The Crucial Difference Between Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Living up to people’s expectations is a source of anxiety. But meeting those expectations cannot release us from that anxiety—because success achieved in the eyes of others leaves us dependent upon those same eyes.
The problem is not with success itself. Money can buy freedom and security; renown or recognition can create opportunities. But success cannot answer the deeper question: Am I enough?
To understand why, we need to distinguish between self-confidence and self-esteem—two things which are often confused.
Self-Confidence vs Self-Esteem
Self-confidence asks, “Can I do this?” Self-esteem asks, “Am I enough?”
Performing in the world can make us self-confident, while leaving us profoundly insecure as a human. Just think of all those celebrities who can command an audience but then struggle behind the scenes.
When we confuse self-confidence and self-esteem, ability and worth, we begin using achieving to repair self-esteem. Each new achievement brings a bit of relief, but, of course, our list of achievements, or CV, can never be long enough.
This is how ambition becomes a trap. We put our authentic lives on hold and neglect everything that’s important, in the hope that we might finally feel enough. A person can succeed brilliantly at the wrong life.
The Secret to Self-Esteem
Fame and fortune are external goods, and what comes from outside cannot establish our worth. And if this is so, our sense of worth can only come from inside us, from how we live and relate to ourselves.
The answer, then, is not to abandon ambition, but to subordinate it to our values. An ambition works for us when it expresses our values. Whenever we stand for who we are, we become someone we can love and trust. By backing ourselves, we become our best selves.
Outward success can do many things for us—but it cannot make us enough. ‘Enough’ is not a prize awarded by the crowd, but the quiet consequence of living up to our ideals.
The greatest success is to become ourselves—and no longer to need success.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Art of Failure, an unconventional exploration of success, ambition, happiness, and the good life.
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Whereas depression weighs upon life as it is, anxiety points towards the future: what might happen, what might go wrong, what might be expected of us.
Of course, some concern for the future is necessary. It motivates us to do what’s needed, pay our bills, and avoid danger. So the aim cannot be to abolish anxiety altogether—simply to prevent occasional alarm from becoming a permanent state.
Modern Life
The modern world makes this difficult because threats are seldom all-or-nothing. Our ancestors faced a predator, or did not. We have emails, deadlines, mortgages. And when we look on social media, we feel we are falling behind.
Because the pressure is diffuse and continuous, we internalise it. Eventually, nobody needs to chase us; we carry the pursuer in our head.
Once the pursuer is inside us, we try to outrun them by keeping busy. Activity gives us a sense of control, but often we are not addressing the anxiety so much as preventing ourselves from feeling it. We run faster and faster so that we never have to ask where we are going.
There is a Zen story about a horseman galloping down a path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. “Where are you heading?” hollered a bystander. “I don’t know!” came the already distant reply, “Ask the horse!”
How to Reduce Anxiety
The first step, then, is to stop running and name the anxiety. A vague anxiety can fill the whole sky; a named fear becomes one object within it. Once identified, it can be worked with, accepted, or dismissed.
In particular, we can determine what part of the anxiety is actually within our control. The ancient Stoics emphasized this distinction between what is and is not in our control. What is not in our control must simply be let go.
The Stoics had this image of an archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control. So the right-thinking archer focuses on the action, not on its result—because the first is in his control, whereas the other is not.
When dealing with our anxiety, we should all become like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”
The Deepest Cure for Fear and Anxiety—No Prescription Required
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs culminates in self-actualization. But the journey does not end there.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs can be arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs).
Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented as a five-level pyramid (Figure 1), with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic ones have been met. Maslow called the bottom four levels ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem, status, and recognition.
In contrast, he called the fifth and highest level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ insofar as the drive to self-actualize requires that we move beyond the pursuit of comfort and security to fulfil our deepest potential as human beings.
Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only dimly, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a minority of people ever truly self-actualize, because self-actualization requires unusual qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, above all, courage. Many people who have satisfied all their deficiency needs remain unable to self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of life would lead them to entertain the possibility of its meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.
Existential Anxiety
A person who begins to contemplate their bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inescapable, while at the same time clinging to the comforting belief that they are somehow immortal, important, or at least significant. This inner conflict gives rise to existential anxiety. Whereas fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias or panic disorder) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent insignificance, or absurdity, of life.
Existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, instead constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, routines, relationships, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.
Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, those who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’ and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, with them, anxiety, but, beyond that, it can also bring a profound sense of calm, freedom, even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase—a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of greater things to come.
The Courage to Be
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich took this idea a step further. In The Courage to Be, he argued that refusing to confront non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had argued, but also to pathological—or neurotic—anxiety.
He wrote:
He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.
According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.
Squaring up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make—and get—the most out of our lives.
This, I believe, is the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.
Some philosophers have gone further still in asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to face the executioner, tells his friends that absolute justice, beauty, and goodness cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death—and can be said to be almost dead.
Only a true philosopher who no longer fears death truly possesses courage and the other virtues. Those who remain in fear of death can only have, at best, the appearance of virtue; but behind the facade, they are forever trading one fear against another.
Sisyphus, by Titian. Sisyphus is condemned to push his rock forever. Worse than that, he can never put it down.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
A horse galloped down the path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. ‘Where are you heading?’ hollered a bystander. ‘I don’t know!’ came the already distant reply, ‘Ask the horse!’ —A Zen story
The manic defence is the tendency, when confronted with threatening thoughts and feelings, to distract the conscious mind with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts and feelings.
A paradigm of the manic defence is the person who spends all their time rushing around from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity. Other examples include the socialite who attends one event after another, the small and dependent boy who charges around declaiming that he is Superman, and the insecure teenager who laughs ‘like a maniac’ at the slightest intimation of sex. The behaviour or activity need not be frantic or compulsive. It might involve working, exercising, socialising, travelling, even helping others.
But that is all beside the point. What matters is what is being blocked out.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning needless events and then fussing over their every detail. In the 2002 film The Hours, which takes its inspiration from Woolf’s novel, the poet Richard Brown puts it rather more cruelly: ‘Oh, Mrs Dalloway… Always giving parties to cover the silence.’
The Essence of the Manic Defence
The essence of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of despair and helplessness from entering the conscious mind by occupying it with opposite feelings of euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.
This might be why people feel driven not only to mark but also to celebrate such depressing milestones as entering the workforce (graduation), getting ever older (birthdays, anniversaries, New Year), and even, in more recent times, death and dying (Halloween). Our forefathers would be turning in their graves if they could see what had become of All Saints’ Day.
It can be no coincidence that Christmas, originally a pagan solstice festival, is celebrated in the bleak mid-winter, in the shortest and darkest days of the year. A few years ago, I spent Christmas in New Zealand, where it is summer at that time of year—and the people there made much less of a fuss of it.
The manic defence may also take on more subtle or covert forms, such as creating a commotion over something trivial; filling every ‘spare moment’ with reading, study, or talking on the phone to a friend; spending several months preparing for some civic or sporting event; seeking out status or celebrity so as to be a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’; entering into baseless relationships; and even, sometimes, getting married and having children. Of course, I don’t mean you.
When the Manic Defence Becomes a Problem
Everyone uses the manic defence, but some people use it to such an extent that they find it difficult to cope with even short periods of unstructured time such as holidays, weekends, and long-distance travel—which explains why airport shops are so profitable.
Since the advent of smartphones, it can be a struggle to go a few hours, or even the space of a toilet break, without checking our device. God forbid that we should be left alone, even for five minutes, with our own thoughts. The significance of the smartphone is that it has put the manic defence in your pocket, available anytime, anywhere.
Of course, keeping busy need not be unhealthy. It becomes so when we cannot bear to stop—when the activity serves not simply to live or exalt life, but to avoid being alone with ourselves.
The Norse gave the name Hel both to the goddess of death and to her cold, hidden kingdom. Hel is our hell, from an ancient root meaning ‘to conceal’. Unlike Valhalla, with its endless fighting and feasting, Hel is a realm of deprivation and stasis: the horror of nothing happening. Perhaps this is what we fear whenever we stop—not inactivity itself, but descent into the hidden place.
‘To do nothing at all,’ observed Oscar Wilde, long before the advent of the smartphone, ‘is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.’
People with a strong manic defence are unable to live in the moment, unable to be truly alive. They leave themselves no opportunity to integrate their thoughts or process their emotions, that is, no opportunity to gather perspective or come to terms with reality, that is, no opportunity to grow.
Because they never let it in, they lose all immunity to despair. And so when it finally hits them, it hits them like a tidal wave.
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