Ask HN: Low self confidence and self esteem. How to improve?
A good deal of the advice in this thread is specialized to the sort of single males that make up the bulk of HN&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;tech. As someone who is neither single nor male (I&#x27;m a trans woman,) I wanted to provide another viewpoint.<p>So this isn&#x27;t specifically in response to the OP, but as someone who has been there, I hope a passing Googler finds it.<p>The people telling you to meditate or do cognitive-behavioral therapy are almost certainly right.<p>Neither of them ever really gave me perceptible results until recently. Here is why. If you exist for long enough inside of your own head, you can forget that it&#x27;s possible to exist any other way. Some variants of CBT [1] call this &quot;cognitive fusion.&quot;<p>If step one of CBT is &quot;thoughts beget feelings, feelings beget thoughts&quot; then step zero has to be &quot;you are not your thoughts and you are not your feelings.&quot; This sounds obvious, but I had to have a dissociative episode to grasp it - if you&#x27;re as deeply fused with your thoughts as I&#x27;ve been,  it may not be something you can really grok by hearing it from another person.<p>So you do meditation or you do therapy, but you unthinkingly assume that the patterns of thought and feeling that you&#x27;re trying to replace have always been there, and you can&#x27;t even perceive them. So it doesn&#x27;t work - the core of CBT is the practice of talking back to your thoughts, but it&#x27;s really, really hard to do that if you don&#x27;t (or can&#x27;t) see the space between you and your thoughts.<p>I understand that many people have an easily-accessed self-concept separate from what&#x27;s inside of their head. Tapping into mine is something I have to work at. I don&#x27;t know if such theory-of-mind problems are something that coders (or trans women) experience at a higher rate than the general population, but anecdotally it seems to be common enough that this is worth dropping here.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Acceptance_and_commitment_therapy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Acceptance_and_commitment_ther...</a>