The Little Things
February 9, 2015

Love is in the air, right? I’m admittedly not a hugely excited by Valentine’s Day, which is fine. For me, the month of February is a time for me to check-in with myself to make sure that I’m loving myself well.

That’s the thing- loving yourself is SO important, yet we often push that aside in the pursuit of loving others. The love and care that we are even able to give others comes out of the love and care that we ourselves have, and that’s why it’s critical to make sure that we each our loving ourselves well. This is certainly an underlying theme that plays out most hours of my day as a counselor, and I only become more and more convinced every year that we learn to love ourselves well so that we can love others well too.

10 Ways To Love Yourself Well

But what does “loving yourself” even mean? Loving yourself means ALL sorts of things, including:

1. Maintaining ownership of appropriate areas of your life, while not trying to take ownership of others’ property. This means that I own my own thoughts, feelings, and actions. I don’t try to make someone else responsible for how I feel or act, and I don’t try to take responsibility for how another person thinks, feels, or behave. This is about developing boundaries in our life.

2. It means learning how to cope in healthy ways when I face something distressing. Just as a parent soothes a child, we learn to self-soothe as we mature into adults.

3. It means learning to be mindful of your present experiences so that you don’t miss important cues which might explode into something much bigger later (i.e. increasing stress that leads to a panic attack or something that’s bothering you with a friend that you don’t bring up, which creates a much bigger problem in the relationship)

4. Learning to give back to yourself in big and small ways- financially, relationally, mentally, emotionally, etc… This might mean investing an hour in getting a massage, creating a savings account so that you aren’t as stressed in tight times, or exercising (these are just a few of the MANY many things you can do).

5. It means that you work hard on healing old wounds and making yourself into the healthiest person that you can be. Loving yourself well might mean that you commit to regularly counseling.

6. Embracing the fact that “what other people think of me is none of my business”. I can focus on being responsible for myself in the best ways I know how. What others think of me in the process isn’t what I need to be concerned about.

7. Recognizing and replacing the cognitive distortions that we use (such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing). These distortions not only add a lot of stress and anxiety to our lives and relationships, but they serve to tear us down.

8. It might mean that you need to work on forgiving yourself for past mistakes, learning instead how to learn from mistakes while extending grace to yourself.

9. It might mean creating space from toxic and unhealthy people in our lives. We receive a lot of unhealthy messages from people in our life, and we often unintentionally take those comments and incorporate that into our inner monologue. Surrounding yourself with safe people is a way of loving yourself.

10. It means acknowledging our hurt instead of burying it away. We live out of our hurts, so it’s important we process those hurts so that we don’t hurt others because of our hurt.

Now obviously there are plenty more ways to love yourself than what I listed above, but these are all great places to start. The fact of the matter is that you need to love yourself well in order to be healthy, happy, and to have healthy and loving relationships with others, so it’s worth the time, effort, and energy!

Through this week leading up to Valentine’s Day, I challenge you to do a little self-assessment. Check-in and see how you are loving yourself well, and what areas in your life might need improvement. Commit to improving one area of your life that might change how you love yourself!

Now it’s your turn to share! What’s one way that you choose to love yourself well? Is there an area you’d like to work on in your pursuit of loving yourself well?

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2 responses to “10 Healthy Ways To Love Yourself”

  1. Abby @ BackAtSquareZero says:
    February 11, 2015 at 9:28 pm

    Working on being kinder and loving myself. Great tips.