What, exactly, do people get out of having low self-esteem?

Because make no mistake : nothing happens within the human mind which does not, in some sense, benefit it. It might be a lousy deal which costs far more than what is gotten out of it, but the actions are still in search of something.

Indeed, the main problem in the life of the modern human is a question of how to meet our many and overlapping emotional needs. We have thrown open the gates of possibility, and that has made this happiness equation more complicated than ever.

So what, exactly, is the need met by low self-esteem? Even self-loathing?

The most common hypothesis that I have encountered is that the need met is one for a sense of safety. Lurking within the mind of people with dangerously low self-esteem is a very deep fear that higher self esteem will somehow attract danger, and that it is only by staying buried in the mud out of humility that one can avoid attracting the lightning bolts of the gods.

This is an excellent theory, and I think gets to the root of the problem. But it is not a complete theory. There is a lot more going on than compulsive humility. We must dig deeper.

Another theory is that low self esteem is the product of people taking out their anger on themselves, internally. Everyone’s life results in some frustration and anger, and while others might take it out by becoming cranky and irritable, and hence securing a target for their anger, a low self esteem individual might well attack themselves instead, criticizing themselves and attacking their own self-worth as a way of venting that anger without risk of confrontation.

Of course, this is tragically futile, because when attacker and the attacked are the same person, the short term gain in vented frustration comes at a heavy, heavy cost to the self-worth of the individual in question, and from that low self worth comes a whole new world of frustration and pain.

It’s a lousy deal.

Then there’s the chemical argument. Without the right serotonin levels in the brain because of the too-hasty re-uptake of it by the brain’s own cells, all positive emotions are suppressed. Normal emotional expression is impossible and the psyche cannot help but be warped by this constant chemical imbalance.

In a sense, if this is true, then all other theories must pale in comparison. It may simply be impossible to love yourself when your serotonin levels are off, and there is only so much modern medicine can do to fix them.

My antidepressants keep me from killing myself by keeping my mood above a certain level. But they don’t make me happy.

However, when examined, this proposition begs the question : how did those levels become chronically low in the first place?

Maybe it’s a genetic defect. Or the result of an infection we didn’t even know we have. Maybe somewhere within us, there is a parasite that is very fond of the raw materials for serotonin.

But we can’t discount the possibility that the reason is entirely psychological. We are still very shaky on the relationship between brain chemicals and psychological reality. In fact, we generally don’t like thinking about it at all. We prefer to think of ourselves as more autonomous than that, and the notion that something going on in our minds, possibly even the result of a consciously made choice, is to blame for a chemical imbalance offends and disgusts us.

Myself included, of course.

We can accept that what goes on in our brains is electro-chemical in nature, and we can accept that our psyches can be supported or damaged by life events, but when you interpret one in terms of the other, things get discomforting pretty fast.

See that little blip on your brain scan? That’s the time your father took your bicycle away.

Another theory of low self-esteem is that it stems from a lack of positive self esteem input from one’s life, either in the past or in the present. This is often misinterpreted as a lack of praise and positive reinforcement, but that interpretation leaves out the vitally important ingredient of meaningful effort. Self-esteem, in short, must be earned. It cannot simply be handed to you by the powers that be.

It is certainly true that the “nurture” of one’s life can be wildly insufficient and one can suffer from a kind of emotional malnourished as a result. This lack of emotional nutrients can even lead to something akin to a disability in life.

But no amount of unearned praise or arbitrary reward will fix that.

That is why I think that we need to incorporate meaningful labour into our conception of human needs. It’s not a need like oxygen is a need, but it’s a need like love, sex, acceptance, and so on. Society needs to recognize said need as well as realize that it is in its best interest to find a use for everybody, and do its best to provide for that need.

Sorry, that was a rant, not a theory.

So which of these theories is true? Probably all of them, in different ways. They are all different perspectives for something that is too large for us to see all at once, and as such, can see radically different from one another and even in conflict, but they are all true perspectives on the same enormous subject of human self-esteem.

The truth is, we know so very little about how our minds work, even a century after Freud. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, as far as we know, and the more we learn about it, the more there is to learn. Every answer spawns a dozen more questions. And it’s a tossup as to whether the scientists or the psychologists will be first to the finish line.

One thing is certain : low self esteem is pandemic in modern civilization, and we need to understand the nature of the problem before we can find a cure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Author’s Note : I am not talking about comfort food or delicious food. Also, I am going to rant about nutrition again.

You hear a lot about what food tastes good, and what food is (supposedly) good for you, but very little about how food makes you feel. And this seems odd to me.

It’s like there is no happy medium between the (sometimes very) long term thinking of healthy eating and the extremely short term pleasure of flavour. After all, we human beings are not terribly good at thinking in the long term when it comes to our basic pleasures like food and sex, and on the other hand, the most delicious taste in the world is gone seconds after you experience it. There has to be some kind of middle ground.

What I want to know is how foods make you feel later that same day. What foods lead to a better day, and which ones are almost guaranteed to make you miserable? In short, how does one eat to be happy?

This problem is complicated by something I have talked about before, which is the need for human beings to stimulate the reward centers of their brains in order to maintain positive self-worth. It might well be that the high-reward foods we love so much that it is killing us are nevertheless, in a strictly short-term sense, the better bet for being happy that day.

Or maybe not. The problem is, we simply do not have the information to make this kind of decision. The world is polarized between “tastes good” and “good for you”, and while corporations compete to push that reward button harder than anyone else, they also compete to sell you health food and fad nutrition.

Meanwhile, ideologues of nutrition, as well as people that can only be described as nutrition denialists, muddy the waters further by trying to get followers for their own little empires of thought and influence, and all under the guise of trying to help people lead better lives.

If they truly wanted people to lead better lives, they would look at the whole picture.

We the public are left without plausible data. The world of nutrition research is maddeningly unscientific and non-comprehensive. as well as completely without method or reason. There are so many vested interests trying to sway the science their way, and so many people wedded to their nutritional beliefs because it seems like they worked for them, as well as various actual medical professionals selling, with total innocence, nutritional folklore as science, and it’s no wonder that the modern human just shrugs and eats whatever seems to make sense to them at the time.

And when it comes to how foods make people feel good after eating them, the data basically does not exist. People have theories about it, but there is no systematically collected and carefully collated dataset on which to base these theories.

All we have is mountains of unhelpful anecdotal evidence, and people’s own life experience, which as I have mentioned before is not so great at long term thinking when it comes to basic needs.

A person could live a decade in deep depression because of how they eat and have absolutely no idea. In fact, they might double down again and again on the very foods making them miserable because they use those foods to self-medicate their depression.

This is clearly and categorically unacceptable.

What is needed is a coordinated and integrated effort to study the effects of nutrition on mood. Not a million little projects from corporate scientists looking to please their masters or desperate professors seeking tenure.

Instead, it should have the same combination of open-source accessibility and the ability to put all valid results in a comprehensive framework that will lead to a single body of solid knowledge that the Human Genome Project used.

People will be free to claim a section of the problem and work on it on their own, and if their results are deemed valid, that section of the problem will be considered solved.

Frankly, this is how all large and complicated science issues should be tackled.

Of course, the first and most likely to stir the hornet’s next is a comprehensive review of all current nutritional data and beliefs. No sense in re-inventing the wheel on that score, but the review would have to follow all the current lore to its source and then evaluate the validity of that source.

And if no valid source is to be found, the information is deleted.

The next phase would be to do all the basic research needed to fill the gaps left in nutritional lore (I have a feeling those gaps will be quite large) so that the basics of human nutrition can finally be hashed out.

That will not be easy, but it will at least be a matter of biochemistry. The final phase is the really tricky one.

In said phase, we will have the enter the murky, slippery world of happiness research. You will have to feed people certain foods (or types of meals) and then figure out how that food made them feel.

Obviously, there will be self-reporting. As unreliable as self-reporting can be, it is still the best way to establish a baseline on what the participants think is going on.

Harder data would be more elusive. You certainly can’t tell how happy someone truly is simply by observing them. Possibly, in the modern day of fMRI, it might be possible to at least establish what is really going on in the brain, and by comparing that to the self-reports of participants, it might be possibly to get some kind of clue as to what the real story might be.

But for the most part, we would have to take people at their word.

In the end, what I hope for is to give unto the world the knowledge they need to make informed diet decisions. If people could see what they eat in terms of how it will make them feel after eating it, they would be empowered to make smarter choices and in the end we would have a happier, healthier population.

And that’s something we all want.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.