How many ways to love yourself do you practice every day?
Before we get to the ways to love yourself, what is self-love?
How to know if you love yourself enough?
Where is the border between self-love and selfishness?
What are some good self-love habits and how to be sure we give ourselves the attention we need?
These are serious questions I intend to answer in this post.
I also want to show you 10 daily habits that will speak self-love all day long, every day.
But first…
What is self-love, and how to know if you practice it?
Self-love is the essential love for one’s self, a basic human necessity that helps us be self-aware of how we feel and why we feel this way. Just as with happiness, self-love is our birthright, and when missing or not fully experienced, we feel incomplete, anxious and unfulfilled.
This might lead us to deeper problems in our personal life.
We get tired, sad, depressed, cranky, snappy, we ignore people around us, neglect our feelings and the feelings of the ones we love. We try to focus on “being an adult” and rush through our days, promising ourselves that one day we’ll change that focus towards ourselves.
But the days become weeks and the weeks become months.
And if months ago, there was a voice in our heads shouting at us to slow down and nourish ourselves, these days that voice is husky and it can’t reach us.
It’s all about self-love
Most of our problems come from the lack of self-love and our ignorance of that fact.
We know we should look after ourselves more.
We know we should find a way to make ourselves happy before trying to please everyone else around us.
We know that sooner or later we will be forced to choose a side – “I nourish myself” side or “What happened to my life?” side.
Yet, we do nothing about all that.
We scribble into our journals once in a month, we take a hot bath twice a year, we light up the aroma candles at Christmas time, and we try to finish that good book for the last five months.
We try and try to implement self-love, but we’re limited by the hours in the day, by the chores on the to-do list, by the people around us… by us.
But self-love is more.
And I have 10 habits that you could practice every single day, starting right now, and they will help you love yourself more.
So, let’s go through the 10 ways to love yourself more.
1. Less Social Media
Less social media translates into more self-love time.
Instal an app on your phone (iPhones have it already in Settings→Screen Time, you need to turn it on) that tells you how much time you spend on social media and cut that time in half. I just recently did that, and I am blown away by the facts. For the last 7 days, I’ve spent 11 hours on Youtube only and 5 hours on Facebook!
I lost 16 hours of my life and can’t remember a single thing of what I’ve seen on these social media platforms!
I could’ve used 7 of these hours to walk outside in nature. I could have done my nails for another hour, read a book half-hour a day (that’s three and a half hours total) and I would still have another four and a half hours extra to clean my home/ work on my projects/ spend time with my fiance/ call a friend.
If in the last week, you’ve said at least once “I don’t have enough time!” I simply ask you to turn on this feature on your phone (or install an app for Android) and set a reminder 7 days from now to check how much time do you spend on your social media.
2. Practice Saying No
Practice saying “No” to some things gives you the time and power to say Yes to other things.
Saying “No” to a colleague who wants you to do his job, gives you time to work on your own projects and get a promotion.
“No” to dinner with people who exhaust you mentally give you the time to have that bath, read that book or watch that movie.
Refusing to click on the 156th notification on your phone helps you say “Yes” to staying focused on the thing you do right now and finishing with it faster than planned.
Saying “No” deliberates.
It’s that simple moment when you choose between your most important needs and everything else. That “everything else” has to go through a special selection process before it lands on your to-do/to-go list.
3. Practice listening to your intuition
Listening to your intuition helps you take better decisions and use your creativity.
We’ve all had these moments when deep down in us there’s this small voice telling us what to do. If we listen to it, we usually end up taking a good decision. But if we listen to the logic or someone else around us, if we mess up our mind too much, we lose track of this voice, and we make a decision we usually regret.
Following what our intuition tells us isn’t simple. Sometimes we “just know” what to do, but more often than not, we wonder, we worry, we struggle.
How to learn to listen to our guts/intuition?
The voice of our intuition is usually very quiet and soft. Therefore, it takes time to learn to recognise it in the outer world’s noise. First, we need to learn how to be quiet; we need to stay still and be patient. We must ask the right question and wait for the answers. And finally, we want to accept the answer and notice the way it makes us feel.
Usually, by making a decision our intuition told us, we tend to feel free, confident and optimistic. We are in peace and balance with our inner self, and even though our decision might not be the right decision for someone else, it’s the one that speaks of self-love and self-nourishment.
A great way to learn how to listen to your intuition is through meditation. Just 10 minutes daily could do wonders for you and teach you how to recognise that tiny voice inside you.
4. Educate yourself all the time
I know that for many of us, the school years might be gone, but this doesn’t mean we should stop educating ourselves.
Back at school, we were told what to learn, but now we could make that choice for ourselves.
It really doesn’t matter what your choice is as it could be something profound or something small. For example, I read loads of self-help books and take online courses to improve my business.
If investing your time in learning something new sounds good to you I recommend you have a look at what SkillShare offers. They have hundreds of different courses ready for you to explore and you get to do it two months for free if you sign up with this link.
5. Prioritise Yourself
If you really want to know what’s the best way to practice self-love, it’s this one: Prioritising yourself.
It simply means to choose You over many other things.
And here’s the place to mention that prioritising yourself doesn’t make you selfish. It also doesn’t mean that you get to do whatever you want. It makes you a person who loves himself.
Prioritising yourself helps you tend to your needs first before you tend to other people’s needs.
A great example of prioritising yourself is to cut on multitasking as it takes too much energy out of you. It’s also taking a few minutes alone to calm down when you’re stressed and nervous. Prioritising yourself might mean making better food choices or scheduling fewer meetings in the week, so you have time to unwind and relax. Prioritising yourself means consciously implementing good daily habits into your life.
Find what prioritising means to you and start practising it daily.
6. Walk on your spiritual path
Believe in something.
I know that this is a very sensitive subject and most bloggers won’t talk about it, but I believe that we all have the right to walk on our own spiritual path, and if my path is different than yours, that’s totally fine.
What I ask you to do is just to embrace it.
After all, it’s all about true love and learning how to receive and give that love.
Read books. Pray. Meditate. Journal. Think.
As long as you evolve spiritually, that’s all you really need to practice self-love.
7. Find joy in the little things
In a materialistic world where we measure our happiness in bank accounts, and Instagram likes, I challenge you to ignore all that and find happiness and joy in the little things every day gives you. You get a bonus if these little things are not materialistic.
I would even suggest you create your gratitude journal and write inside all the little things that gave you happy thrills throughout the day in the form of gratitude. Here are 100 things to be grateful for you could write down today.
8. Allow yourself not to feel OK
You had a bad day. Now, I know you want to pretend you’re an adult and just to have a glass of wine and forget about it, but hear me.
It’s OK not to feel OK. Actually, allowing yourself to feel as bad as you actually feel without beating yourself up for it is self-love. Yes, it is!
Life isn’t perfect, and it shouldn’t be.
Every day hundreds of information, emotions and decisions are going through our heads, and that simply exhausts us.
Sometimes we feel the glass half empty and although we want to focus on the “half-full” part, we just can’t. Instead of pretending everything’s fine and distracting ourselves with social media, TV or more work to do, I suggest we give ourselves a good hour of feeling miserable and useless.
Because emotions like those are completely normal and you cannot shut them off if you don’t add the good emotions to them too. So next time we say “I don’t feel anything.” we should also remind ourselves that there’s a negative emotion we switched off a long time ago and that’s the reason we don’t feel good either.
Allow yourself to feel sad, ignored, lonely, forgotten, angry, frustrated, unloved. Let it all out. Don’t feel guilty about it nor weird. Once you’re done with it…
Say Goodbye to these emotions and wish them all the best.
It’s time to improve yourself and see what other alternatives life offers you.
9. Move your body with love
There’s something profound that none of us wants to admit.
We will get old.
Our bodies aren’t meant to hold us forever and sooner or later; we will feel the consequences of every decision not to move, not to exercise and not to look after ourselves properly.
It’s sad how we never realise what we have unless we lose it.
So, today you have the physical strength, flexibility, joy of moving without any pain… but one day all that will be lost. At some point, we will feel stiff, weak, uncomfortable.
Therefore, I say, move your body with love today. Dance, run, climb mountains, jump, swim, do yoga, go to the gym, and so on.
Enjoy the way your mussels make you feel alive.
Do it today. We never know what tomorrow will bring us.
10. Eliminate Negative Self-Talk
The last one of the ways to love yourself more is to stop with the negative self-talk in any form.
If you won’t tell it to your best friend why tell it yourself?
No one is perfect, and we all have doubts, things we struggle with, a bad decision we regret, we all have “unfulfilled dreams”, but that’s not a reason to add another bad decision.
Negative thoughts and negative self-talk will literally ruin your life more than anything else on the outside.
Instead of “I could’ve done something different in that situation.” try to think “What’s my lesson and is there a pattern I follow every time I make a bad decision?”.
Don’t allow negative thoughts to creep into your mind and encourage yourself to be more alert and replace the negativity with positivity. It takes time, but it will happen if you stick around long enough.
Favourite products to help you practice self-love daily
I’ve got a shortlist of 5 products to help you practice each one of these ways to love yourself. Let’s go through them quickly.
1. A good book
There’s nothing better than having a good book to help you learn how to love yourself. With over 2 million copies sold, Brene Brown’s book “The Gifts Of Imperfection” is one of the books you want to have on your bookshelf. The author has dedicated her life on mental health research and helping people all over the world to believe in themself and see their perfect imperfections as an advantage instead of a curse.
2. Learning how to say No
Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life – a book that’s going to help you set healthy boundaries in your life and teach you how to say No.
3. Meditation and listening to your intuition
This meditation kit is your perfect choice if you’d like to start tapping into your inner self. It comes with aromatherapy stress reliever and includes crystals, smudge stick and much more.
4. Self Care Playbook
This gorgeous journal will keep you busy and focused on yourself. It includes questions and affirmations to help you on your journey. What I love the most about it is that it’s a guide you could use when you don’t know where to start.
5. Natural Body Wash
7 Different scents are ready to relax, refresh and inspire you starting from your bathroom. This creamy body wash might be exactly what you need at the end of a stressful day to wake up the goddess inside you.
More useful content to help you find more ways to love yourself
- 15 WINTER SELF-CARE IDEAS TO TRY
- 50 SELF-CARE IDEAS TO HELP YOU RELAX AND FEEL GOOD AGAIN
- 100 THINGS TO BE GRATEFUL FOR TODAY
- 10 GRATITUDE JOURNALS THAT REQUIRE ONLY 5 MINUTES OF YOUR DAY
- 20 JOURNALING PROMPTS TO HELP YOU COMBAT ANXIETY
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