The vegan author Jordi Casamitjana highlights five ways veganism can help people with low self-esteem boost it
Overall, I like who I am.
I am very much aware of my imperfections, and I have hundreds — if not thousands — of regrets about my life choices directly attributable to me. There are many identities and labels that I have acquired over the years that I no longer feel aligned to, and I have character flaws I cannot really spin. However, overall, I like who I have become. I like that I consistently chose the left in my political spectrum; I like that I was able to capitalise on my particular brain architecture and achieve significant success because of it; I like that I am an ethical person relying on rationality and not religion, and, above all, I like that I became vegan about 25 years ago and this has become my most forefront identity. I like who I am not only because I could be much worse — statistically speaking — but also because I don’t have low self-esteem.
Self-esteem is the belief in your own ability and value; the confidence in one’s own worth, abilities, or morals. It’s not really a narcissistic thing. It’s not even that close to self-love and self-care — that is valuable too, but self-esteem does not go that far. It’s almost as if you looked in the mirror and said, with a thumbs-up, “You are OK”. It’s not self-obsession and navel-gazing. It’s not over-confidence and arrogance. It’s not thinking you are the centre of the universe and everything else revolves around you. It’s simply concluding that, all things considered, you are not so bad, you are lucky and doing relatively well, you can achieve significant things, and what you say and do matter. It is, I believe, the basic conclusion from self-judgement that is needed to function in today’s world.
This means that, if you have low self-esteem, you may be struggling. You may be adding extra obstacles to your progress and fulfilment. You may be dragging your feet, staying still, or even stepping backwards, away from your goals and aspirations. You may be down on yourself, deflated, and even prone to depression. In other words, you may be operating with below-optimal internal conditions, and this may be something that could be changed because it may not all be due to genetics or character.
Vegans, like anyone else, may have self-esteem too, but veganism, being this powerful multi-faceted philosophy and social movement capable of solving many global and individual crises, can be used to solve this problem too. In fact, if you are a non-vegan with low self-esteem, perhaps becoming vegan may boost it high enough until you can say, in all honesty, that you like yourself now. The following are five ways I think veganism can do that:
1. Feeling proud of joining a highly ethical progressive movement
One of the simplest ways veganism can improve your self-esteem is that becoming vegan gives you something about yourself you can genuinely be proud of. I am not talking about the sort of pride that makes you feel superior to others. Vegans are not inherently better people than non-vegans — after all, most vegans were non-vegans once, and many people who are not vegan today may become vegan tomorrow. I am talking about the quieter satisfaction of knowing that, when presented with an ethical choice, you decided to try to do the right thing, and voluntarily chose to follow a philosophy and join a movement which is intrinsically benign and ethically sound.
Veganism is, fundamentally, an ethical philosophy about rejecting the exploitation of other sentient beings and trying, as far as is practicable and possible, not to participate in it directly or indirectly because such exploitation harms them. Once you understand that all animals are sentient individuals who can suffer, experience fear, seek pleasure, and value their lives, choosing not to exploit them becomes a meaningful moral decision — one that you can be proud of because you most likely grew up in an environment that was forcing you to choose the opposite. You resisted the indoctrination, you rebelled against the predominant speciesist system, and you challenged the status quo — the stuff of “heroes” in most dramatic stories.
Meaningful moral decisions can change how you see yourself. If you have low self-esteem, perhaps you have accumulated a long catalogue of things you think you did wrong. Perhaps your internal accountant is constantly adding mistakes to the debit column while conveniently forgetting to record anything on the credit side. Becoming vegan gives that accountant something substantial to write down in the positive column. Something valuable that can change the overall moral balance of your life.
You joined a global progressive socio-political movement that not only is trying to make the world less violent, but it is also trying to save it from all the major anthropogenic global crises that are threatening it. You changed aspects of your life because you believed that doing so would benefit others who could never repay you. You chose principle over convenience. You replaced exploitation with respect. You chose the right side of history, challenging the current hypermasculine speciesist carnist paradigm. Whatever other shortcomings you may think you have, that is something. That is more than something: that is noble.
Being vegan also means becoming part of a proud community stretching across countries, cultures, generations and social groups. We may disagree about tactics, politics, and semantics, but we share an important ethical commitment, and we are working to achieve the same goal: the vegan world where oppression and exploitation of others will no longer be systemic.
When you can sincerely say, “I am trying not to harm others, whoever these others are,” the person looking back at you from the mirror may suddenly look like someone you really like.
2. Feeling grounded and connected to all sentient beings and the planet
Low self-esteem can make you spend an awful lot of time zooming inside your own head. You may continually evaluate yourself against other people, revisit past failures, anticipate future ones, and magnify every imperfection until it seems enormous. With this kind of inner-looking obsession akin to the effects of a black hole in the centre of a galaxy, your universe can gradually shrink until you become its collapsing centre, with everything measured according to what it says about you.
Veganism can help to move the centre somewhere else, because when you become vegan, you begin paying much more attention to other sentient beings. The cow in a field is no longer just part of the scenery, the pigeon walking beside you is no longer merely urban furniture, the spider in your bathroom becomes a flatmate rather than part of a dirty cobweb that needs removing, and a homeless person begging in the street is no longer a social statistic about your neighbourhood. You start noticing sentience everywhere, because you have been learning about exploitation and harm to others, and with it, you have been introduced to many of the “others”.
That change of perspective can be remarkably grounding, because, suddenly, you belong to something bigger than your individual ego-centric successes and failures. You are one sentient being among quadrillions upon quadrillions of others, sharing this extraordinary planet for a relatively short time. Your problems remain real, of course, but they look different when you look at them from the vegan perspective.
Veganism also connects issues that our society often keeps artificially separated. Animal agriculture is not only about what happens to farmed animals, but is also connected with land use, habitat destruction, biodiversity, pollution, climate change, food systems and the way humans perceive our place in nature. Veganism invites you to see the web rather than only the individual threads and removes your ego-centric superiority complex with a relational eco-centric appreciation.
This wider perspective can be particularly valuable for someone with low self-esteem because it gives you a sense of belonging that does not depend on status, beauty, wealth, popularity or achievement. You belong because you are alive and sentient, living on a planet for living and sentient beings. Other sentient beings matter, and so do you, because you are one of them. As the title of the iconic 2005 vegan documentary narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, you are an earthling, sharing the planet with all the other earthlings.
Perhaps paradoxically, recognising that you are not the centre of the universe can make you feel better about your place within it, because it’s no longer about what you have done or not done, but simply about who you are.
3. Feeling healthier, fitter, and with a mind better aligned to your body
There is a more physical route by which veganism may improve self-esteem. Contrary to popular belief, veganism is not a diet, and becoming vegan does not magically make somebody healthy because of what you eat. You can be vegan and eat badly, exercise too little, sleep less than necessary, smoke, drink alcohol, or spend far too many hours sitting in front of a computer.
However, becoming vegan often forces you to reconsider habits you previously performed on autopilot, food being the most obvious one, and if you choose to be a Whole Food Plant-Based (WFPB) vegan, then the probability of a healthier life will dramatically increase — and with it, an improvement in your self-esteem.
You may experiment with healthy vegetables, pulses, grains, nuts, seeds and fruits you rarely ate before, and discover that you love them. You may start cooking more and choosing less processed food. For many people, this greater awareness can become the beginning of a broader interest in looking after their bodies, but this also means that you will become better equipped to avoid unhealthy food. Rejecting all animal products will automatically reject the worst food for humans, as we continue being a frugivore species — as the primates we are — and our body is not really optimised when we choose a carnivorous diet (even when we choose an omnivorous diet).
If you choose the WFPB vegan route, you are more likely to be healthier and fitter than you were before you changed diets, and you will like yourself more when you look in the mirror (in addition to having a higher probability of having the right mood to appreciate yourself better).
When your body feels better, your assessment of yourself may improve too. There is also something psychologically satisfying about aligning what your body does with what your mind believes. If you believe animals should not be exploited but your daily habits continue to support their exploitation, your body is effectively carrying out actions your ethical mind rejects. Veganism brings the two closer together.
Your shopping basket, your meals, your clothes and many of your everyday choices begin expressing your values rather than contradicting them, and that new alignment brings harmony, not dissonance. That can generate a particular sort of confidence that does not come from having bigger muscles, being thinner, looking younger or conforming to somebody else’s idea of attractiveness (although a vegan lifestyle can bring you all that if you want to), but the confidence of inhabiting a body that is increasingly acting according to the instructions of your conscience.
You may look at yourself and think, “This is my body, imperfect as it is, but I am using it to live according to my values.” For self-esteem, that may matter more than looking good in the mirror.
4. Getting rid of uncomfortable cognitive dissonances and irritating inconsistencies
Before becoming vegan, I had many more contradictions in my mind, and I behaved more inconsistently than I did after. Most people are a mixed bag of contradictions and inconsistencies. Humans are remarkably good at holding two incompatible ideas simultaneously and finding ingenious ways of avoiding looking at the gap between them. For instance, claiming to love animals but eating them, or opposing cruelty but knowingly paying for intrinsically cruel practices. We become outraged when somebody hurts a dog while accepting that pigs, cows, chickens and fishes can be harmed for our convenience.
Psychologists call the discomfort produced by conflicting beliefs, values and behaviours cognitive dissonance, which occurs whenever there is a clash between different parts of a person’s mental life — such as when someone’s behaviour contradicts their values, when two beliefs conflict, or when new information challenges an established worldview.
Unfortunately, changing our behaviour to prevent contradiction is only one option to get rid of the uncomfortable, persistent cognitive dissonances. We can also invent excuses, minimise the problem, avoid information, ridicule those who remind us of the contradiction, or simply place the uncomfortable thought into a mental cupboard and try never to open the door. However, all this requires psychological energy and does not always work, and changing the contradictory behaviour remains the ultimate solution. Becoming vegan allows you to make such changes in a coordinated, cogent, and consistent way.
If you believe animals matter, you can act as though they matter. If you oppose animal exploitation, you can withdraw your participation from it as much as you reasonably can. If you feel compassion when you see an animal suffering, you no longer need to switch that compassion off when choosing lunch. The back-and-white first core principle of veganism (the ahimsa principle) that I write as “Trying not to harm anyone is the moral baseline” is a pleasant, simple way to rule one’s life consistently — when it’s applied to anyone, which is what the veganism principle of anti-speciesism dictates.
This does not mean becoming vegan makes you perfectly consistent. Life is complicated, ethical dilemmas remain, relics of carnism linger, and veganism itself continually presents questions for which the answers are not obvious (the inevitable ”grey areas” I often tackle in my writings). But the contradiction between caring about sentient beings and consuming products obtained through their exploitation can be eliminated by simply letting your veganism develop from philosophy to lifestyle.
For somebody with low self-esteem, consistency can be particularly important. If you repeatedly behave in ways that conflict with your own moral judgement, you may end up trusting yourself less. Conversely, when your behaviour increasingly matches your principles, you acquire evidence that your values are not merely things you say, but are also things you manifest in your life. They are things you live by, and those who can do that are achieving something valuable and difficult.
When you choose veganism as the philosophy to guide your life, you become somebody whose actions make more sense to yourself, and liking yourself becomes considerably easier when you are less irritated by your own inconsistencies.
5. Embracing kindness and recognising your compassion
Finally, veganism may help your self-esteem by revealing something about yourself that you may have underestimated: your capacity for compassion. People with low self-esteem can be very good at identifying their faults and surprisingly incompetent at recognising their virtues. They may interpret kindness as weakness, sensitivity as vulnerability, and compassion as something sentimental that has little value in the “real world”.
Veganism turns that around, because it shows that compassion becomes something both important and pragmatical. You do not merely feel sorry for a fellow animal, but you do something about it. You change what you buy, you change what you eat, you change what you wear, and you change what you do. You alter habits acquired over decades to make them better. You may inconvenience yourself, sometimes only slightly and sometimes considerably, because somebody else would otherwise pay a much higher price, and now this matters to you.
Veganism often manifests itself as allowing someone’s compassion to become action, and the recipients of that compassion do not have to look like you, speak your language, share your nationality, belong to your species, be grateful to you, admire you or even know that you exist. You are trying to help them simply because you feel their negative experience and have an urge to change it for the better.
If you are a compassionate person, sooner or later you may be considering becoming vegan, as veganism allows you to manifest your compassion in a way that satisfies your needs. But veganism can do more than that. It may show that you are a compassionate person when you had forgotten that you were, due to the indoctrination you received from childhood. Once you recognise this quality in yourself, it may become harder to maintain the story that you have little value.
You may also discover that compassion is transferable. The habit of considering the interests of other animals can make you more attentive to suffering generally. And, importantly, the kindness you extend to others may eventually become easier to extend to yourself.
I am not suggesting veganism is a treatment for low self-esteem — much less for depression or any other mental health conditions that have precise physiological and psychological causes, nor am I claiming that all vegans have good self-esteem — they do not — as becoming vegan does not erase trauma, insecurity, neurodevelopmental issues, social handicaps or the hundreds of other factors that shape how we perceive ourselves.
What I am saying is much simpler. If your mind tells you that you are useless, selfish, weak, inconsistent or incapable of meaningful change, becoming vegan can provide some very illuminating evidence to the contrary. You made an important ethical decision, you connected yourself with other sentient beings, you reconsidered deeply ingrained habits, you brought your behaviour closer to your beliefs, and you allowed compassion to influence how you live. None of this makes you perfect, but perfection is not the goal…it’s acceptance.
Remember the mirror I mentioned earlier? Self-esteem does not require the person looking back at you to be extraordinary. You don’t need to love every aspect of that person. You don’t need to admire everything they have done. Perhaps you only need enough reasons to look at them, give them the thumbs up, and say, “You are OK.”
Becoming vegan might give you five more.
