Self-love doesn’t mean being selfish as most people tend to interpret it. It means showing love and care to yourself while re-asserting your well-being is very important even when others do not care so much about it.
Self-love loving yourself unconditionally and forgiving yourself as easily as you would forgive someone else. Many people neglect themselves and pay too much attention to treating other people better. This is not a good thing.
If you have heard about self-love or know about it but are wondering how you can practice it on yourself, here are some best tips on how to practice self-love.
Tips On How To Practice Self-love
1. Accept yourself
The first way to practice self-love is to accept yourself and know that you are worth a great value. Self-love begins with accepting yourself as a whole and acknowledging both positive and negative aspects of yourself without self-criticism or judgment.
Many people condemn themselves and their looks or see themselves as inferior to other people based on what they see physically. Accepting yourself shows that you are not comparing yourself negatively with other people and this helps build your self-worth and self-esteem.
You are good enough and you don’t have to be like someone else. You can’t afford to love other people more than you love yourself.
2. Know yourself
Self-understanding is one thing many people ignore. What are your values, and your goals, and what are the things you or your body can’t accept?
Life throws different things at us daily. Many of these things can potentially harm our physical, social, and mental well-being. Knowing yourself will help you practice self-love more effectively, and be able to deflect off those situations and experiences that can threaten your inner peace, happiness, and well-being.
Also, know what your body likes and what it cannot tolerate. Many people harm themselves in the name of enjoyment, recreation, or fun without realizing it. As you get to know yourself better, understanding the impact of foods, drinks, drugs, substances, etc., on your body is part of practicing self-care.
3. Care for yourself
Self-care is an integral part of self-love. Taking care of your physical body can help boost your self-esteem, improve your productivity, and general well-being, as well as help protect you from illness and diseases.
Taking care of yourself involves wearing clean and nice clothes, regular physical exercise, adequate sleep, adequate water daily, recreation, taking prescribed medications, and so on. These are important ways to practice self-love to improve your quality of life.
To help yourself relax you should engage in fun leisure activities that you love, not an activity that someone imposed on you. It will help in reducing any stress you may feel.
4. Choose your friends
We can’t choose our family, but we are permitted to choose our friends and those we let into our lives. Don’t allow toxic people into your life to drain you.
Self-love is when you choose friends who uplift you, make you feel better, and respect you. Many people put up with people who are toxic in the name of giving them another chance, but as a way of practicing self-love, you should know when to cut off someone toxic to you.
5. Learn to say NO
Another important way to practice self-love is by learning to say no when it is necessary. That doesn’t make you a bad person, because you cannot please someone else to displease yourself always.
Many people accept tasks, and duties, or take on roles they cannot afford to take given their efforts or resources simply because they don’t want to get on someone’s bad side. Saying no when necessary means you realize what you can and cannot handle at that point in time.
With time, people will come to respect you and your preferences when you might have consistently shown them the things you cannot agree to.
6. Appreciate yourself
Positive self-affirmations and self-appreciation are another way to practice self-love. People are beginning to see the impact of self-affirmations on the success of anyone.
Learn to speak kind words to yourself, be kind to yourself, and motivate yourself. If anyone else would not do that for you, you can do it for yourself. That is self-love.
7. Reward yourself
You work so hard, yet no one rewards you for doing so. Working without getting some rewards is not an act of love, therefore you should not do that to yourself.
Sometimes, take yourself on a solo date, read a book, see a favorite movie, or do any other fun thing you love. That way, you are appreciating yourself for what you do and taking care of your mental and physical health to achieve even greater things.
8. Forgive yourself
There are some mistakes you made in the past that you are probably still being yourself up for. You blame yourself for not having done this or that perfectly, you forget the fact that you are a human being and you mess up sometimes.
Self-love opens your mind to the awareness that you are allowed to forgive yourself for what you didn’t do right previously because of a lack of knowledge or experience. Embrace the present.
9. Improve yourself
There are areas of our lives where we need work or improvement, but you cannot cause those changes by making up excuses, lazying about, or simply ignoring them. You have put in the required work.
Your body, mind, and soul have a desire to grow, develop, and improve. Feeding your body with the right ingredients for growth and improvement is going to make you happy overall.
Putting in work to improve yourself might not seem like an act of self-love but if you consistently improve yourself, you will be grateful to yourself a few years later.
10. Be grateful
Gratitude comes from a place of contentment, which is a major component of self-care. Worrying too much about things you do not have is an act of self-inflicted punishment.
Thus, one last way to practice self-care is to always be grateful for what you have. Some of the things you get freely that you call ‘little’ are things some people are dying to get. So, being grateful is your way of saving yourself from the emotional and psychological stress of worrying too much.
Another thing gratitude helps you achieve is it gives you a clear mind and opens your heart to endless possibilities to improve and grow beyond where you currently are.
Conclusion
It is vital to practice self-love and to do so unapologetically. In a world where there is so much hostility, the least you can do is to be kind to yourself.
People come and leave your life at different points in your life. Some people might be too selfish and not mind causing you harm or hurt as long as that exonerates them from something. But while self-love is not about being selfish, at the end of the day, all you have is yourself.
So, you should learn to practice self-love. And I hope these tips above will be helpful to you in achieving that.
