🎭 What Low Self-Esteem Looks Like in the Brain

Understanding the neural overlap between how you see yourself and how others see you

Low self-esteem can be a real challenge for daily happiness and mental health. The way we judge our worth in the world can determine our confidence, our sense of resilience, our willingness to tackle challenges, and the way we interact with the people around us. When we don’t believe in ourselves and can’t see the value in our existence, it’s difficult to function in ways that support our health and well-being.

Self-esteem feels like a very personal topic, but it’s important to understand its social context. New research is investigating what self-esteem looks like in the brain, both from the point of view of ourselves and also the perspectives of other people. There are actually two competing theories in this context:

• People with low self-esteem will mentally see themselves in a very similar way to how others see them

• People with low self-esteem will mentally see themselves very differently to how others see them

But which of these theories will the latest brain imaging evidence support?

This is more than an academic question; understanding how our brains represent our sense of self can inform what we should be doing to protect our self-esteem. Some will argue that your self-perception should be realistically grounded in the social world around you, while others will argue that it should be resilient to external influences.

So let’s dive into what the research suggests.

👑 How self-esteem impacts your brain’s perception of “you”

In a study published in November 2024, researchers recruited 120 participants in groups of 6. Each group contained people who were well-acquainted with each other.

The researchers started by measuring each person’s self-esteem using an established questionnaire. This included questions such as “How often do you dislike yourself?” and “How often do you have the feeling that there is nothing you can do well?”.

After being placed inside a scanner to measure brain activity, each participant then completed a task linking adjectives with each of the individuals in their social group. First, the screen inside the scanner presented either the word “SELF” or the name of one of their friends. After this, it showed an adjective such as “HAPPY” or “CLUMSY”, and participants had to respond with a “yes” or “no” each time depending on whether they perceived a link between the person and the adjective.

People’s brains showed what the researchers called a self-recapitulation effect. When people were thinking about themselves, the activity patterns in their brain were similar to the activity patterns in other people’s brains when they considered the same person. In a sense, we project our identity into other people’s brains. A stronger similarity between how we represent ourselves and how others represent us indicates a stronger self-recapitulation effect.

This primarily occurred in a part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex—a brain area generally involved in evaluating ourselves and others around us.

The researchers wanted to know whether this self-recapitulation effect was affected by people’s levels of self-esteem. Referring back to the hypotheses I listed in my intro, they asked whether low self-esteem would make a person’s self-related brain activity more or less similar to the social group’s brain activity representing that person. When you don’t have a good a mental impression of yourself, does that mean your brain activity deviates from how your friends see you?

Quite the opposite. The lower a person’s self-esteem was, the more their self-related brain activity overlapped with the group’s activity.

This is consistent with the idea that people who experience low self-esteem and other depression-related challenges may actually perceive themselves quite realistically, especially relative to other people’s estimations. A more functional and widespread cognitive bias might be to inflate our egos a little. Since we constantly live with ourselves and control only our own lives, it’s helpful to bolster our self-confidence and believe in ourselves to an extent that others may not.

In other words, brain activity patterns are more consistent with a self-enhancement hypothesis than a self-verification hypothesis for self-esteem. Our levels of confidence and self-worth are better supported by enhanced evaluations of ourselves than super-realistic evaluations.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Reflect on your unique strengths and values

• You have strengths and achievements in your life that others can’t fully see or understand. Reflect on those regularly to boost your awareness of what makes you uniquely interesting. This is not an exercise in arrogance but rather a way of reinforcing a positive self-concept and looking after your self-esteem. Some people also use daily positive affirmations as a way of reminding themselves of core personal values in a very concrete way. I asked my network on Substack recently if they use affirmations and what they feel they gain from them. One Substack user (@deerlights) put it particularly well: “Daily affirmations have made me feel self centered. There is something interesting there related to confidence that I am not entirely in tune with”.

#2. Resist being defined by other people’s perceptions

• Other people’s views of us are usually incomplete and not always beneficial to our self-esteem so avoid using them as templates for how you view yourself. The way you see yourself is important for your daily well-being, so positively reinforce it rather than being too self-critical. Sometimes, critical feedback is essential for our personal growth but there’s no need to identify too much with it. Feedback is something we can take on board and use in guiding our behavior, but it doesn’t define who we are.

#3. Seek people who inspire and support you

• While we can avoid feeling defined by other people’s perceptions, we can also be conscious about crafting social networks that nurture and support us rather than make us feel worse. In my younger years, I can recall spending a lot of time with people who weren’t necessarily good for my sense of self-worth and happiness. When you notice this in your own life, consider meeting new people and spending more time with the friends or family who love you.

“As is our confidence, so is our capacity.”

~ William Hazlitt

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