21 Ways To Cultivate Self-Love
“If you’re searching for that one person that will change your life, take a look in the mirror.”
Self-love is such a big topic. I can remember people telling me when I was younger that I should love myself. At the time, this made little sense to me…it was the same in my mind as someone expecting me to suddenly be able to speak a language that I had never even heard before in my life. What does it even mean to love yourself? Is it words you say to yourself?
What I learned through trial and error was that self-love is an action. It is not a passive thing at all. Think about it…when we love another person, we SHOW them love through our actions. We act as if we love them. We treat them with kindness and compassion and care. In order to love ourselves, we want to do the same thing.
If we don’t feel love for ourselves, we can simply begin by acting as if we do. Acting as if is a quick and much easier way to get from where we are to where we want to be. If you don’t feel like you have any love or care for yourself, you can simply ask yourself, “if I loved myself, what would I do right now?” or “what would someone who loves themselves do?” and then do that thing. Another way to feel into what we would do if we loved ourselves is to treat ourselves the way we would treat someone in our lives who we do love.
These twenty-one ways of practicing self-love will help you to get started.
Practice Saying No
When we don’t love ourselves or practice adequate self-care because of self-esteem issues, it can be very easy to fall into the people-pleasing trap. After all, if we don’t love ourselves, we have no choice but to look for love and approval in others, and what better way than to do everything we can to please them and make them happy? However, this will inevitably leave us in a place of resentment and feeling drained and taken advantage of by others. The solution is to practice saying no when we feel like we are a no. We want to pause when someone asks us to do something, checking in with ourselves to see if we are in fact a yes or no and proceed accordingly.
Stop People-Pleasing
This goes with the last one well, but people-pleasing is a much broader issue. When we are people-pleasers, we may do more than just say “yes” to things we don’t actually want to do. When we are working hard to please others, we may even do things like give up parts of ourselves or deny our own needs in favor of making the other person happy. We may also compromise ourselves in order to keep the other person from leaving us.
Eat Healthy Food
When we don’t love or care about ourselves, our self-care suffers, and usually in different ways. Eating a healthy and balanced diet is one of the primary ways that we can show ourselves love. If we think of food as nourishment for our body, we are more likely to make healthy choices than if we are just eating to have things that taste good to us. When we eat well, we feel more balanced, energized, and happy. As within, so without. Try to include as many fresh fruits and vegetables as you can in your diet each day in order to provide your body with the nourishment it needs.
Get Enough Quality Sleep
Sleep is obviously an essential aspect of self-care, but many of us don’t get quality sleep all of the time, resulting in chronic tiredness, irritability, and challenges in focusing on work-related tasks. This may be a result of going to bed really late, eating too late, or using technology too close to bedtime. The closer we go to bed at 10:00 or 10:30 at the latest, the more quality, restful sleep we will get. For our circadian rhythms, this is optimal. Ideally, we eat at least three hours prior to bedtime, if not more, so our body will not be having to work so hard to digest food while we are trying to get deep sleep. While we are all very connected to our computers and smartphones, if we can turn them off at least an hour before bedtime, it will help us to rest more deeply than we would if we turned it off right before trying to sleep.
Don’t Overbook Yourself
In the modern world, it is so easy to overwhelm ourselves with too much work and too many social obligations. We have been conditioned to do as much as possible, to go all the time and to be everything to everyone. As we well know, this is not sustainable. If we continue over the long-term to try to operate in this way, we will burn ourselves out completely. Before we commit to yet another thing, a good practice is to check in with ourselves and ask, “Do I really want to do this?” or “Am I a full “yes” to this or not?” and if it’s a “no,” then we do not add it to our schedule. The bottom line? We must always check-in with ourselves to see if we have the energy, the time, and the desire to do whatever it is that we are being asked to do and make sure that we are allowing enough time for ourselves and for rest.
Leave Time For Just BEING
How many of us actually do this one? Again, in our modern society, there is such a push to accomplish and there is not much value placed on just BEING. When we are in the mode of striving to make things happen all the time, we wind up feeling stressed, overworked, irritable, and frustrated that we don’t have time for ourselves. What is the solution? We have to make time for just Being a priority. If we don’t, we just remain on the treadmill of over productivity that never ends and in the process miss out on the joy of LIVING.
Exercise and Movement
We can make a lot of headway in terms of cultivating self-love simply through taking good care of our physical body. Physical movement and exercise are so important for our sense of well-being: without it, we may feel stagnant, moody and we may struggle with fatigue. When we exercise, we are sending a message to ourselves that our body and our health is important to us, that WE are a priority. In addition to this, when we move, we release the feel-good endorphins, improving our emotional and energetic states in the process. The more we tend to our physical body, the more empowered and capable we feel to manage the different aspects of our lives.
Let Go of Toxic Relationships
Letting go of toxic relationships is such an important part of self-love and self-care. What do I mean when I say “toxic relationships?” Some examples of toxic relationships are where the other person does not respect your needs, your boundaries, your feelings, or your personal space. In a toxic relationship, the person might manipulate you, use you, or try to control you. It is best, when possible, to either end these kinds of relationships completely or to at minimum severely limit your time with people like that. We all deserve to have people in our lives who treat us with respect and care at all times.
Stop Addictive Habits
Addiction can easily rob us of our happiness, health, relationships, and sense of well-being, and sometimes fast. Addiction keeps us from being able to connect fully to ourselves and to life. When we are caught in the cycle of pain that is created by any addictive process, we are not actually living…the substance or habit is taking up so much of our life energy that there is not much left for us. In addition, we may feel powerless over the substance, and therefore unable to live our lives in the way that we truly desire and deserve to live. If you have an active addiction, please seek help…there is another way to live, and you can have your life back.
Spend Time With People Who Are Happy
It is true that we become like the five people that we spend the most time with. This truth is great if we are spending time with quality people who are living consciously and are living in similar ways to the way we want to live our lives. However, if we spend our time with others who are not living consciously, those who are chronically upset, negative, who complain and play victim to life, we are in serious danger of becoming just like them. Be careful of the company you keep is excellent advice. It is better to spend a lot of time alone than to be in the company of people who drag us down.
Do Work That You Love
So many people are working at jobs that they dislike, even maybe actually hate. That is no way to live. In addition, many work very long hours and have little time for family, rest, and relaxation. Eventually, when we live this way, we feel chronically stressed, frustrated, unfulfilled, and resentful and life passes us by. When we do work that we love, we have a real chance of making a difference in the world and we have a chance to find fulfillment and joy in what we do. If we can, we want to do work that we love for the sake of the work itself instead of pursuing money and external power.
Declutter Your Space
Clutter kills creativity and joy. Whatever clutter we have in our personal space severely inhibits our ability to attract more of what we want in our lives. Think about it this way: if we are holding on to old stuff that we no longer care about and we try to bring something new in that we do care about and value, there won’t be space for the new things until we discard the things that we no longer want. We have to let go in order to receive more, plain, and simple. This goes the same way for old relationships, habits, and ways of thinking about ourselves and life. Until we become willing to let go of what no longer serves us, we cannot possibly allow in what does serve us now. We must be willing to let go.
Learn To Forgive
Forgiveness is a biggie. Until we become willing to forgive ourselves and others, we are bound to the pain of anger, resentment, and “what-ifs.” As they say, holding onto anger is like holding on to hot coal and expecting that the other person will get burned. When we hold onto pain in this way, we hold ourselves captive to others, to the past and we keep ourselves from the happiness that we so desperately seek. We can say to ourselves, “even though I wanted _____ to happen, I am willing to accept things as they are so that I can be free.” It WORKS. Yes, we may have to do this over and over again in some cases, but it is effective in releasing us from the burden of carrying past hurts with us that has the power to poison all that we want to create in our lives. We must become willing to liberate ourselves, and forgiveness is the way to do this.
Grieve the Past
Loss is a hard one, right? In the course of our lives, we will lose family members and loved ones to death, relationships will end, we will lose jobs, pets, money, and eventually our health. We know that endings will come, and yet, when it does, many of us get caught in deep suffering. Why does this happen? We suffer greatly when we argue with reality. This resistance is created when we refuse to accept life as it is added to the pain of what has happened. When we become willing to accept what has happened even though we don’t like it, we can then move through the painful feelings that are associated with grief. This process is a cleansing process, and when we open to it fully, it makes life and the challenging transitions, much easier. When we have an old loss that we have not accepted, we can also go back and process the grief, and when we do, we liberate ourselves from untold suffering.
Accept Your Darkness
We all want to be light and good all of the time, right? While this is a lovely thought, it is not realistic. We are human, and part of being human is accepting the full spectrum of the human experience – light, dark, and shades of gray. We are not all good. We are not perfect, and we will never be. This is just a fact of human existence. If we do not embrace our ‘darker’ aspects, they will control our lives, wreaking havoc in our relationships, and limiting our ability for happiness and joy. This is what Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung talked about with the shadow self. All of the things that we deny within ourselves have power over us until we accept them. ALL parts of you are deserving of your love and kindness.
Practice Self-Compassion
When we practice self-compassion, we are practicing being kind to ourselves. Clearly, this is the opposite of being judgmental, impatient, and mean to ourselves, expecting perfection. When we practice self-compassion, we send ourselves the message that all is well and that we are perfect as we are at this moment, that there is nothing to “fix” or change. If you have trouble connecting with the concept of self-compassion, simply treat yourself as you would treat your best friend or someone else in your life who you love. When we begin to meet ourselves in this way, our whole being and our life begin to change in amazing and beautiful ways.
Let Go Of Expectations
Expectations never work out the way we want them to work out. Ultimately, we have no control over the actions of other people, or over life. The only thing we truly have control over is our own response to what is happening and how we treat ourselves and others. So when we set expectations, we are setting ourselves up for not only disappointment but possibly for anger and resentment as well. What is the best thing to do? We can set intentions for what we want to create for our lives, but we want to be open to things happening in ways that we may not expect. Of course, sometimes we will not get our way, but sometimes when we don’t limit possibilities by setting rigid expectations, we allow life to bring us far more than we could imagine!
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude is a very important daily practice if we are to achieve the happiness and contentment that we seek. When we practice gratitude, we override the sometimes negative voices of doubt, fear, and limitation that are so pervasive for so many of us. What we focus on grows, so when we focus on being grateful for what we already have, the Universe gets to work sending us more things for which to be grateful! Not only that, but it just feels better, doesn’t it? One thing you can do is to write down five things each morning or evening that you are grateful for, and when you do this, try to call up the good feelings of appreciation for each thing. This is an excellent way to begin each day, and in this way, we direct our conscious mind as to what direction to focus during the day instead of allowing it to go on autopilot, which may be fear-based thoughts.
Live In the Present Moment
Life is NOW. We have never lived in any moment that was not now. The past and the future essentially do not exist…we cannot see them or reach them from here, so they are not real. The only thing that is real is the present moment, which is the eternal now. One way to look at it is this: your physical body only ever exists in the present moment, and our physical body is our source of energy and power – without it, we have neither. When we are focused mentally on the past or the future, we will either be in rumination or anxiety, because we cannot change either. The present moment is our point of power and is the only place and time where we can effectively achieve peace and anything resembling enlightenment. Meditation and mindfulness practices help us to remain grounded at the moment and therefore are very important practices that assist in the cultivation of self-love.
Stop Comparing Yourself To Other People
Someone wise once said that comparison is the thief of joy, and it’s true. We get nowhere by comparing ourselves to others, and it is like comparing apples to oranges since we are all very unique and special humans as we are. We have all had a lifetime of experiences that are unique to us that nobody else has had ever. How special is that? When we compare ourselves to others, we eliminate this specialness from the equation and make the other person above us. Nobody can be you and do things in the special way that you do them…embrace your beautiful and unique self, and stop the comparisons…nothing good can come of it.
Act On What You Need Instead Of What You Want
All of the topics on this list are important, to be sure, but this one may be the most important one of all. Most of us have an unfortunate desire for things that are not good for us at all, whether that be relationships, habits, hobbies, or past times, and it can be easy to just give in to these things without thinking. If we want to live a life where we love ourselves, feel confident, and at peace with who we are, then we have to be willing to say “no” to ourselves sometimes, and possibly frequently. This is the necessary price we pay to cultivate self-love. We want to do as many things that we can do that are healthy, positive, and generate good feelings and health.
As you see, self-love is a very action-oriented thing that we can actually learn to cultivate through our choices and actions in daily life. How great is that? Love is not some mysterious thing that we either have or don’t have…it is something that we can build through the way we treat ourselves. What choices can you make right now that will help you to love yourself more?
