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How to Love Yourself – 7 Essential Tips to Get Started

Ian Warner

9 min read

Benefits

Tips

Why This Is Important Now More Than Ever

You are more exposed to the realities of mental health problems because of social media. Never has there been a time in history where you can be so connected to what other people are doing all around the globe like you can right now. You can do it in real time as well. Before, you were only aware of what is going on in your own community. Being exposed to other people allows you to hear the opinions of others much quicker and more frequently. You can make comparison between yourself and others and it can be exhausting.

Mark 12:31 say The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

The problem with this verse is that its assumed that you love yourself. One of the greatest commandments we have is to love our neighbor but that can only come if we love ourselves. If you hate yourself that means that you will struggle to love your own neighbor and live up to one of the greatest commandments in the bible.

The third area that this will cause issues is when it comes time to accept love from others. Its hard to be in romantic relationships when you don’t love yourself. You either end up depending on another person to fill you up more than any imperfect human can. Or you can’t accept their love at all because it does not make sense to you how someone can even love you. You will not trust them or wait for them to hurt you because there is no way another person can be good to you. You will look for ways to destroy the relationship without self love,.

• You are more exposed than ever to things that contribute to unhappiness
• You can’t love your neighbor without loving yourself first
• If you don’t love yourself its hard to accept love

Why Self Love Seems to Be Selfish

You know when you’re on airplanes and are saying that if the masks drop down in an emergency you should put on your mask before a childs or before you assist someone else? This is one of the least selfless acts you can do if you’re taking care of someone else but it may not appear this way at first. The reason it may not seem awesome at first is because you think it would be better to just help them out and make sure they are good. The problem with this is that if you end up passing out due to lack of oxygen, the people you’re assisting won’t be able to help you, so you both will die.

The best thing you can do is take care of yourself. Even the most selfless person knows that they have to take care of themselves or they will burnout. Think of the mom who spends all day taking care of her three kids but never has time for herself. Eventually she is going to blow because she is not taking care of her self and at that point she won’t do a good job of caring for the kids either. Everyone needs to step back and spend some time keep their physical and mental health in check. If you don’t take care of yourself it will end up turning into more selfish behavior.

You can go overboard with self care but most people are far from this. Self love only becomes a problem if on a regular basis its putting those you love or should be looking out for in  a worst position.

• You must take care of yourself in order to help others better
• If you only focus on others you eventually burn out
• Its possible to go over-board with self love

Benefits of Self Love

• Able to tolerated your weaknesses
• Increase self-confidence
• Less people pleasing
• Ability to forgive yourself and others
• Not expecting others to save you
• Ability to discover your destiny
• Improved relationships
• Better love life
• More authentic connections with people
• Much better mental health
• Improved coping mechanisms

Tips to Love Yourself

Spend Time With Just Yourself

Alone time is so important on the path to learning to love yourself. If you always need input and validation from other people, it’s a sign that you need more time to learn to love yourself. Alone time, is a great way to get to learn about you and understand what you need before you try and learn about others.

Point Out Lies

There are so many lies that you have bought into throughout your life. These lies build up for so long that you can’t tell the difference between the truth and a lie any more. Its time to go through all your negative self beliefs and point out which ones someone else put in your head that really is not true. Call it out for the lie that it is and begin to forgive yourself for every believing it.

Positive Self-Talk

Most of the time when you are lacking in love for yourself, you also partake in a lot of negative self-talk. There is a difference between breing realisitic and beating yourself up for no reason. When you talk bad to yourself you are inflicting wounds that are much more harmful than anything another person could say to you because these wounds are coming from your own mind. When other people are mean, it requires you to allow those words into your mind and to believe them. One of the easiest ways to love yourself is speak to yourself with loving language,. Think about how a loving parent would speak tio a child vs an abusive one.

Release The anger

You can lose the love for yourself when you go through something hard or traumatic. Maybe it starts as anger with another person and that turns to anger with yourself. As that anger builds it can turn to digest and other emotions that horrible to harbor. You must take steps towards letting that anger going and forgiving the right people.

Seek Out Happy People 

People who are happy with life tend to know how to love themselves better. The more you can be around people like this, the more their behaviours will rub off on you. The worst thing you can do is be around other groups of people who struggle in this area because everyone will bring each other down further.

Take Your Foot off of The Gas 

Sometimes you can’t understand how to love yourself better because life is just moving too fast. You have kids, bills and responsibilities all built up on your back and it keeps you on the move. When you take a day or two to just step back and think, you will start to see solutions to many of these issues.

Treat Yourself

Taking care of yourself can look different for everyone. Some may go to the spa, while others will want to shop. Either do things that remind you that you’re valuable. If car costs a lot you pay more to insure it and protect it. If you’re life is valuable you shoud spend whatever is needed to do the same.

Change how You Perceive Your Flaws

You have choosen to look at your flaws in a certain negative way. If you can do that you can also choose to see your flaws in a positive light. Nothing is 100% negative. There has to be some positive in everything and you just need to find that. When you can focus on the positive of your flaws you start to use them to your advantage.

Stand Up For Yourself

One of the tell tale signs that someone does not have enough self love is if they allow another person to walk all over them repeatedly. When you have a healthy amount of love for your self and you’re not scared to express that, you won’t let people take advantage of you because you know how valuable you are.

Go Love Yourself The Right Way

To love yourself is to respect yourself. If you can’t grasp it, you invite struggles with your romantic relationships and you will struggle to accept love from others. It does not make one selfish to take care of themselves, it actually is unselfish in the long run becaue you can better serve others over the long run.

The process of learning to love yourself is not something that happens overnight. It will take time to heal old wounds and get to the heart of some of these issues. Every second you spend working on this though will be worth it.