Short Wave - The science of self-worth (and how to boost yours)

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Your self-worth today can be affected by your memories. But you have power over those memories – when you re-experience them. By doing that, you can reshape your self-esteem for the better and change your perspective. That idea and the broader science of self-worth are at the heart of Marisa Franco’s new book Worth. It’s so intriguing to us, we couldn’t pass up the chance to share it with you. That’s why today’s episode is a peek at a conversation Marisa had about self-worth on NPR’s self-help podcast Life Kit.Interested in more psychology episodes? Email us your question at [e-mail] – it may become a future episode!Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Regina Barbara here. Do you feel like you have high self-esteem, or do you think it's low? Or maybe you're like me and it just ping pongs between the two all the time? Do you feel good about yourself or do you feel like you can't admit it if you don't? The paradox I would say of self-worth is that people that are truly worthy can admit when they don't feel worthy. Because again, they're all about just attuning to and expressing their internal world as it is. Self-esteem is at the heart of Marissa Franco's new book, Worth.

She's a psychologist, and recently she sat down with Mariel Sagata, host of NPR's Self-Help Podcast Life Kit. Hey, Mariel. Hey. So how was that conversation with Marissa? Yeah, it was really interesting. You know, I learned a lot about how researchers think about and study self-esteem. For instance, like what happens in the bodies of people with low self-esteem? I mean, when I feel like I have low self-esteem, I definitely feel it in my body. And actually, this one's kind of wild. If someone with low self-esteem experiences something that contradicts their view of themselves, like they get a compliment or an award, they can actually have a negative physical reaction to that misalignment.

for instance, their blood pressure will go up. Yeah, makes complete sense to me. Yeah, I mean, I found that really surprising. And the fact also that this can have a long-term effect, like their body will continue to react over time. There was one study where that looked at self-esteem when positive events happened to people, and it found that when people had low self-esteem

and positive events happened to them, they got sicker months later. And when you say they got sicker, They've had more doctor's appointments. Yeah, this is, I think, for some people, counterintuitive, but for me, I feel like maybe it makes kind of sense because your reality is just, I don't know, it's not fitting. It's unsettling. Yeah, it's completely unsettling, yeah. Well, Marissa says this is related to something called self-verification theory, which is this idea that we look for the world to verify our sense of self.

And if it doesn't, it influences our sense of coherence and control. right? And so that can undermine well-being. So today, my gift to you, Gina, and to all the listeners, is a look at what science has to say about self-worth and why it works the way it does. I am definitely here for it. Thank you for this gift. You're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Mariel, I'm excited to pass the baton and hear you and Marissa walk through this all. Yeah, we actually made a special version just for a. all at shortwave. Ooh, I'm excited.

Okay. So where are we dropping into the conversation with Marissa, like your conversation with her? I think it makes sense to pick it up in the part where we're exploring how low self-esteem shows up in the body, especially around rejection. What low self-esteem does is it amplifies negative emotions and it diminishes positive ones. That's based on some of your past experiences. that that's the reason why it's happening.

But that's what we see in the research, right? That if an instance of rejection really hits you hard, if it feels like all you're focusing on, if it feels like something you can't get over, if it feels like you're ruminating all the time, right? Like you're experiencing lows lower than other people because of that low self-esteem, because your negative memories are amplifying

a negative experience in this moment. But also if you have low self-esteem, right, your brain is convinced that the negative things are going to happen, that you're going to be rejected again, right, because your memories are predicting in the future, which means there's this ambivalence that your brain and body have to positive experiences because this positive experience can be a way to, if I elevate my sense of self, if I feel so happy, but I can just get further crushed. And so there's often this anxiety that can come with positive experiences is when you've had low self-esteem where you feel like, you know, if people are giving me a

compliment, now I have to live up to this and I can't live up to this. If I'm experiencing a success, it's only a matter of time until I fail. And so your positive feelings, positive emotions, positive events become a little bit more fraught if you struggle with self-esteem. And one technique that's meant to help people become more secure and improve their self-esteem is memory consolidation. The underlying theory here, right, is that when you recall a memory in a new context, you have the opportunity to update it. How does that work? Researchers say memories are the database of self-esteem. And so you've had negative experiences of rejection,

harm, abuse, perhaps. And the thing about memories is they don't just record the past. They predict the future. So a part of you thinks that this is going to happen again. You know, someone is going to abandon me, just like my parent might have. And you're literally, in a way, your body's recreating those past experiences in the present based off your memories and is literally triggering the same body state for you now. So researchers have found that we can update and transform our memories in a way that can actually make us feel more worthy. But those memories have to be open.

What does that mean? So when a memory is what's called open, it still triggers a memory. emotion in us. It still affects how we feel. It still affects how we see ourselves and the world around us. We might try to avoid that memory, not look at it versus a closed memory where we have closure. Like it actually is in the past. It no longer shapes how we're living in the present. And there's this psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg, he says, we don't go to therapy to deal with what happened then, but with what's still happening now. And that's open memories. We're almost like they're still happening now, right? Like when I describe perhaps an anxiously attached person and

their boss gives them negative feedback and they're having such a strong reaction. They feel so bad. Like, they hate themselves. They're a failure. Right. That's the example of an open memory, perhaps shaping your experience of the present moment. You're not truly living in the present when you have a memory that's not closed in this way. And so those open, first it has to be in a memory that's open. So it's, you know, even if you've had a really negative experience, if you feel like, you know, I've gotten closure about it. I've kind of moved on. Like it doesn't trigger any emotion in me. I'm not confused. That's why it happened. That's why it happened. And that might not be the memory to target.

But then in the context of open memories, right, there's some that we might make us shut down, that we might dread that are so scary. And in that case, we might want to go through some of these exercises with our therapist. But there's other, honestly, Mariel, that are quite benign. I did this exercise with friends. And I say benign because they sound benign because when we're kids, we're taking in reality a lot more personally. And we don't have resources in the same way.

And another feature of these open memories is that you don't necessarily have meaning. You don't understand why it happened, right? You don't feel like it made your life better at the end of the day, right? It doesn't feel like there's much silver linings around this memory. And so looking back and trying to figure out, okay, what are those memories that still kind of niggle at me a little bit, right? It still kind of hurts when I look back at them. Those are some of the memories that might still be open and affecting yourself. sense of worth now. And Mary, I want to go one step deeper with this, which is that it's ultimately

more about changing emotion than changing a memory, right? It's about, because there's a study on self-esteem and what predicted whether people's self-esteem changed at the end of therapy. And the number one factor was how much emotion that they expressed. And so the problem in these memories is that the emotion is not fully expressed. The emotion is not fully processed. you haven't fully moved through the emotion. And so it continues to shape how you perceive yourself and how you perceive the world. And so it's about looking back at these memories and giving yourself a sort of catharsis and allowing those feelings to move through you more so that they don't continue to shape your sense of self right now.

One thing I wonder about this is like if going back to your childhood self and providing the reassurance that you needed, if that reinforces that you can only rely on yourself. I think why this exercise could be helpful is because of the ways that our memories shape how we perceive reality. Often even if people do show up for us, we don't have a felt sense that they are, right? Or we pick out the one way they didn't show up perfectly, and that's what we're left with. And I talk about this in the book that when people have low self-esteem, they, and If they're with a partner that loves them too much, the season two positively, they're less intimate with that partner because that love doesn't match their own sense of how they see themselves.

And that discordance feels like an identity crisis. It feels like they're being misunderstood. And there's this way that unworthiness can manifest as an inability to accept love from other people. It can filter out love from other people because it's like, this doesn't match how I see myself. And so hopefully there would be more of a symbiosis between these two things, that when we work on our sense of self, when we feel worthier, we are, in fact, able to accept more love and care and support from other people without feeling like they don't mean it, without feeling

like I'm a burden, without feeling like they're trying to get me to depend on them. So then I'm ultimately going to get let down. Yeah. And so what I hope is that through doing this active memory reconciliation, again, it just opens us up to be willing to take the risks of being able to rely on people more. Because I ultimately think it's people that feel like they matter that are more willing to ask for what they need. I wonder what can we expect to feel after we do this memory reconciliation exercise? There's a catharsis feeling. There's a joy for me. There's a sense of waking up or possibility.

When a memory has continued to affect your sense of reality for so long, it's almost hard to experience yourself differently. And so it's almost like the sense of like you're opening your eyes in the springtime that you're like, oh my gosh, I'm noticing all of these new things around me. Like I'm just having a different felt experience of the world around me when you're able to reconsolid a memory that's weighing on you. Why is it worth addressing our low self-esteem? Well, all the beauties of life slip off of you when you have lower self-esteem. You can experience great success and still feel like a failure. You can find great love and still feel unlovable.

And so your ability to actually internalize the good is disrupted by your own sense of self. And so I think if we're able to feel good about ourselves, ultimately we are able to receive all the good happening in our lives more deeply. Mariel, thank you for bringing us this conversation on the science of self-worth. You're welcome. And if listeners want to hear the rest of the conversation and hear Marissa go through her own memory reconciliation exercise, she talks about a memory from childhood where her mom showed up late to pick her up from soccer practice, You can check out the Life Kit version of this conversation.

We'll link to that in the show notes. This episode was produced by Bertha McCoy and Lennon Sherburn. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Megan Kane. The fact checkers were Tyler Jones and Andrea Lopez-Gruzzaro. The audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Sina LaFredo. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.