Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques

by David D. Burns

There is one and only one person in this world who has the power to threaten your self-esteem—and that is you. Your sense of worth can go down only if you put yourself down. The real solution is to put an end to your absurd inner harangue.

Another distortion characteristic of anger-generating thoughts is mind reading—you invent motives that explains to your satisfaction why the other person did what he or she did. These hypotheses are frequently erroneous because they will not describe the actual thoughts and perceptions that motivated the other person. Due to your indignation, it may not occur to you to check out what you are saying to yourself.

The third form of distortion that leads to anger is magnification. If you exaggerate the importance of the negative event, the intensity and duration of your emotional reaction may get blown up out of all proportion. For example, if you are waiting for a late bus and you have an important appointment, you might tell yourself, “I can’t take this!” Isn’t that a slight exaggeration? Since you are taking it, you can take it, so why tell yourself you can’t? The inconvenience of waiting for the bus is bad enough without creating additional discomfort and self-pity in this way. Do you really want to fume like that?

Inappropriate should and shouldn’t statements represent the fourth type of distortion that feeds your anger. When you find that some people’s actions are not to your liking, you tell yourself they “shouldn’t” have done what they did, or they “should have” done something they failed to do. For example, suppose you register at a hotel and discover they lost the record of your reservation, and now there are no rooms available. You furiously insist, “This shouldn’t have happened! Those stupid goddam clerks!”

Irrational should statements rest on your assumption that you are entitled to instant gratification at all times. So on those occasions when you don’t get what you want, you go into panic or rage because of your attitude that unless you get X, you will either die or be tragically deprived of joy forever (X can represent love, affection, status, respect, promptness, perfection, niceness, etc.). This insistence that your wants be gratified at all times is the basis for much self-defeating anger. People who are anger-prone often formulate their desires in moralistic terms such as this: If I’m nice to someone, they should be appreciative. Other people have free will, and often think and act in ways that aren’t to your liking. All of your insistence that they must fall in line with your desires and wishes will not produce this result. The opposite is more often true. Your attempts to coerce and manipulate people with angry demands most often will alienate and polarize them and make them much less likely to want to please you. This is because other people don’t like being controlled or dominated any more than you do. Your anger will simply limit the creative possibilities for problem solving.

The perception of unfairness or injustice is the ultimate cause of most, if not all, anger. In fact, we could define anger as the emotion which corresponds in a one-to-one manner to your belief that you are being treated unfairly.

Now we come to a truth you may see either as a bitter pill or an enlightening revelation. There is no such thing as a universally accepted concept of fairness and justice. There is an undeniable relativity of fairness, just as Einstein showed the relativity of time and space. Einstein postulated—and it has since been experimentally validated—there is no “absolute time” that is standard throughout the universe. Time can appear to “speed up” and “slow down,” and is relative to the frame of reference of the observer. Similarly, “absolute fairness” does not exist. “Fairness” is relative to the observer, and what is fair to one person can appear quite unfair to another. Even social rules and moral strictures which are ac...

When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair? From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair; he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation. From the point of view of the lion, it is fair. He’s hungry, and this is the daily bread he feels entitled to. Who is “right”? There is no ultimate or universal answer to this question because there’s no “absolute fairness” floating around to resolve the issue. In fact, fairness is simply a perceptual interpretation, an abstraction, a self-created concept. How about when you eat a hamburger? Is...

In spite of the fact that “absolute fairness” does not exist, personal and social moral codes are important and useful. I am not recommending anarchy. I am saying that moral statements and judgments about fairness are stipulations, not objective facts. Social moral systems, such as the Ten Commandments, are essentially sets of rules that groups decide to abide by. One basis for such systems is the enlightened self-interest of each member of the group. If you fail to act in a manner that takes into account the feelings and interests of others you are likely to end up less happy because sooner or later they will retaliate when they notice you are taking advantage of them. A system which defines “fairness” varies in its generality depending on how many people accept it. When a rule of behavior is unique to one person, other people may see it as eccentric. An example of this would be my patient who washes her hands ritualistically over fifty times a day to “set things right” and to avoid extreme feelings of guilt and anxiety. When a rule is nearly universally ac...

Again, his arguments seem to be based on cognitive distortion. To say anger serves no purpose is just more all-or-nothing thinking, and to say it never works is an overgeneralization. Actually, anger can be adaptive and productive in certain situations. So the real question is not “Should I or should I not feel anger?” but rather “Where will I draw the line?” The following two guidelines will help you to determine when your anger is productive and when it is not. These two criteria can help you synthesize what you are learning and to evolve a meaningful personal philosophy about anger: 1. Is my anger directed toward someone who has knowingly, intentionally, and unnecessarily acted in a hurtful manner? 2. Is my anger useful? Does it help me achieve a desired goal or does it simply defeat me? Example: You are playing basketball, and a fellow on the other team elbows you in the stomach intentionally so as to upset you and get you off your game. You may be able to channel your anger productively so you will play harder and win. So far your anger is adaptive.* Once the game is over, you may no longer want that anger. Now it’s maladaptive.

The events of this world don’t make you angry. Your “hot thoughts” create your anger. Even when a genuinely negative event occurs, it is the meaning you attach to it that determines your emotional response. The idea that you are responsible for your anger is ultimately to your advantage because it gives you the opportunity to achieve control and make a free choice about how you want to feel. If it weren’t for this, you would be helpless to control your emotions; they would be irreversibly bound up with every external event of this world, most of which are ultimately out of your control.

Most of the time your anger will not help you. It will immobilize you, and you will become frozen in your hostility to no productive purpose. You will feel better if you place your emphasis on the active search for creative solutions. What can you do to correct the difficulty or at least reduce the chance that you’ll get burned in the same way in the future? This attitude will eliminate to a certain extent the helplessness and frustration that eat you up when you feel you can’t deal with a situation effectively. If no solution is possible because the provocation is totally beyond your control, you will only make yourself miserable with your resentment, so why not get rid of it? It’s difficult if not impossible to feel anger and joy simultaneously. If you think your angry feelings are especially precious and important, then think about one of the happiest moments of your life. Now ask yourself. How many minutes of that period of peace or jubilation would I be willing to trade in for feeling frustration and irritation instead?

The thoughts that generate anger more often than not will contain distortions. Correcting these distortions will reduce your anger.

Ultimately your anger is caused by your belief that someone is acting unfairly or some event is unjust. The intensity of the anger will increase in proportion to the severity of the maliciousness perceived and if the act is seen as intentional.

If you learn to see the world through other people’s eyes, you will often be surprised to realize their actions are not unfair from their point of view. The unfairness in these cases turns out to be an illusion that exists only in your mind! If you are willing to let go of the unrealistic notion that your concepts of truth, justice, and fairness are shared by everyone, much of your resentment and frustration will vanish.

Other people usually do not feel they deserve your punishment. Therefore, your retaliation is unlikely to help you achieve any positive goals in your interactions with them. Your rage will often just cause further deterioration and polarization, and will function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if you temporarily get what you want, any short-term gains from such hostile manipulation will often be more than counterbalanced by a long-term resentment and retaliation from the people you are coercing. No one likes to be controlled or forced. This is why a positive reward system works better.

A great deal of your anger involves your defense against loss of self-esteem when people criticize you, disagree with you, or fail to behave as you want them to. Such anger is always inappropriate because only your own negative distorted thoughts can cause you to lose self-esteem. When you blame the other guy for your feelings of worthlessness, you are always fooling yourself.

Frustration results from unmet expectations. Since the event that disappointed you was a part of “reality,” it was “realistic.” Thus, your frustration always results from your unrealistic expectation. You have the right to try to influence reality to bring it more in line with your expectations, but this is not always practical, especially when these expectations represent ideals that don’t correspond to everyone else’s concept of human nature. The simplest solution would be to change your expectations.

It is just childish pouting to insist you have the right to be angry. Of course you do! Anger is legally permitted in the United States. The crucial issue is—is it to your advantage to feel angry? Will you or the world really benefit from your rage?

You rarely need your anger in order to be human. It is not true that you will be an unfeeling robot without it. In fact, when you rid yourself of that sour irritability, you will feel greater zest, joy, peace, and productivity. You will experience liberation and enlightenment.

Guilt is the emotion you will experience when you have the following thoughts: 1. I have done something I shouldn’t have (or I have failed to do something that I should have) because my actions fall short of my moral standards and violate my concept of fairness. 2. This “bad behavior” shows that I am a bad person (or that I have an evil streak, or a tainted character, or a rotten core, etc.). This concept of the “badness” of self is central to guilt. In its absence, your hurtful action might lead to a healthy feeling of remorse but not guilt. Remorse stems from the undistorted awareness that you have willfully and unnecessarily acted in a hurtful manner toward yourself or another person that violates your personal ethical standards. Remorse differs from guilt because there is no implication your transgression indicates you are inherently bad, evil, or immoral. To put it in a nutshell, remorse or regret are aimed at behavior, whereas guilt is targeted toward the “self.” If in addition to your guilt you feel depression, shame, or anxiety, you are probably making one of the following assumptions: 1. Because of my “bad behavior,” I am inferior or worthless (this interpretation leads to depression). 2. If others found out what I did, they would look down on me (this cognition leads to shame). 3. I’ m in danger of retaliation or punishment (this thought provokes anxiety). The simplest way to assess whether the feelings created by such thoughts are u...

The first potential distortion when you are feeling guilty is your assumption you have done something wrong. This may or may not actually be the case. Is the behavior you condemn in yourself in reality so terrible, immoral, or wrong? Or are you magnifying things out of proportion?

A second key distortion that leads to guilt is when you label yourself a “bad person” because of what you did. This is actually the kind of superstitious destructive thinking that led to the medieval witch hunts! You may have engaged in a bad, angry, hurtful action, but it is counterproductive to label yourself a “bad” or “rotten” person because your energy gets channeled into rumination and self-persecution instead of creative problem-solving strategies.

Another common guilt-provoking distortion is personalization. You inappropriately assume responsibility for an event you did not cause.

Inappropriate “should” statements represent the “final common pathway” to your guilt. Irrational should statements imply you are expected to be perfect, all-knowing, or all-powerful. Perfectionistic shoulds include rules for living that defeat you by creating impossible expectations and rigidity. One example of this would be, “I should be happy at all times.” The consequence of this rule is that you will feel like a failure every time you are upset. Since it is obviously unrealistic for any human being to achieve the goal of perpetual happiness, the rule is self-defeating and irresponsible. A should statement that is based on the premise you are all-knowing assumes you have all the knowledge in the universe and that you can predict the future with absolute certainty. For example, you might think, “I shouldn’t have gone to the beach this weekend because I was coming down with the flu. What a jerk I am! Now I’m so sick I’ll be in bed for a week.” Berating yourself this way is unrealistic because you didn’t know for certain that going to the beach would make you so ill. If you had known this, you would have acted differently. Being human, you made a decision, and your hunch turned out to be wrong. Should statements based on the premise you are all-powerful assume that, like God, you are omnipotent and have the ability to control yourself and other people so as to achieve each and every goal. You miss your tennis serve and wince, exclaiming, “I shouldn’t have missed that serve...

Even if your guilt is unhealthy and based on distortion, once you begin to feel guilty, you may become trapped in an illusion that makes the guilt appear valid. Such illusions can be powerful and convincing. You reason: 1. I feel guilty and worthy of condemnation. This means I’ve been bad. 2. Since I’m bad, I deserve to suffer. Thus, your guilt convinces you of your badness and leads to further guilt. This cognitive-emotional connection locks your thoughts and feelings into each other. You end up trapped in a circular system which I call the “guilt cycle.” Emotional reasoning fuels this cycle. You automatically assume that because you’re feeling guilty, you must have fallen short in some way and that you deserve to suffer. You reason, “I feel bad, therefore I must be bad.” This is irrational because your self-loathing does not necessarily prove that you did anything wrong. Your guilt just reflects the fact that you believe you behaved badly. This might be the case, but it often is not. For example, children are frequently punished inappropriately when parents are feeling tired and irritable and misinterpret their behavior. Under these conditions, the poor child’s guilt obviously does not prove he or she did anything wrong.

The Irresponsibility of Guilt. If you have actually done something inappropriate or hurtful, does it follow that you deserve to suffer? If you feel the answer to this question is yes, then ask yourself, “How long must I suffer? One day? A year? For the rest of my life?” What sentence will you choose to impose on yourself? Are you willing to stop suffering and making yourself miserable when your sentence has expired? This would at least be a responsible way to punish yourself because it would be time-limited. But what is the point of abusing yourself with guilt in the first place? If you did make a mistake and act in a hurtful way, your guilt won’t reverse your blunder in some magical manner. It won’t speed your learning processes so as to reduce the chance you’ll make the same mistake in the future. Other people won’t love and respect you more because you are feeling guilty and putting yourself down in this manner. Nor will your guilt lead to productive living. So what’s the point?

You can replace your guilt with a more enlightened basis for moral behavior—empathy. Empathy is the ability to visualize the consequences, good and bad, of your behavior. Empathy is the capacity to conceptualize the impact of what you do on yourself and on the other person, and to feel appropriate and genuine sorrow and regret without labeling yourself as inherently bad. Empathy gives you the necessary mental and emotional climate to guide your behavior in a moral and self-enhancing manner in the absence of the whip of guilt. Using these criteria, you can now readily determine whether your feelings represent a normal and healthy sense of remorse or a self-defeating, distorted sense of guilt. Ask yourself: 1. Did I consciously and willfully do something “bad,” “unfair,” or needlessly hurtful that I shouldn’t have? Or am I irrationally expecting myself to be perfect, all-knowing, or all-powerful? 2. Am I labeling myself a bad or tainted person because of this action? Do my thoughts contain other cognitive distortions, such as magnification, overgeneralization, etc.? 3. Am I feeling a realistic regret or remorse, which results from an empathic awareness of the negative impact of my action? Are the intensity and duration of my painful emotional response appropriate to what I actually did? 4. Am I learning from my error and developing a strategy for change, or am I moping and ruminating nonproductively or even punishing myself in a destructive manner?

1. Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts. In earlier chapters you were introduced to a Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts for overcoming low self-esteem and inadequacy. This method works handsomely for a variety of unwanted emotions, including guilt.

2. Should Removal Techniques. Here are some methods for reducing all those irrational “should” statements you’ve been hitting yourself with. The first is to ask yourself, “Who says I should? Where is it written that I should?” The point of this is to make you aware that you are being critical of yourself unnecessarily. Since you are ultimately making your own rules, once you decide that a rule is not useful you can revise it or get rid of it.

Another simple but effective way to rid yourself of should statements involves substituting other words for “should,” using the double-column technique. The terms “It would be nice if” or “I wish I could” work well, and often sound more realistic and less upsetting.

Another anti-should method involves showing yourself that a should statement doesn’t fit reality. For example, when you say, “I shouldn’t have done X,” you assume (1) it is a fact that you shouldn’t have, and (2) it is going to help you to say this. The “reality method” reveals—to your surprise—that the truth is usually just the opposite: (a) In point of fact, you should have done what you did; and (b) it is going to hurt you to say you shouldn’t have.

3. Learn to Stick to Your Guns. One of the big disadvantages of being guilt-prone is that others can and will use this guilt to manipulate you. If you feel obligated to please everyone, your family and friends will be able to coerce you effectively into doing many things that may not be in your best self-interest. To cite a trivial example, how many social invitations have you halfheartedly accepted so as not to hurt someone’s feelings? In this case the price you pay for saying yes when you really would have preferred to say no is not great. You only end up wasting one evening. And there is a payoff. You will avoid feeling guilty, and you can fantasize that you are an especially nice person. Furthermore, if you try to decline the invitation, the disappointed host may say, “But we are expecting you. Do you mean you are going to let the old gang down? Aw, come on.” And then what would you say? How would you feel?

4. Antiwhiner Technique. This is one of the most surprising, delightfully effective methods in this book. It works like a charm in situations where someone—usually a loved one—makes you feel frustrated, guilty, and helpless through whining, complaining, and nagging. The typical pattern works like this: The whiner complains to you about something or someone. You feel the sincere desire to be helpful, so you make a suggestion. The person immediately squashes your suggestion and complains again. You feel tense and inadequate, so you try harder and make another suggestion. You get the same response. Anytime you try to break loose from the conversation, the other person implies he or she is being abandoned, and you are flooded with guilt.

In fact, it is your urge to help complainers that maintains the monotonous interaction. Paradoxically, when you agree with their pessimistic whining, they quickly run out of steam. Perhaps an explanation will make this seem less puzzling. When people whine and complain, they are usually feeling irritated, overwhelmed, and insecure. When you try to help them, this sounds to them like criticism because it implies they aren’t handling things properly. In contrast, when you agree with them and add a compliment, they feel endorsed, and they then usually relax and quiet down.

5. Moorey Moaner Method. A useful modification of this technique was proposed by Stirling Moorey, a brilliant British medical student who studied with our group in Philadelphia and sat in with me during therapy sessions during the summer of 1979. He worked with a chronically severely depressed fifty-two-year-old sculptor named Harriet with a heart of gold. Harriet’s problem was her friends would often bend her ear with gossip and personal problems. She found these problems upsetting because of her excessive capacity for empathy. Because she wouldn’t know how to help her friends, she felt trapped and resentful until she learned the “Moorey Moaner Method.” Stirling simply instructed her to find a way to agree with what the person was saying, and then to distract the moaner by finding something positive in the complaint and commenting on it.

6. Developing Perspective. One of the commonest distortions that leads to a sense of guilt is personalization—the misguided notion that you are ultimately responsible for other people’s feelings and actions or for naturally occurring events. An obvious example would be your sense of guilt when it rained unexpectedly on the day of a large picnic you had organized to honor the retiring president of your club. In this case you could probably shake your absurd reaction off without a great deal of effort because you clearly cannot control the weather. Guilt becomes much more difficult to overcome when someone suffers substantial pain and discomfort and insists it results from their personal interaction with you. In such cases it can be helpful to clarify the extent to which you can realistically assume responsibility. Where does your responsibility end and the other person’s begin? The technical name for this is “disattribution,” but you might call it putting things into perspective.

What is the difference between “healthy sadness” and depression? The distinction is simple. Sadness is a normal emotion created by realistic perceptions that describe a negative event involving loss or disappointment in an undistorted way. Depression is an illness that always results from thoughts that are distorted in some way. For example, when a loved one dies, you validly think, “I lost him (or her), and I will miss the companionship and love we shared.” The feelings such a thought creates are tender, realistic, and desirable. Your emotions will enhance your humanity and add depth to the meaning of life. In this way you gain from your loss.

There are several differences between feeling better and getting better. Feeling better simply indicates that the painful symptoms have temporarily disappeared. Getting better implies: 1. Understanding why you got depressed. 2. Knowing why and how you got better. This involves a mastery of the particular self-help techniques that worked specifically for you so that you can reapply them and make them work again whenever you choose. 3. Acquiring self-confidence and self-esteem. Self-confidence is based on the knowledge that you have a good chance of being reasonably successful in personal relationships and in your career. Self-esteem is the capacity to experience maximal self-love and joy whether or not you are successful at any point in your life. 4. Locating the deeper causes of your depression.

The key to emotional enlightenment is the knowledge that only your thoughts can affect your moods. If you are an approval addict, you are in the bad habit of flicking your inner switch only when someone else shines their light on you first. And you mistakenly confuse their approval with your own self-approval because the two occur almost simultaneously. You mistakenly conclude that the other person has made you feel good! The fact that you do at times enjoy praise and compliments proves that you know how to approve of yourself! But if you are an approval addict, you have developed the self-defeating habit of endorsing yourself only when someone you respect approves of you first.

The “silent assumption” which often goes hand in hand with the fear of disapproval is “I cannot be a truly happy and fulfilled human being unless I am loved by a member of the opposite sex. True love is necessary for ultimate happiness.” The demand or need for love before you can feel happy is called “dependency.” Dependency means that you are unable to assume responsibility for your emotional life.

You may cling to your dependency because of the erroneous notion that if you do achieve independence, others will see you as a rejecting person and you will end up alone. If this is your fear, you are equating dependency with warmth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you are lonely and dependent, your anger and resentment stem from the fact that you feel deprived of the love you believe you are entitled to receive from others. This attitude drives you farther into isolation. If you are more independent, you are not obliged to be alone—you simply have the capacity to feel happy when you are alone. The more independent you are, the more secure you will be in your feelings. Furthermore, your moods will not go up and down at someone else’s mercy. After all, the amount of love that someone can feel for you is often quite unpredictable. They may not appreciate everything about you, and they may not act in an affectionate way all the time. If you are willing to learn to love yourself, you will have a far more dependable and continuous source of self-esteem.

The first step is to find out if you want independence. All of us have a much greater chance of achieving our goals if we understand what they are. It helped Roberta to realize that her dependency was condemning her to an empty existence. If you are still clinging to the notion that it is desirable to be “dependent,” list the advantages, using the double-column technique. Spell out how you benefit if you let love determine your personal worth. Then in order to assess the situation objectively, write down the counterarguments, or rational responses, in the right-hand column. You may learn that the advantages of your love addiction are partially or totally illusory. Figure 12–1 shows how a woman with a problem similar to Roberta’s assessed these issues. This written exercise motivated her to look within herself for what she had been seeking in others, and enabled her to see that her dependency was the real enemy because it incapacitated her.

Perceiving the Difference Between Loneliness and Being Alone. As you read the previous section you may have concluded that it would be to your advantage if you could learn to regulate your moods and find happiness within yourself. This would give you the capacity to feel as alive when you are alone as when you are with someone you love. But you may be thinking, “That all sounds well and good, Dr. Burns, but it is not realistic. The truth is that it is undeniably emotionally inferior to be alone. All my life I have known that love and happiness are identical, and all my friends a...

There is a difference between wanting and needing something. Oxygen is a need, but love is a want. I repeat: LOVE IS NOT AN ADULT HUMAN NEED! It’s okay to want a loving relationship with another human being. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a delicious pleasure to be involved in a good relationship with someone you love. But you do not need that external approval, love, or attention in order to survive or to experience maximal levels of happiness.

Attitude Modification. Just as love, companionship, and marriage are not necessary for happiness and self-esteem, they are not sufficient either. The proof of this is the millions of men and women who are married and miserable. If love were the antidote to depression, then I would soon be out of business because the vast majority of the suicidal individuals I treat are in fact loved very dearly by their spouses, children, parents, and friends. Love is not an effective antidepressant. Like tranquilizers, alcohol, and sleeping pills, it often makes the symptoms worse. In addition to restructuring your activities more creatively, challenge the upsetting negative thoughts that flow through your mind when you are alone. This was helpful to Maria, a lovely thirty-year-old single woman, who found that when she did activities on her own, she sometimes soured the experience unnecessarily by telling herself, “Being alone is a curse.” In order to combat the feelings of self-pity and resentment this thought created, she wrote a list of counterarguments (see Figure 12–3, page 323). She reported this was very helpful in breaking the cycle of loneliness and depression. Over a year after terminating my work with her I sent her an early draft of this chapter, and she wrote back: “Last night I read very thoroughly the chapter … It proves that it is not being alone that is so bad or so good, but rather how one thinks regarding that or any other condition of being. Thoughts are so powerful! T...

A third silent assumption that leads to anxiety and depression is “My worth as a human being is proportional to what I have achieved in my life.” This attitude is at the core of Western culture and the Protestant work ethic. It sounds innocent enough. In fact, it is self-defeating, grossly inaccurate, and malignant.

Essentially, you must acknowledge that human “worth” is just an abstraction; it doesn’t exist. Hence, there is actually no such thing as human worth. Therefore, you cannot have it or fail to have it, and it cannot be measured. Worth is not a “thing,” it is just a global concept. It is so generalized it has no concrete practical meaning. Nor is it a useful and enhancing concept. It is simply self-defeating. It doesn’t do you any good. It only causes suffering and misery. So rid yourself immediately of any claim to being “worthy,” and you’ll never have to measure up again or fear being “worthless.” Realize that “worthy” and “worthless” are just empty concepts when applied to a human being. Like the concept of your “true self,” your “personal worth” is just meaningless hot air. Dump your “worth” in the garbage can!(You can put your “true self” in there too, if you like.) You’ll find you’ve got nothing to lose! Then you can focus on living in the here and now instead. What problems do you face in life? How will you deal with them? That’s where the action is, not in the elusive mirage of “worth.” You may be afraid to give up your “self” or your “worth.” What are you afraid of? What terrible thing will happen? Nothing!

You might also wonder—“What is the purpose and meaning of life without a concept of worth?” It’s simple. Rather than grasp for “worth,” aim for satisfaction, pleasure, learning, mastery, personal growth and communication with others every day of your life. Set realistic goals for yourself and work toward them. I think you will find this so abundantly gratifying you’ll forget all about “worth,” which in the last analysis has no more buying power than fool’s gold.

“But I’m a humanistic or spiritual person,” you might argue. “I’ve always been taught that all human beings have worth, and I just don’t want to give up this concept.” Very well, if you want to look at it that way, I’ll agree with you, and this brings us to the second path to self-esteem. Acknowledge that everyone has one “unit of worth” from the time they are born until the time they die. As an infant you may achieve very little, and yet you are still precious and worthwhile. And when you are old or ill, relaxed or asleep, or just doing “nothing,” you still have “worth.” Your “unit of worth” can’t be measured and can never change, and it is the same for everyone. During your lifetime, you can enhance your happiness and satisfaction through productive living, or you can act in a destructive manner and make yourself miserable. But your “unit of worth” is always there, along with your potential for self-esteem and joy. Since you can’t measure it or change it, there is no point in dealing with it or being concerned about it. Leave that up to God. Paradoxically, this solution comes down to the same bottom line as the previous solution. It becomes pointless and irresponsible to deal with your “worth,” so you might as well focus on living life productively instead! What problems do you confront today? How will you go about solving them? Questions such as these are meaningful and useful, whereas rumination about your personal “worth” just causes you to spin your wheels.