Self-love is often mistaken for short-term self-care practices that don’t necessarily support your mental health or your physical well-being. Social media feeds promote lavish spa days and splurging on materialistic things, but at the end of the day, these habits can fall short of making you feel love. Quick fixes don’t usually lead to self-love. If you are ready to embark on this journey, get ready to be uncomfortable, face all your feelings, and put in the time. Until you fully love yourself, you can’t fully love others.

Get To Know Yourself

Make a conscious decision to focus on yourself. We often neglect to nurture our relationship with ourselves because we are too busy with life and it’s not something we are usually taught. But like any healthy relationship, we need to carve out time to be with ourselves. What does this look like? A big part of this is ensuring that we are meeting our various needs and making space for us to reflect, recharge, and grow. Learning to love yourself takes patience and understanding, explore at your own pace.

7 Practices To Build Self-Love

Self care

Like any self care practice, ensuring our basic needs are being met is essential for getting to love yourself. Ensure you have proper nutrition, exercise regularly, sleep, and connect with others. All four pillars contribute to you having a better baseline to deal with life’s daily challenges, and they support your physical and mental health. Look at your core basics to figure out what you need to succeed in life.

Establishing a good self care routine will not only reduce stress in your life, it will develop healthier habits that will build your resiliency over time. The better you feel, the more likely you are to love yourself. If things are out of balance, it makes it harder to feel love.

Accept the good and the bad

A big reason we can sometimes struggle with loving ourselves is because we don’t always like parts of ourselves. That can be tied to behaviours, thoughts, feelings, what we’ve accomplished (or not), or even our appearance.

It’s easier to love yourself when things are going great, but when you are struggling it becomes very difficult. Ironically, this is when we need it the most. By accepting that you are only human and reminding yourself that we all make mistakes, you can learn to let things go and forgive yourself. By showing yourself kindness daily, you can learn to accept your flaws. Stop that inner-critique in its tracks, it doesn’t serve you any good. Remember, nobody is perfect.

Feel your emotions

At times, loving yourself is difficult because we are trying to minimize emotions. We normally focus on trying not to feel the bad, like sadness, anger, hurt, jealousy, rejection and loneliness. But we need to feel those things in order to appreciate the good ones: happiness, excitement, awe, pride, hope, and love to name a few. By learning how to properly handle the spectrum of emotions, you can learn to move on and not get stuck in a negative feedback loop.

Give yourself compassion when things don’t go your way. Better coping strategies also help minimize bad habits that are often associated with trying not to feel emotions. Coping with your feelings contributes to your ability to trust that you can conquer any curve ball that comes your way. The more you believe in yourself, the more you can feel love for yourself.

Find the good

Find ways to see the beauty in every day life. It’s truly the little things that make a big difference. By finding those gems, you are priming your brain to focus on positivity. Be grateful for all the good in your life, no matter how little. Thank your mind and body for what they enable you to accomplish every day. Celebrate them by giving yourself a personal pampering day. Once you start to believe in gratitude, you can also start to love yourself more.

Don’t be afraid to speak up

Finding your voice can be difficult, but if you want to fully love yourself, you need to know yourself, and be able to advocate for yourself. Only you can do it. When you know your self-worth and are confident to ask for your needs, you can also love yourself more. Furthermore, establishing boundaries with others ensures you are not subjecting yourself to toxicity, nor taking on too much. Take the necessary actions to provide yourself with nurturing environments. And trust yourself. You know yourself better than anyone. Doubt can undermine your ability to see the good in yourself and will then affect your ability to love yourself.

Stop the need for external validation

Now more than ever, comparing ourselves to others is normal because we see so much of people’s lives on social media. But we all need to learn how to stop the comparison cycle. We often forget that a post is one sliver of their reality, and oftentimes, it is not even genuine. We all have different experiences, pasts, and challenges. Comparison serves no purpose.

Another detractor from finding self-love is that we worry about what others think of us or the expectations they have. That’s irrelevant! What matters is what you believe. The sooner you switch your beliefs about yourself to acceptance of who you are, the better off you will be, and the more you can love yourself.

Spend time alone

Create a safe space for yourself where you can spend time reflecting without interruptions. Quiet time with your inner thoughts is essential to understand what you are struggling with, and to get to know yourself better. Meditation or mindfulness activities are great tools to use during this time. Time alone can help you recharge so you can be your best self. Carving even a few minutes a day to be with yourself is a form of self love.

How do you show yourself love?

For some, the road to self-love can be long, but you are worth it. Give yourself patience if you are struggling, we all have different obstacles, habits, and histories to overcome. By focusing on prioritizing your own relationship with yourself, you will be able to grow the love you have for yourself. Know your worth and the value of what you bring to the world. We all make mistakes and we all have weaknesses, it’s part of the human experience. That doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy of love. Keep judgement out of the picture. Be ready to feel the spectrum of emotions in your life in order to find love. Be open to falling in love with what makes you you.

IMAGE CREDIT: Unsplash | Brian Lundquist.