I'm in my mid-fifties and I still make the joke about myself before anybody else gets the chance. It's a reflex. Somebody compliments a photo and I've already pointed out what's wrong with it. Self-deprecation is funny for about a minute. After fifty years it's just a habit that keeps the door shut.
So can you build self-esteem after 50? Yes. And not only as a nice thought. The best data I found says self-esteem, on average, keeps climbing through adulthood and peaks somewhere around 60 to 70. That doesn't mean it happens to you on its own. It means the window isn't closed.
What the research says about self-esteem and age
In 2018, a team led by Ulrich Orth at the University of Bern pulled together every long-term study they could find on how self-esteem changes over a lifetime. It came to 331 samples and 164,868 people, ages 4 to 94, published in Psychological Bulletin. On average, self-esteem rose through adulthood and was highest between about 60 and 70.
I like that study because it's boring. No hype. Just a lot of people followed over a lot of years. And the line goes up for most of adult life.
Averages hide people, though. Plenty of us sit well under that line. If you spent decades not knowing why you were "weird," or blowing up at people and hating yourself after, or using substances to quiet your head, the average isn't much comfort. You need something you can actually do.
Why mine was so low for so long
For fifty years I didn't know I had ASD. I had the tics, the habits, the obsessions, the passions nobody else seemed to have. Something was off and nobody had a name for it, so I filled in the blank myself. The word I picked was something like "defective."
Then there were the robplosions. A friend coined that word nearly 20 years ago, back when I was running Raincity Studios in Vancouver. It meant me losing it and exploding at people when problems came up. The explosion was bad. The shame after was worse, and it stuck around a lot longer. (I wrote about that in why I explode over small things.)
Add depression and the drugs. Then the way I wreck things right when they start to go well. All of it got logged as more proof.
What the diagnosis changed, and what it didn't
Getting diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at 50 didn't fix my self-esteem. I want to be honest about that. I didn't walk out of the assessment loving myself.
What it did was swap the explanation. "Defective" got replaced with "autistic, undiagnosed for 50 years, masking the whole time." That second sentence is a lot easier to have compassion for. It's the same life. It reads differently.
What's actually helping (slowly)
None of this is a program. It's what I've noticed works on me, more or less, on the days I do it.
Checking the thought against the evidence. The NHS self-esteem page suggests writing down the negative beliefs you have about yourself and then looking for evidence against them. It sounds like homework. It kind of is. But the voice in my head is a terrible witness. It never brings receipts. I have one piece of evidence I keep coming back to: I have not touched cocaine or heroin in sixteen years. A worthless person doesn't pull that off.
Self-compassion, even though it felt cringe. Kristin Neff, the researcher who built the Self-Compassion Scale, describes it as treating yourself the way you'd treat a friend who was struggling. My first reaction was an eye roll. My second reaction, a while later, was noticing I would never talk to a friend the way I talk to myself. Not even close. That gap is useful information.
Self-Compassion
Kristin Neff
My take. Shame fed my using and my blow-ups. This is the research-backed antidote. Sounds soft. It isn't.
Good to know. Some of it reads like a pep talk. Do the exercises anyway.
Small promises, kept. I don't trust big resolutions anymore. I start things with enormous energy and then crash, so a big promise to myself is mostly a setup for another round of "see, you never finish anything." Small ones work better. Go for the walk. Answer the email. Done. It's a tiny deposit, but self-esteem seems to grow on deposits, not on speeches.
Not using success as the measure. This one surprised me. I always figured self-esteem would come from achievements. I've had some. It didn't. When success shows up I tend to back away from it or sabotage it (more on that here). So for me, building self-esteem on wins is building it on sand.
What doesn't work for me: affirmations in the mirror. I tried. It felt like lying to a guy who knows better.
When to get help
If low self-esteem has been there for years and it's dragging your mood down with it, that's worth bringing to a professional. CBT is one of the approaches with good evidence for this, and a psychologist can help you find what's underneath. In Québec, you can start with your doctor or a CLSC, or call Info-Social 811.
And if it has crossed over from "I don't think much of myself" into actually hating yourself, please read when you hate yourself. That's a different place, and it deserves real help.
I'm not done with this. In my mid-fifties I'm a work in progress, which sounds like a poster, so let me put it plainly: some days the voice wins. It wins less than it used to.
If any of this is sitting heavy right now, the Get help now page has numbers for your country.