What even is self-love?

Is self love a bubble bath with lavender essential oils and a lush bath bomb? Is self-love saying affirmations to yourself in the mirror every morning? Is self-love lighting candles and dimming the lights while you enjoy a glass of Chardonnay and read a Colleen Hoover novel?

Yes, they can be expressions of self-love. And… it can’t be these things in isolation.

Self- love is loving yourself even when you make a mistake. Self-love is doing things for yourself even when you don’t feel like it – because you know that to love yourself is to take care of yourself, mentally and physically. Self-love is being kind and compassionate to yourself, not being judgemental or mean.

Is self-love joyful?

It can be yes- but it is not joyful all of the time. It means doing things for yourself even when you don’t want to.

Sometimes it means going to the gym, even when you didn’t feel like it that morning, but because you made a commitment to strength. Sometimes it means actually taking a bubble bath to calm your mind when you think you should keep working.

Things that sound fun and joyful are not always intuitive for all of us. If you’re a recovering perfectionist like me, sometimes it feels wrong or hard to prioritize activities that feel like love because I was programmed to believe that you either work or you’re being lazy. Self-love sometimes means doing things for yourself that feel “wrong” but that we know is right, like reading a book outside rather than work inside on a Sunday afternoon.

Why should you choose self-love?

We create neural pathways in our brains with our beliefs.  Beliefs are just sentences that we have thought in our head over and over and over again. If you think that you are unloveable, and you have been thinking that for years, then it has become a belief.

Your brain is always looking to find proof for what it believes. You will create evidence in your life, with your thinking, to prove your beliefs true.

In college, I thought that I didn’t fit in and I was weird and unlikeable. No one told me that, no one said that, but I believed it. So, I constantly created evidence of this by being too shy to talk to other kids, not going out as much as everyone else, being scared to try new things, not joining clubs etc.. I isolated myself and told myself it was because other people didn’t like me. I believed it and so I acted in a way that created the evidence for my brain.

The opposite is also true. When you believe positively about yourself – your brain will also seek examples to prove that true. When I thought that I was made to be a school leader, then I showed up with confidence, I problem solved, I took initiative, I sought opportunities to grow and help others grow. I created a reality for myself that proved my thought true.

So – when you choose self-love, you are choosing to create a reality for yourself that will express self-love. When you choose to think judgemental thoughts for yourself, you will create that reality.

Which reality would you prefer?

Moving from self-hatred to self-love

It is often so hard to show ourselves self-love when we are in such a negative frame of mind. It can feel like a cognitive disconnect to move from “I hate myself” to “I love myself.” Your brain is just not yet ready to draw that connection.

Instead – aim at first for neutral. Acknowledge what you have, then move to gratitude, then like, and then love.

Here is an example that I have done with myself.

I hated myself. I thought I was awkward and unworthy and unlovable.

• I had to first become aware that those were thoughts I was having.

• Then, whenever I noticed I was feeling down and having those thoughts I would instead just change them to the thought, “I am a human being”. It’s something that is so neutral, I couldn’t argue with it. It kind of freezes your brain from wanting to fight back because it literally cannot argue this fact.

• Then I would move to gratitude. I would think, “I am a human being and I am grateful to be a human.” Again, I couldn’t really argue with myself.

If you struggle with acceptance or gratitude for yourself – one thing that helped me was gratitude and acceptance for other people. It was easier for me to have compassion and gratitude for others rather than myself. I would start to look at others and think, “They are so very human and they are doing the best that they can.”

Once I felt this way about others, I found it easier to feel that way about myself.

• I started to acknowledge my efforts. I went to, “I am a human being and I am grateful to be a human. I am doing the best that I can.”

• From there I fell into “like” with myself. I stayed in like for a while until that felt really good. I didn’t try to lie and say I was in love, rather I would just say to myself, “I like myself.” That was it- I kept it simple so that my brain couldn’t argue.

After a while I realized that I more than liked myself – I loved myself. This was such a life-changing moment for me.

I started to do self-love activities out of pure love rather than a sense of guilt or obligation. I started to take bubble baths because I knew that my body deserved rest, instead of because someone told me I should so I needed to prove that I did the right thing. I started doing yoga because I loved how it made my body feel, rather than because it was going to be the thing that made me flexible which would make me “better.”

The difference is astronomical. When you act out of love instead of obligation or perfectionism, your experience of those activities is dramatically different.

What can I do to experience more self-love?

Here are some thoughts that really helped me in my journey to falling in love with myself:

• Everyone is doing the best they can.
• We were all born infinitely loveable and we all have that inside ourselves- including me!
• My human brain is not trying to sabotage me, it is trying to protect me.
• Of course I think this- it’s been ingrained. I just need to make some small shifts.
• I don’t have to believe what I was taught. I get to decide.
• No one else gets to decide if I am loveable – only me.

Here are some good exercises that you can try. I did all of these and when I tell you they were hard at first, trust me they will push you. They are deceptively simple but powerful.

• Every day make a list of 10 things that you like about yourself. Try to think of different things each day.

• If you were talking to yourself like you talk to your best friend – what would you say? What advice would you give? How would you speak and what tone would you use?

• What story are you telling yourself about why you are not loveable? What parts of that story might not be true? What parts of that story do you want to believe?

The bottom line is that life is so much better when you choose to love yourself. The activities that everyone tells you are self love – bubble baths, face masks and massages. They aren’t fun unless they are truly done from a place of love. When you start to show yourself kindness and radical self-love, the world looks different and possibilities will become endless.