Learning to Love Yourself A Little at a Time

*This is a collaborative post 

We can feel that we’ve got to keep up with what life throws at us, that we need to get the most expensive clothes or we have to maintain a constant social media presence. But these things can override our own perception of ourselves. Learning to love ourselves isn’t some sort of hippie pastime, but it’s something that is more about self-respect. While it’s popular self-help advice, and we may believe that we really do love ourselves, what we do in life might suggest something else. How can we truly learn to love ourselves?

Remember To Care For Yourself As Much As You Do For Everybody Else

When we are doing everything for everyone else we must remember it isn’t “selfish” to care about ourselves. Sometimes we start to look at ourselves and think there are things that we need to change. But while we may think that something like breast reduction will solve all our problems, we have to remember when making big decisions like this is asking ourselves if we are doing it for the right reasons. This means that if we truly care about ourselves and that there is a genuine reason for changing something about ourselves in this respect, we are doing it healthily. But in order to get to this point, sometimes we have to step outside our own body and learn to treat ourselves as we would the most precious things we have in our lives.

Respect Your Boundaries

We can very easily overstep our boundaries because others ask us to help them. Sometimes emotional preservation is crucial, but we may not necessarily know what we need to maintain our boundaries. If you are someone gets hurt a lot in relationships you may take the opportunity to make a list of the things that you need emotionally but also understand what these things could do to your sense of self if they are ignored. It’s not about avoiding things that hurt us but it’s about having a better understanding of when these things hurt us so we can start to respect these boundaries and take action to have our needs met. This will improve our self-esteem.

What Makes You Feel Good?

We can spend a lot of time being people pleasers and chasing something that we think we need when we really don’t. You need to do what is necessary to be you. This could be starting to look at the things that exhaust you that you do every day and flip it on its ear. For example, is there a hobby that you can immerse yourself in so you feel much better about yourself? It’s about finding those things that make you feel good and doing that. Because it’s these things that can rejuvenate us but also helps us realise what is important to us and helps us thrive.

It’s amazing how so many of us feel the need to benefit everyone else apart from ourselves. This spills over into that temptation to keep our social media followers updated but when this completely eradicates our sense of self it’s time to go back to loving ourselves. It can be a long journey, but we can easily do this a little at a time.