Have you ever wondered why you’re so terrible? Did you ever feel that you’re worse than others, and are a failure in life?

Self-loathing is often subtle, and the damage it deals to you is enormous. It destroys your mental health, makes you easy to manipulate, and creates limiting beliefs.

There are 7 signs you hate yourself that can help you overcome self-loathing and achieve lasting happiness.

In this article, I’ll share these signs, explain how they express self-hatred, and provide strategies to help you increase your self-esteem. Let’s begin.

7 Signs You Hate Yourself

There are several signs of self-hatred. Some of them are easy to spot, and others are more subtle and non-obvious.

Nevertheless, identifying them in yourself is crucial to solving the problem. The first sign you hate yourself is that you can’t let go of the past.

1: You Are Stuck in the Past

When you hate yourself, you live in the past. You constantly remind yourself of your past failures, mistakes, traumatic events, and don’t let yourself enjoy your life now, in the Present moment.

Life is a series of moments. Past and future do not exist in physical reality, but only in our own minds in the form of thoughts and speculations. Therefore, the only time that exists is Now.

By refusing to move on from your past and reminding yourself of it, you subconsciously express self-hatred, preventing yourself from enjoying life.

Recommended article: How to Always Be in The Present Moment: 9 Best Ways

2: You Deny Praise and Compliments

Another sign of self-hatred is that you deny praise. Whenever someone compliments you for your abilities and efforts, you decline it, saying different excuses.

• “It’s nothing, I just got lucky.”
• “That’s not true, I’m quite dumb actually.”
• “No need to thank me, it’s my work.”

While it may seem like an innocent expression of humility at first, it’s a sign you hate yourself. You deny praise directed at your abilities and therefore, undermine your honest efforts.

You refuse to accept that you’re good at something because you see yourself as an inferior person. This affects your self-esteem, work ethic, and relationships, limiting your opportunities to grow as a person.

3: You Compare Yourself to Others

You spend hours upon hours of time scrolling on social media apps, like Instagram and TikTok. Doom scrolling itself is already terrible, but when combined with comparison, it becomes a great danger to your mental health.

People often warp and filter what they post on social media, pretending that they and their lives are absolutely flawless. In reality, a lot of what you see on these apps is fake and doesn’t show the full picture.

Each time you scroll on Instagram and see a post of a man more muscular/famous/richer than you, you hurt yourself with feelings of regret, guilt, and blame for not meeting these standards.

If you constantly indulge in this behavior, even though you’re aware that it hurts you, it’s a clear sign that you hate yourself.

Related article: How to Stop Being Envious of Others

4: You Always Expect the Worst

When you hate yourself, you see the world from a pessimistic perspective. You over exaggerate unfortunate events, find flaws in good ones, and blame yourself even for the littlest mistakes.

Why would you want to do that, though? Why would you intentionally hurt yourself by draining all happiness and enjoyment from your own life?

The answer is simple. On a subconscious level, you don’t believe that you deserve happiness, since you see yourself as a bad person, inferior to others around you.

Hence, you “punish” yourself by expecting the worst to come, finding little flaws in your actions, thoughts, criticizing your abilities, and pushing other people away.

5: You Overthink Decisions and Actions

A clear sign you hate yourself is the tendency to overthink actions and decisions. Instead of making clear choices on how to act and move forward in life, you analyze all possible scenarios, options, and end up in a state of paralysis.

Some people may argue that this is a sign of intelligence, as smart people are analytical in nature. In reality, though, it’s a sign you hate yourself:

If you can’t make clear decisions and overanalyze all possible outcomes, it means that you don’t trust yourself. You see yourself as incompetent, stupid, and full of flaws, and you feel the need to analyze everything to get the best possible outcome.

Indecisiveness is ruining your life, for it wastes your time, mental resources, and ability to act upon your wishes.

6: You Neglect Your Dreams and Aspirations 

In childhood, we all have ambitions and dreams. We dream of being firefighters, writers, police officers, businessmen, YouTubers, and astronauts. But only a few of us achieve these dreams.

Once we become teenagers, we are told to “grow up”, “be realistic”, and accept mind-numbing office jobs, even if we don’t find enjoyment in them.

If you gave up on pursuing your childhood dreams, finding better work for yourself, and making progress towards goals, it’s one of the 7 signs you hate yourself.

Those who’re content with who they are love their work, pursue their goals, and make progress. By accepting mediocrity and purposeless existence, you accept your inferiority as a human, and subconsciously torment yourself for being “worse than others.”

7: You Constantly Seek Approval From Others

The last clear sign you hate yourself is seeking external approval. You don’t feel comfortable being by yourself, as it provokes negative thoughts of self-loathing.

You aren’t sure of your own talents, abilities, efforts, and feel unable to validate yourself. For this reason, you feel the constant need to be validated by others.

You hang out with all sorts of people, even if you don’t vibe or feel comfortable around them. You may even copy their interests, behaviors, and act like a clown, just to feel liked and accepted by them.

Real fulfillment comes not from external validation, though, but from self-acceptance, progress, and positive actions.

How to Build Back Your Self-Esteem

If you have 3, 4, or more of these 7 signs, you have a problem with self-loathing. I’m not just going to leave you with the realization of the issue, though.

I’m going to provide you with 5 steps to building up your self-esteem, so that you overcome self-hatred and start living like a healthy human.

1: Improve Your Mental Health

First and foremost, start working on your mental health. How can you respect or like yourself when you have thousands of thoughts rushing through your brain every minute?

You don’t need medication, expensive therapists, or other conventional methods the media likes to propagate. Start building these simple habits:

• Meditate for 10-20 minutes every morning
• Do gratitude journaling every morning
• Read books about spirituality and stoicism (“The Power of Now”, “Discourses” of Epictetus)
• Sleep for 7-8 hours
• Go outside for 15 minutes
• Eat more natural foods without chemicals

These habits have massive benefits for your well-being. Meditation clears your mind, gratitude journaling increases your happiness, and sunlight improves your mood.

I guarantee you: you’re going to see massive improvements in your mental health, have less anxiety, depressive mood, and develop more mental clarity.

That’s not all, though. We need to address the core reason for self-loathing: the lack of competence and progress.

Related article: The Power of Not Reacting: How to Obtain Peace of Mind

2: Develop Productive Habits

The main reason you feel bad about yourself is that you aren’t making progress. You have no goals to pursue, no mission to complete, no worthy achievements to show.

You also likely spend most of your days scrolling on social media or watching Netflix. It’s hard not to dislike yourself when you waste your life and are perfectly aware of it.

The mental health habits I named above are already productive, as they directly improve your clarity, focus, and ability to work. Aside from them, you should also start developing other masculine hobbies you’d like.

You can start journaling for self-improvement, playing billiards, going hiking, or playing Sudoku. Find any hobby you’d enjoy, and dedicate at least 15 minutes to it.

You can also learn how to build good habits more easily by doing them at specific hours of the day and putting positive triggers into your environment.

The more you care about yourself, and the more you progress, the more you develop self-esteem and self-respect. Keep that in mind.

3: Focus on Your Fitness

In your journey to building self-esteem, it’s particularly important to focus on your fitness. The amount of exercise you do directly correlates with how well you feel both physically and mentally.

Start exercising more. Get into weightlifting, learn how to gain muscle mass, and build an aesthetic body. Do basic calisthenics, like pushups, squats, pullups, and slowly move on to more complex exercises.

The reason I recommend resistance training over other training types is its influence on self-esteem. Being able to bench press 100 kg, do 100 pushups in a set, and having a great body make you very confident.

Start small, and gradually increase the intensity of exercise. Stretch, take a cold shower, and drink protein after finishing a workout to gain more health benefits.

The best part? You’ll start feeling the benefits just 2 weeks after starting. So go on, and give fitness a try.

Recommended article: How to Be Mentally Tougher: 9 Ways to Cultivate Resilience

4: Stop Consuming Negative Content

This part is especially important. Millions of people worldwide fill their brains with trash without even realizing it. News, celebrity drama, scandals, politics, violent content – all of these program your brain to look for the negative (remember the 4th sign you hate yourself?).

Listen. I know it feels tempting to consume drama, listen to rap music, and watch degenerate TikTok videos whenever you’re bored. Even though it feels good right now, it makes your life worse in the long run.

Negative content and social media change how your brain works, weaken mental clarity, and affect your ability to think rationally. Your brain gets used to useless, flashy, and irrelevant information, making it less capable of working as intended.

That is why you should also take a digital detox. Stop using social media, news, and other similar info sources for a month while developing good habits simultaneously. It will do wonders for both your mental health and self-respect.

Recommended article: How to Erase Negative Thoughts For Good

5: Find Your Purpose in Life

Finally, the last way to restore your self-esteem is to find your Life Mission. Even if you exercise, meditate, read, and do other productive activities, you might still feel bad about yourself.

Many people quit self-improvement because of this, thinking that it’s a scam that doesn’t work. It is not true.

A large part of self-development is finding your purpose, writing it down, and executing it. Every man needs something specific and meaningful to work towards. Otherwise, he’ll feel empty and unsatisfied.

This evening, instead of scrolling on Instagram and watching TV shows like usual, dive into introspection. Ask yourself why you live, what work you’d like to do, what problems you’d want to solve, and what makes you the happiest

Finding your masculine purpose may seem like an extremely complex task, but in reality, all it requires is your full attention and honesty with yourself.

Once you’ve found your calling, spend at least an hour every day working on it. Create projects (websites, eBooks, innovative products, art, whatever else you want) and express yourself through them.

This meaningful work will elevate your consciousness to another level and build unbreakable self-esteem, since it increases your value as a human being.

Signs of Self-Hatred

Many people hate themselves without even realizing it. They engage in self-destructive behaviors, ignore their needs, and change their behavior to get external validation.

These are several signs you suffer from self-loathing:

• You live in the past;
• You deny praise;
• You compare yourself to others;
• You are pessimistic and self-critical;
• You regularly overthink decisions;
• You neglect your dreams and goals;
• You seek external approval.

If you have some of these 7 signs you hate yourself, there are several things you can do. Build habits that’ll improve your mental health, take a break from degenerate content, exercise more, and work on your purpose.

Building up your self-esteem isn’t a quick process, but you shouldn’t quit because of it. All it takes is doing simple actions on a consistent basis. I believe in you, brother.

If you liked this article and found it useful, make sure to share it on social media and leave a comment below. See you next time.