Observations about self-esteem issues and coping with stress

As a perfectionist, taking a math quiz in a specific format for the first time today, and struggling to do it, was damaging for my self-esteem. I was trying to hold back tears after the quiz, on lunch break, on the way back home, and crashed into my bed, pulled the sheets over my head and started watching documentaries about the underwater world, a particularly comforting activity for me, immediately as I arrived home.

After a few hours of self-loathing and falling in and out of sleep (due to the exhaustion I felt upon not having gotten enough sleep for the entirety of the week because I was studying for the quiz I didn’t do as well as I wanted to on), I thought to myself “WHAT AM I DOING?” (I’m capitalizing the letters because I internally shouted at myself).

So, to distract myself (and also because I had binge-watched the entire whale documentary and I didn’t want to commit to a new one just yet), I opened up my computer and started reading my blog posts. Prior to now, I had never read my blog posts after I had posted them, because it seemed too “cringe”. However, upon choosing even cringing over the self-loathe I felt, I opened up one of my posts. Interestingly, I didn’t cringe! I actually quite liked reading it. And because I had chosen one of the older ones, I had forgotten some parts of it, and reading it from a fresh perspective almost a year later was a unique, and rather amazing feeling. This made me think to myself (regardless of how cliche this may sound), “Doing bad on a single quiz doesn’t mean I’m unintelligent. Would an unintelligent person be able to write these? These quizzes aren’t defining of my self worth. I have plenty of chances to pick myself up, and the only thing I’m doing right now is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.” (self-fulfilling prophecies are basically a psychological phenomenon in which you become so scared of confirming biases people, or yourself, have against you that you accidentally end up confirming it. for example, in an experiment done by two psychologists, they observed that when black participants felt as though they were being stereotyped as “unintelligent”, although there were no differences in the IQ levels of the black and white participants, the black participants ended up doing worse when they took a standardized test because they stressed about having to prove the researchers wrong, an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.) One quiz doesn’t define me, nor does one exam, or two, three, four… Truly, I’m the only one that can define myself, and although I would enjoy “got a good grade on a math quiz in high school” to be one of those definitions, I won’t be devastated if it isn’t (just like how you shouldn’t be either!).

What I would enjoy more, is to have “resilient”, “compassionate towards herself”, “self-aware” to be on there. Because material success can only get us so far, especially when we are perceiving ourselves. No matter how much we want to love ourselves, for instance, it doesn’t matter whether we have millions of good grades, of dollars, of friends, or nothing, we simply won’t be able to do it if it doesn’t come from us. Though I would like to mention that I’m aware even self-love is elitist, as the richer have more ability to take breaks/go to retreats or camps, and also have more access to therapy/psychiatry and concepts like “yoga” or “meditation”, making it easier for them to essentially be happier. However, it has to come from us first, otherwise the therapy session and meditation retreats will be mostly ineffective.

So having felt this sadness and reading my blog to somehow fix the sadness ended up motivating me and allowing me to give myself time to write a blog post after a couple of weeks. I noticed, while writing, that the tension I didn’t realize I had been holding on my shoulders released, I unclenched my jaw and yawned!!! (This is a good sign, because I’m usually on “overdrive”, especially when I’m at home, so I have trouble sleeping even when all my work is done and instead sleep on my 1.5hr ride to and from the school). So I realized that the workload I have at the moment is preventing me from utilizing my mechanisms for coping with stress like doing the things that bring me joy. When I can’t do these things, I get even more stressed, leading me to want to work more and therefore to working harder instead of smarter, which leaves even less spare time to do the things I love and reduce stress. Therefore, I enter a vicious cycle (not like the ones we learn in economics about inflationary spirals, but a rather a psychological one).

I believe the only way to solve this is to have a mindset shift, which sounds like you need to change your whole identity and move to a different continent. But luckily, everyone has a unique mind, and unique, small methods that will work for them. Though I will say, according to psychological research, the two natural methods that was shown to help the most with lowering cortisol levels was meditation and exercise. And these are both things you can do in 5 minutes each day!! There are tons of “5 minute guided meditation” videos on Youtube (though I would believe that the longer ones are more effective) or even quick 5 minute workouts. There might be some other things that work for you, like being out in nature, playing with your pets, putting on nail polish, doing your hair, gaming, reading books, taking a long bath, and I encourage you to do all those things if you found them to be effective for you! Personally, I’ve found that having a skincare routine, even though it only consists of 3 steps, is a great way for me to destress. Showers also work! It’s a way in which I tell my body “It’s time to relax, the day is over.”. Doing my skincare routine every night and morning also provides me with some sense of security as I usually don’t have the privilege to have a routine that allows me to take breaks or do the things that bring me joy and comfort. Usually, I get home, grab a snack which I try to finish in 15 minutes or less while I watch a TV show I like [which has recently been “Wednesday”], then get upstairs, make a to do list and try to finish everything on it until 11pm-12am, then I go to bed, wake up at 6am, get on the bus at 6.30am, arrive at school on 8pm, enter my classes, come home at 5.15pm and repeat. And even then, I have trouble finishing everything on the list. So the methods I try to incorporate into my routine are short, things that I can stick to, and things that I can “justify” (ie. I can justify having a skincare routine because it’s for my physical health as well as my mental! Or showers, they’re a way for me to destress but I also have to take them regardless of that, so I can justify them too! And I know this isn’t a particularly healthy mindset because I shouldn’t have to justify doing the things I love, but it’s the mind of an IB student on survival mode who’s also dealing with college admissions and essays and has about 7 spare hrs every day even though she sleeps only for 6 hours at best.)

So, the moral of this blog post: it’s important to find activities that help you with regulating your mental health that you can do routinely, otherwise, you’ll enter an endless spiral of stress and inefficiency like I sometimes do! And remember that it is NOT selfish to put yourself first sometimes.

Have a nice day/afternoon/night and don’t be too harsh on yourself (easier said than done, I know, but please don’t)!