.
Therefore, it is important to work on people’s self-confidence from their earliest childhood. Even more so if we take into account that, according to a study carried out by researchers at the University of Washington (USA) and published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , self-esteem conforms to 5 years : children of that age they have a fully formed sense of self-worth comparable to that of any adult.
Fortunately, there are many scientific studies on our gray matter that ensure that we can train the brain – for example, through meditation – to be more optimistic and less prone to stress.
