The definition of “self-love” is to treat yourself better, which includes your own wellbeing and happiness. Well-being includes taking care of your mind, body, and spirit as these are things that vastly contribute to our overall health. Self-care is also about making yourself happy, doing things that make you fulfilled and putting a smile on your face. Is self-love selfish? Absolutely not! Many people tend to confuse the two, but there is nothing selfish or narcissistic about loving yourself and taking care of yourself.
How do you plan to love and take care of others if you can’t do that for yourself? It’s so important to treat yourself better. Do things that you want to do, achieve things you’ve always dreamt of, take a step back, and rest. All of this matters and all of this makes a massive difference in your physical and mental health. If you’re looking to find ways to treat yourself better and to embrace loving yourself, then look no further! Here are some helpful tips so you can get started.
Begin by nourishing yourself
Since self-care is more than just bubble baths and pastries, you should think of ways that you can nourish your mind-body, and spirit. Each aspect of yourself and your health is going to vary. Here are some examples of different ways to nourish yourself.
Nourishing your body
This is going to include eating healthy whole foods such as fruits and veggies. In general, it’s important to have a healthy diet so look into eating more leafy greens, smoothies, and other highly nutritious foods. Try to cut down on junk food as these have little to no nutritional value. While junk food is tasty, it’s not good for the body as it can lower your immune system, upset your stomach, and lower your energy levels which can leave you sluggish.
Nourishing your mind
This involves engaging in intellectual material such as ready books, solving puzzles, learning new things from online workshops, picking up new hobbies, and even having a deep conversation with someone. These are all wonderful ways to get your brain sharper. Believe it or not, but some video games can do this too, especially ones that are loaded with puzzles.
Nourishing your soul
Whether you’re religious or not, it’s important to be in touch with your spirituality. This can include meditation, reflection, using a gratitude journal, or even just jotting down some of your thoughts in a journal. Having some alone time to yourself to just think, reflect, and get closer to yourself is very important. This is also going to help you be more clear-headed if you have recently had a lot of things going on in your mind.
Consider your own needs
A lot of people were taught to put others before themselves. You’ll see this often depicted in children’s TV shows, movies, books, and it’s also something that gets lectured. Sure, sometimes it’s okay to put others before yourself. That can be a great thing because it shows how selfless you are and how much you’re wanting to help out. But this is something that shouldn’t happen all the time. You have to think of yourself and put yourself first from time to time.
Look into ways to extend kindness to yourself. Do you feel bad when you say “no” to someone who is asking to hang out even though you’re too tired or busy? Focus on security rather than the fear of missing out. Recognize your needs and how you’re wanting to fulfill them. You can still help others and put others before yourself, but it’s something that you shouldn’t constantly do. A part of self-care is knowing your limits.
Surround yourself with a loving support system
These are people who you love and care for, and you know that they feel the same for you. These also tend to be positive people who believe in you and encourage you, just like you do for them. It’s so important to maintain strong relationships with these people as this is going to strongly affect your well-being. You always want to be around people who will build you up and who you can build up, but tear down.
Choose healthier choices
As stated earlier, a major part of self-care is about being healthy and taking care of yourself. Nourishing your mind, body, and soul is very important for taking care of yourself and staying healthy and happy. While nourishments are very important, there is so much more than just that. Other things to keep in mind would be to try and avoid things that will bring you down, make you feel bad, or that can completely make you unhealthy.
One example would include alcohol, as this could eventually lead to dependency and having to go to rehab for alcohol. Another example could include exercising. It’s important to get in daily physical activity and to exercise. Getting enough sleep can even be considered another as this is going to heavily affect your physical and mental health. There are plenty of ways to make healthy choices for yourself, and while it may be difficult, eventually they’ll turn into healthy habits.
Silence your inner critic
It’s true when they say that we’re our worst critics. You know yourself better than anyone. We all have that little voice in our head that is telling us negative stuff, specifically about ourselves. Everyone had this little voice, and everyone hates it. The problem lies in believing that little voice, believing what it says. This is going to massively limit yourself to the point you’re going to say “what’s the point?”.
It will make you not want to achieve anything. Instead, you need to challenge these thoughts. If you have a presentation at work and this voice says that you’re going to fail, challenge that thought. Why would you fail your presentation, you spent hours on it. It’s so important to question, challenge, and argue these thoughts. The more you do it, the faster they will go away.
Don’t bottle up your emotions
One of the best ways to treat yourself [AD1] is going to be by letting yourself feel the emotions that you have. Bottling up or trying to drown how you feel is only going to make it worse for yourself. Embrace how you’re feeling, just letting it all out is going to make these negative feelings go away faster and these positive feelings stay longer.
Never be afraid to ask for help
It’s important to have that support system mentioned earlier because if you fall, you know they’ll be there to catch you, figuratively speaking. It’s okay to ask for help, especially from your support system. Asking for help doesn’t make you weak, lazy, or anything like that. Instead, it makes you strong. You have enough courage to reach out and ask someone for help and you’re being honest with yourself that it’s not something that you could easily handle alone. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and trapped, just know that it’s important to ask for help.
Get the idea out of your head that you need to be perfect
Nobody is perfect, nobody at all. No matter what Instagram or any other social media site leads you to believe, absolutely nobody in this world has been or will ever be perfect. Perfection does not exist, and it never will exist. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, something that you may think if perfect can be “meh” to someone else. Why try to achieve something that is unattainable? It’s true that social media has really warped reality for some. Social media is showing photoshopped and altered images of bodies, imagery of people living the perfect life, and some who seem to have unlimited wealth. What happens on social media is completely false, fake, totally not real. So don’t let this idea of perfection from fake photos and captions get to you.
