One of the keys to handling personal stress is to build your self-esteem. Here are 10 specific steps you can take to gain confidence, get in touch with reality, and reduce stress:
        
1. Write a list of ten things you like about yourself. Acknowledge the things you did well today. If you have difficulty accepting compliments, keep practicing until you can. Look at yourself in the mirror and say the things to yourself that would make you feel good if someone else said them to you.

2. Another way of altering your personal stress is to try looking at your situation from a less immediate perspective. Take a long-term view of life, particularly your own. Nothing in your life is wasted, and every experience prepares you to cope with situations later on.

3. Look at your parents’ lives or their friends’ lives. Draw on their experiences and learn from them. 

4. Be assertive about your personal privacy, freedom, and autonomy. Examine your goals and directions, making sure you are doing what you want to do and going where you want to go. Are your goals your own or someone else’s?

5. Decide what you want to be doing and where you want to be in 5 years, then figure out what it will take to get you there. This can be tough on personal relationships and you may have to decide which is more important, your relationship or your freedom.

6. If you’re feeling badly about not meeting obligations to yourself (or berating yourself for being a failure and not having lived up to your potential), take time out for a reality check. Who are you competing with? Who are you comparing yourself to? Whose aspirations are you reaching for, yours or someone else’s?

7. Make a list of your achievements, successes, and accomplishments. Chances are you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much you’ve done.

8. Get in touch with reality. How much of your personal stress has to do with impossibly high standards others have set for you or you’ve set for yourself? How much comes from overestimating your own talents, abilities, and capacities? Do you tend to overestimate, underestimate, or accurately estimate what you can and cannot do?

9. If too much success is the problem, just slow down. You don’t have to exhaust yourself to live up to your past success or your current image of future success. Take it easy and don’t assume more success than you can handle.

10. Develop a multi-faceted personal identity. Learn to look at yourself in many different ways. Don’t limit yourself to being just one thing. Search for balance among work, family, friends, recreation, and hobbies.