Matt Kielty

That's like the biggest tuna of all of them.

That's like the most important thing of everything.

Well, okay, what Jennifer would say is... Right, I think there's nothing wrong with being happy.

Yeah, like, of course, sure.

Being happy, that's meaningful.

Right.

Our emotions are central to how we experience our lives.

But that's not all there is to the story because there is a downside to high self-esteem.

Which is what?

Well, the research shows that people with really high self-esteem tend to defend their positive views of themselves.

And so you see high self-esteem associated with things like... Defensiveness, aggression.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, totally.

They found that in education, sometimes self-esteem programs produce actually like complacency, reduced effort, resistance to any sort of critical negative feedback.

And then there's Jennifer's work.

For, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, I was really interested in what people base their self-esteem on.

And we found that pretty much everybody based their self-esteem on something.

So Jennifer did this study at the University of Michigan with students who were... Intending to apply to graduate school.

And what they found was that for the students who tied their self-worth to high academic achievement, when they got rejected from a grad school, their self-esteem obviously went down.

And it would, for some of the students, it would actually stay down for several days until something happened to kind of shake them out of that funk.