There is a whole genre of article listing the behaviors that quietly destroy your self-respect. Saying yes when you mean no. Apologizing for taking up space. Staying somewhere you are not valued. Explaining yourself to people who have already decided.
Most of that advice may be reasonable on its own terms. But the two bodies of research cited here do not test whether those particular habits lower self-respect or global self-esteem. They address the consequences of global self-esteem and its average development with age, so they cannot validate or disprove a list of specific behaviors.
Two problems with the question
The first is a naming problem. Psychology does not measure self-respect. It measures global self-esteem, usually with a ten-item questionnaire that has been in use since the 1960s. The two are not identical, and anyone promising you the psychology of self-respect is quietly substituting one for the other. That substitution is worth noticing, because everything that follows is about the thing that was actually measured.
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The second problem is direction. The influential review cited below found little evidence that high global self-esteem caused most of the academic, occupational, relationship or health outcomes attributed to it. In some domains, success may raise self-esteem; in others, direction remained undetermined. That is not a general finding that the causal arrow usually points backward.
The review that went looking for the arrow
In 2003, Roy Baumeister, Jennifer Campbell, Joachim Krueger and Kathleen Vohs published a commissioned review of the self-esteem literature in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The question was simple and the answer was not the expected one.
School grades correlated with self-esteem at around .21 to .26, a modest relationship. But the longitudinal evidence suggested that performing well at school sometimes raised self-esteem rather than the reverse, and that shared factors such as ability and family background explained most of what was left. Job performance produced highly variable correlations with the causal direction undetermined, and here too occupational success may be what does the lifting.
The interpersonal finding is the one that stings. People with high self-esteem described themselves as having better relationships. Objective measures disconfirmed most of those descriptions. The review found no evidence that self-esteem predicted the quality or the duration of a relationship.
Effects on smoking, drinking, drug use and sexual behavior came out negligible. High self-esteem did not keep people out of trouble.
On programs designed to raise self-esteem, the authors were blunt. They had not found evidence that boosting self-esteem causes benefits, and they recommended against widespread efforts to do it.
The exception, which matters
There is one domain where the review came down the other way, and it deserves more than a footnote. Self-esteem has a strong relation to happiness, and the authors concluded that high self-esteem probably does lead to greater happiness rather than merely accompanying it.
So this is not a finding that how you regard yourself is unimportant. It is a finding that how you regard yourself does much less work on your grades, your job and your relationships than the self-esteem industry claimed, while doing real work on whether your days feel good. Those are different claims and they get muddled constantly.
What actually tracks it
The later lifespan meta-analysis addresses a different question: how average self-esteem changes with age. It describes a developmental trajectory, not a lever or a cause. Age marks a bundle of changing roles, experiences, health and social conditions; the analysis cannot show that getting older itself raises self-esteem.
Ulrich Orth, Ruth Yasemin Erol and Eva Luciano at the University of Bern pooled 331 longitudinal studies covering more than 160,000 people between the ages of 4 and 94. Their account of the work, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2018, describes a single long curve.
Self-esteem rises through childhood. It holds steady through puberty, which surprised the researchers, since the literature had long assumed adolescence was where it collapsed. Orth notes that contrary to that assumption, most youngsters do not experience low self-esteem during this period. It then keeps climbing through young adulthood and middle age, reaching its maximum somewhere between 60 and 70. Pronounced decline arrives only after 90.
Two caveats belong with that. It is an average curve, so it describes a population rather than promising any individual a good decade at 65. And the figures here come from the researchers’ own institutional description of their study rather than from the paper itself, which was not accessible.
One more result is worth recording. Younger cohorts showed the same developmental pattern as people born decades earlier, which cuts against the idea that something about the present generation has broken this particular part of the human wiring.
What this leaves you with
Neither cited paper supplies a validated inventory of habits that lower self-esteem. That absence is not proof that behavior cannot affect self-esteem; it means the claim falls outside what these two reviews tested.
What there is instead is a shape. A sense of one’s own worth appears to be less like a score that drops every time you fail to hold a boundary, and more like a slow accumulation that most adults are still building well into their sixties. That is a different relationship to have with your own bad week.
The practical reading of the 2003 review is narrower: raising global self-esteem by itself should not be assumed to improve grades, work, relationships or health. The review does not establish one general route for improving self-regard, and more recent intervention evidence would need to be assessed separately.