What Makes Self-Esteem Stable

You can think well of yourself and still crash after one cold comment. In the morning, you can cope on your own; by evening, after someone else's edits to your document, you can't. Your self-esteem isn't low. It's volatile.

Psychologists measure these separately: level is how highly a person rates herself on average; stability is how much that rating fluctuates from day to day. In Michael Kernis's work, high but unstable self-esteem was linked to sharper reactions to criticism and angry outbursts in response to it, while high and steady self-esteem was not. Stability is separate from level.

It fluctuates when it rests on one external thing. Jennifer Crocker described these as areas on which a person bases her self-worth: appearance, approval, winning in comparison with others. The narrower the bet, the more often a random day decides who you are today.

The lower the level, the longer it lasts: praise wears off by evening, values do not. Stability comes not when you throw out the upper levels - approval still feels good - but when there is something else beneath them. Then a bad day takes away one piece of support, not all of it at once.

The second part is how you talk to yourself when you fail. Kristin Neff has observed that people who treat themselves in failure as they would a loved one experience less fluctuation in their sense of self-worth over time.

It's worth being precise here. Almost all of this is based on correlations and daily diary measures: people are surveyed day after day, and the range of their fluctuations is compared. These data show a link, but do not prove what causes what, and the effects are moderate.

It's easier than it seems to check this in yourself: over a week, you can see which source of support you reach for on a bad day.

And don't try to convince yourself when everything feels bad - arguments sound false precisely then. Something else works: notice which source of support has weakened, and remember that the others are still there.