Why and How To Learn To Love Yourself
Ever had a visit to the hospital where you had an experience of looking at the Electrocardiogram (ECG)? How does the ECG represent that the patient is still alive? As long as the lines on the ECG are going up and down, you can have the peace of mind that the patient is still breathing. The moment it goes flat is the moment of worry. Our lives function in a similar fashion. Ups and downs are an inevitable part of life. If you are having both the good and bad days, it just means that you are alive. Good and bad are labels that are relative to each other. If you never had a bad day, you would lose your sense to recognize when it’s a good one. After all, without a frame of reference, something to compare it with, you can’t possibly know the kind of day that you are having.
Words can surely have a remarkable healing effect. But sometimes, it is not enough to just remind yourself that hitting a rock bottom is also a part of life and that the sun will shine again after this dark night that seems to consume you slowly. In the moments when you are feeling down because of any given experience of your life, taking all the blame, criticizing yourself, being hard and even hating yourself can only worsen the situation. The frustration is uncanny that makes it even harder to not be lost in the gloomy feeling.
But you are not entirely helpless before the bad days and the moments when you feel like hating yourself. There are more than a few reasons why loving yourself can offer a solution. We have highlighted a few of such reasons in hopes of lending you a helping hand to keep the love for yourself even in the hardest of times.
1. It Makes You Happier
The first and foremost reason for loving yourself is because it makes you happier. The days are going to come and go but the only thing that’ll matter in the end is your happiness and contentment. What needs to be realized is that the days which don’t turn out as expected are inevitable. What’s even more important is to believe that none of the days in your life are permanent. If you are going through a bad phase, try to remember that it’s all that it is; a bad phase. And like any other, it will eventually pass.
When you are having a bad day, it may just feel like there’s no one who’s on your side. If you end up hating yourself too under such circumstances, it will only worsen the situation. On the other hand, if you succeed in keeping your love for yourself, there will be one less thing to worry about. With a happier and satisfied mind, you’d be in a much better position to diligently work on the problem that you are facing and focus on finding a solution.
2. It Makes You A Better Person
Imagine any relationship that is the closest for you. It could be that of being a brother, or perhaps a husband, or a father, and think of the impact that your relationship will experience if you were in a constant state of battle with yourself. In all honesty, it is next to impossible for the best person that you possibly can be for other people if you fail to love yourself in the first place. It is much like the safety precaution that you are told about every time you are traveling via an airplane. Don’t they always tell you to put your own mask first and help yourself before you try to help someone else, even if it is your children? But if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense since you are not going to be helpful for anyone if you end up losing your own consciousness in a state of an emergency.
Your relationships work in a similar fashion. Once you have the ability to cater to your own needs, then only you can lend a helping hand to others. If you can’t love yourself, you won’t be able to be genuinely affectionate towards others. In order to make our best contribution to society, we must be in a state of satisfaction with ourselves. Another reason is the contagious nature of the love itself. The way you will influence the people around you is defined by what you genuinely feel from the inside. Someone who is in love with himself has a positive vibe in general and positivity is exactly what he is able to spread in his surroundings.
3. It Turns You Into A Confident Individual
Have you ever had an experience of [restrict] going for a job interview when your mind tricked you into believing that you are not good enough? You may have told yourself to not be upset about not getting the job since you already knew that you were not good enough. But here’s a food for thought; were you indeed not good enough which became the reason of your failure or was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy and you failed only because you were tricked into believing that you were not good enough?
The point is, you can’t possibly build your self-confidence and sustain it in the long run if you don’t love yourself. If you always have doubts and are an artist in finding the opportunities to take the blame or to criticize yourself, you will always aim for mediocrity. Remember that having self-confidence is a quality that has a significant impact on your personal as well as your professional life. If you are looking for ways to unlock your true potential, the ride to your destination is your self-confidence and the key to your ride is loving yourself and being content with who you are.
4. It Makes Your Life Easier
Truth be told, life is already hard enough. There is no point in making it even harder for no apparent reason. And that’s exactly where you are headed if you have not learned to love yourself. It is harder for such people to let go of things. Over time, they develop this uncanny habit of taking things personally. It is almost as if they inherently want to take the blame for everything that goes wrong and over-criticize themselves for the petty matters. There’s already too much negativity in the world. If you look around yourself, you’d surely find someone with a mission of pulling you down. They are already doing it good enough. There’s no need of putting the person who wears your name tag into the same league of men.
When you are truly in love with yourself, you are much more open-minded to see positivity around you. You are able to have a lighter perspective on life. You develop an understanding that all of your experiences don’t require you to respond emotionally or be overwhelmed. This, in turn, helps a great deal in minimizing the higher levels of stress and anxiety in your routine life. The final outcome is a better quality of life and overall well-being.
5. It Frees You Of Dependence
One of the most counterproductive things that you can do to yourself is to look for validation in the eyes of others. When you put an effort into learning to love yourself, you can finally stop your tiring pursuit of finding external approval. In other words, a person who is in love with himself enjoys being more secure with who he is. You can try it as part of a little experiment. The moment that you start to love yourself, you will witness a sense of greater responsibility in your feelings and emotions. You will no longer feel the need to be guilty of having them. By removing the dependence on other people, self-love can help a great deal in creating a wall between you and the poisonous relationships. It will open your eyes to see what you truly deserve to be treated like and enables you to say NO when you are offered anything less than that. When you are not reliant on other people for your own happiness and to relish the feelings of love and affection, you will learn to stop making a compromise for a less than satisfactory experience. You would then always be on the lookout for your true soul-mates which will open the door for you to build stronger, more meaningful social connections with the people who want to see you grow.
6. It’ll Make You Healthier
Lastly, do you really need a reason to love yourself greater than the reason for protecting your own health? You know what they say, your health is your greatest well. As mentioned earlier, loving yourself is directly linked with being more content and happier with your life. It helps a great deal in reducing stress and optimizes your mental capacities to be more positive. All of it can work for you in the long run in protecting your mental health that directly translates into an overall sense of well-being.
Once you learn to love yourself, you will find pleasure in taking good care of yourself. You’d be able to see when it’s time to give yourself a break and let your mind and body relax for a while before getting back to the rat race of this fast-paced era. You’d see the importance of engaging in the activities that you truly love, you’d be able to make time for yourself, all of which promotes the overall quality of your life.
As evident from the information mentioned above, the importance of self-love is such that it won’t be wrong to state that all good things start with self-love. Just like charity begins at home, happier life does so too. There are plenty of ways that you can try to learn to love yourself but considering that the only thing standing between you and the self-love is a mesh of negative thoughts that you have been tangled in, meditation and mindfulness can turn out to be an impeccable solution. Specifically, the use of a personal mantra as part of your daily meditation can dramatically change your entire belief system, preventing the vicious cycle of negative thoughts to continue and replace it with an alternative of positivity about yourself. It is a simple exercise of the mind that requires you to find a peaceful environment, close your eyes, and start with deep, slow breathing in order to activate the natural relaxation response of the body. Afterward, the aim is to create a mental image of everything that you love about yourself, about your life. You are required to create statements like “I am thankful for…”, “I’m good at ….”, “I’ve got this”, etc. It has now been scientifically proven that repeating such statements with a peaceful state of mind are highly effective in sensitizing your brain into believing them. Once you start to repeat everything that is good about yourself in your head on a daily basis, you will help your mind to clear the haze and see your true worth.
Conclusion
Good and bad days are for everyone. And yet you see a few of the people who have an ability to keep a smile on their face and stand their ground against the bad days and then there are others who seem to have a natural proclivity to breakdown every time things starts to go South. The only difference is that the former have a greater love for who they are than the latter. You can’t run away from the bad days but what you can do is prepare yourself better to face them. By highlighting the prominent reasons why learning to love yourself is worth the journey, we are inviting you to make it a part of your life and then see your life change for the better. [/restrict]
