Self-love and how you can do it
My story of self-love
After years of struggling with my mental health and constantly thinking I wasn’t good enough, I finally decided to make a big change! I knew that I could either carry on down a very destructive and harmful path or change my whole mindset.
At the start of 2024, I decided enough was enough! I was done with feeling like a failure and I was sick of feeling sorry for myself. It was getting tedious and hella boring! I needed self-love in my life.
In this blog, I’ll share 10 ways you can start loving yourself right now.
1. Self-Care
Self-care is a massive part of self-love. Life is full of ups and downs and we find ourselves living in a cycle of getting up, going to work, coming back, seeing to the family and sleeping. Repeating this cycle is tedious and tiring. It makes sense that our mind, body and soul will feel TIRED! Do you feel like you don’t have enough time for yourself? Self-care is all about making time for yourself. You need “ME TIME”.
I understand that it’s easy for someone else to say, but not investing in self-care can have negative consequences for our mental health, leaving us feeling mentally drained.
“Self-care is a conscious act people take to promote their physical, mental, spiritual and emotional health. It is vital for building resilience towards life stressors that we can’t eliminate.” https://www.verywellmind.com/ways-to-practice-self-love-5667417
A few examples of activities which promote self-care are taking a relaxing bath, going for a walk, practicing mindfulness, listening to music or attending a worship service.
You really don’t have to be doing the most, but at the same time, we should be mindful of how we look after our mind, body and soul.
2. Get enough sleep
Let me tell you something about sleep. It is SO important. It’s one of the things I’m trying to get better at myself. It’s a working progress at the moment.
I’ve noticed when I don’t get enough sleep, I’m not the best version of myself, if that makes sense. My thoughts are no longer rationalized and I start to think negatively, which opens up a whole can of worms. I would honestly rather keep that can shut.
Getting a good night’s sleep is just as important as eating a balanced and nutritious diet and exercising.
We should consider getting enough sleep to support our self-love journey.
Please visit www.sleepfoundation.org for some useful info on sleep.
3. Be your biggest fan
Have the same energy you have for yourself as you have for others. It’s great that you’re a cheer leader for your family and friends, but also cheer for yourself. Tell yourself you’re doing amazing and great.
Flip the script and start bigging yourself up. I don’t mean walking around telling people you’re the dogs bollocks. What I mean is giving yourself a little prep talk now and again.
Congratulate yourself when you step out of your comfort zone or exercise after 73 days of procrastination.
Tell yourself you’ve done well in life and you’re still doing well. On top of that you are going to smash it!
Remind yourself you are fab however many times you need to!!
4. Be kind to yourself
I know you can all relate to this one. As humans, I think sometimes we find it really hard to let go of things. So if we f**k up, it’s a REAL PROBLEM. We’ll be in our feelings, thinking “If only I would have done that, then this wouldn’t have happened.” Okay so it’s happened, but beating ourselves up over things that already happened won’t do any good for our well-being.
Yes, it’s okay to acknowledge that you messed up and yes you can feel sad about it for a while. What we can’t do is let it eat away at us!
At some point, we have to let that shit go and start being kind to ourselves!
4. Treat yourself
We all need to treat ourselves once in a while, after all, life is hard!
Why not treat yourself to something you’ve had your eye on for a while? It doesn’t have to be something physical, you could book yourself a massage, facial or pedicure. You could even have all three. You deserve it!
Treating yourself will give you a feeling of happiness and a reminder that you do deserve to be treated and have nice things.
Seriously, you don’t need anyone to treat you like a Queen.
YOU got this all by yourself!
5. Stop comparing yourself to others
One of the things I have struggled with quite recently is constantly comparing myself to others around me and somehow devaluing myself. Prior to this year, I would look at my friends and even people I didn’t really know and feel as though I had failed, simply because I didn’t have what they had.
This was incredibly harmful to my mental health and it made me not like myself at all. I felt quite worthless. How can you love yourself when you feel like a failure? It’s not possible!
I can honestly say, I don’t feel the same way anymore.
WE ALL HAVE OUR OWN JOURNEYS and we have to own it. Just because yours is not the same as others, doesn’t mean it holds less value.
You may not have the same materialistic things as your family and friends, but you’re flipping FABOLOUS!
Be proud of your achievements, hold your head up high and LOVE YOURSELF!
6. Be self-aware
Being self-aware is part of the self-love package!
Loving yourself does not mean you think you are perfect and can do no wrong. In fact, it’s the opposite.
We are humans and we are certainly not perfect. That is a fact!
We ALL have flaws. Being self-aware is understanding what your flaws are but at the same time not being too hard on yourself because of them.
In the same way that we acknowledge our flaws, we should also acknowledge and celebrate our strengths. What makes you AMAZING?
Instead of focusing on what we dislike about ourselves, we should focus our energy on our skills and qualities.
What I’m saying is, self-awareness will help us love ourselves more if we focus on our positive qualities.
Don’t be in your feelings about the things you don’t like about yourself.
Focus on your talents, charisma and charm!!!
7. Have realistic expectations
So this one comes from my own experiences and challenges I’ve had throughout life, especially in the last few years. Having high expectations for our lives can put unnecessary pressure on ourselves to do better and be better.
We can feel frustrated and disappointed because we haven’t achieved the things we wanted/expected to.These are completely normal feelings. At some point, we have to take the coat of pressure off and accept that we haven’t quite achieved X, Y, and Z and it might not happen. BUT, that’s okay!
YOU ARE NOT A FAILURE! Having these negative thoughts may be detrimental to your well-being and how you feel about yourself.
Instead, you should celebrate and be proud of your achievements.
Life is full of obstacles and challenges and sometimes it takes longer to achieve the things you so long for!
Acknowledge your wins and be proud of yourself!
8. Self-respect
“Self-respect is the everyday discipline of loving who you are. It is the bedrock of developing self-acceptance and self-love. It’s hard, if not possible to live a fulfilled, meaningful and joyous life if you don’t respect yourself first.” Dr Judith Jackson
Let’s face it, self-respect is the foundation of self-love. Self-respect enables us to truly love ourselves and have self-worth.
If we respect ourselves, it’s because we care about ourselves. We understand the importance of self-care and protecting our well-being.
Setting boundaries helps us to support the fundamentals of self-respect. Having boundaries helps us to identify which behaviours are acceptable and which are not and therefore protect ourselves from the fuckery we could do without.
9. Be resilient
Being resilient is being able to deal with stress and challenging situations effectively. When we are stressed, upset, angry, anxious, etc, we tend to think negatively and these negative thoughts manifest.
When we are going through shitty times in our lives, we need to show ourselves self-compassion and kindness. (We’ve all been through SHIT times).
We should use whatever mental strength we have to help push us forward and understand that things are temporary and will get better.
Emotional resilience allows us to regulate our emotions and deal with challenging/negative experiences.
We must embrace self-love during these difficult times!
Write yourself a love letter
I have a confession to make. Even though I’ve contemplated doing it for a while, I still haven’t got around to it! What would I even write?? Do I include love hearts and kiss marks? Nah….Too much!
My interpretation of writing a love letter is simply writing down how you feel about yourself and some of it has to be positive.
What are the good things you like about yourself? What have you achieved and are most proud of? I think this will be so uplifting and encouraging.
Again, this is not about saying how perfect and wonderful you are. To be fair, you could start your letter by saying “I know you have your flaws, but these things make you who you are.” It’s to acknowledge that you are deserving of self-love.
Conclusion
Loving yourself is a PROCESS and doesn’t just happen overnight.
There are still some things I’m struggling with, but I’m working on it. I’ve come a LONG way and I’m still on this journey. It’s so refreshing and it’s making me see life completely different. Being able to love yourself is heavily linked to your mental health and how you think and feel about yourself.
What I have written has come from my own experiences. I’m not a therapist, just someone who has struggled for a while with confidence, self-esteem and regulating my emotions.
I hope you found this blog useful!
