Learn To Love Yourself: 5 Recommendations

Learning to love yourself is vitally important to our emotional health. While being positive with others has a number of important benefits, being positive with yourself is fundamental. Ultimately, it is with ourselves that we will spend the rest of our lives.

Loving and valuing yourself, that is, practicing self-esteem, comes down to exercising a healthy egoism  from which we place ourselves as a priority and we treat ourselves well. We need to be grateful for who we are and accept our good and bad qualities.

Moreover,  it is only when we learn to love and nurture ourselves as if we were our own children that we will be able to offer love to others. If we underestimate ourselves, we can never develop a sense of self-confidence and our self-esteem will remain below zero. Loving us is a priority.

A lot of people think they don’t like each other. This is not entirely true. We love each other because the opposite is impossible,  the receiver and the sender of this desire being the same person. However, there are people who still believe that they don’t like each other. In reality, they mean that there are certain parts of their being or their personality that they don’t like.

We can also feel like we don’t love ourselves when we regret or are ashamed of having done, said or thought something. It is normal for this to happen to us, we are not perfect. We all have imperfections and we have to learn to live with them. But that’s no reason to stop loving and valuing ourselves.

Characteristics of people with low self-esteem

Low self-esteem gets a lot of bad press. It has been claimed that it can lead to many psychological problems. In fact, it’s associated with addiction issues, an excessive need for approval, and conditions like anxiety and depression.

People with low self-esteem in addition to not treating themselves well, tend to belittle and disparage others. In other words, they project their own feelings onto them. They also have other characteristics:

• Constantly seek the approval of others

• Want to control others
• Being exploited by their spouse, colleagues, friends
• Create dependency relationships with people, institutions, causes or substances
• Have biased thoughts
• Have feelings of self-dissatisfaction, self-hatred, disgust and contempt

As we see, low self-esteem comes with a series of additional issues  like having interpersonal, professional, or any other issues.

Low self-esteem can be the cause of some psychological disorders

Learning to love yourself is a protective factor against mental illness. In fact,  low self-esteem acts as a facilitator of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and disturbances in body image.

In older people, low self-esteem is associated with poorer health, greater disability, greater anxiety, depression, somatization, and pain. Low self-esteem can also be a risk factor for suicide. Even so, in each case  it is one of the many factors that interact with others. That is, low self-esteem, in and of itself, is not responsible for an eating disorder (to take just one example).

5 recommendations for learning to love yourself

Learning to love yourself is closely linked to the concept of self-esteem. To improve it, we can employ a series of strategies. Here they are :

Speak positively

The way we speak has consequences. If we constantly criticize and blame ourselves, we will feel bad. On the other hand, if we treat each other with respect and pay attention to our language, we will avoid any discomfort.

Living as rigid judges prevents us from growing and moving forward. It is important  to learn to perceive and be grateful for our positive aspects, as well as to accept our shortcomings. To pretend to change them and to be perfect is to pretend not to be human. In fact, change is only possible if we accept them.

Take care of your body and soul

The body-soul pair cannot be broken. What is good for one is good for the other. This means that  if we are looking to take care of ourselves physically and spiritually, we are banking on ourselves.

A balanced diet, a restful sleep, playing a sport every week,  listening to pleasant music, a walk in a natural landscape, a candlelight dinner while we converse with someone important to us are some of the ways that make us feel better. Activities and habits that involve the care of the body-soul pair.

Learn from our mistakes instead of punishing ourselves

Once we have made a mistake, there is no point in seeking punishment. We all make mistakes and we have to accept them as a part of our lives. Not to do them is a good thing, but to pretend not to do any of them is impossible.

Behind every mistake there is a learning,  an opportunity to learn to do things in a different way. It is better to focus on the latter than to punish ourselves.

Forget about conflicting messages

A contradictory double message is both a compliment and a criticism. It is very common in people with low self-esteem. For example, a contradictory message could be “you did a good job but it’s normal, with all the time you put in…”.

Let’s get rid of these double messages, exchange them for gratitude compliments, and put the criticisms aside. For example, “I am happy with the work I have done”.

Focus on places, relationships and nurturing activities

The nurturing places are those where we recover our serenity and our joy of living. It can be a mountain, the sea, a park… If we stay at home, make sure we surround ourselves with useful and pleasant things. We can even reorder it if we need to: it will help us, in a way, to reorder our life.

Nurturers are those whose presence and company fills us with peace and vigor. Bond with people we are comfortable with and avoid toxic relationships.

On the other hand,  nurturing activities are fun activities that give us the strength to cope with the stresses of everyday life. Reading a good book, watching a movie, playing sports or just resting are good examples.

As we see,  learning to love yourself is fundamental. Like all faculties, it requires dedication. Focusing on ourselves, taking care of ourselves and valuing ourselves is essential to take care of our emotional health, in addition to constituting a spring for building a happy life filled with well-being.

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