Saying good things about yourself to yourself each day can make you feel better and more confident in the short term. But soon you need to up the ante and make the statements even more elaborate, comparing yourself to others in a superior way. If that comes across to friends and loved ones, and it does whether you say it openly or not, you are destroying your relationships. Learn how to work with your poor self-esteem in ways that bring you closer to people so that they provide the foundation on which you can feel good for ever, naturally, never needing these artificial self-affirmations again.