When was the last time you remembered to practice self-love and prioritize your happiness? Sometimes we spend so much time worrying about others, our kids, spouse, parents, and friends, that we neglect our own well-being.
What we need to realize is that self-love is really important for living well and developing positive energies. In fact if we fail to practice self-love, it is also likely to subconscious affect those around us. But if we develop the habit to build strong foundations of support and love for ourselves, the benefits are endless.
What Is Self-Love & How Can I Achieve It?
It’s easy to say “you should love yourself more”, or “you must love yourself first before loving others”, but what exactly does that really mean?
Self-love isn’t just ensuring you have enough food to eat, brushing your teeth every morning or catching up with your favorite Netflix series. It is about focusing on increasing your positive vibrations, mindfulness and overall mental & physical well-being. It is about creating a powerful mental environment, one where you feel calm and comfortable to live in.
This could mean addressing painful issues that you have yet to resolve, such as forgiving yourself for any regretful actions. Spending more time for self-development and discovery. Or building social pillars of support in your live. Ultimately the greatest form of self-love is to manifest a positive reality that you happy with and can live live to the fullest.
People who experience higher levels of happiness are able to achieve more in life and take control of their environment.
The good thing is that if you’ve not taken much steps to practice self-love in the past, you can still learn to love yourself easily with the following steps.
25 Self-Love Techniques You Can Start Using Immediately
1. Use Self-Love Affirmations
The benefits of positive affirmations on your brain and psychology are never ending. You can literally affirm yourself in any area of your life to believe confidence and re-frame and mental barriers that might be stopping your from moving forward. Affirmations are so effective because if you apply them consistently, you eventually start to believe these positive statements and they start to take root within your subconscious mind.
Here is a list of some powerful self-love affirmations for you to get started.
2. Forgive Yourself For Past Mistakes
Sometimes, the hardest person to forgive can be the person staring back at you in the mirror. Whatever negative emotions you may have towards yourself, know that the only real way forward is if you can move past these thoughts that serve you no purpose.
Do not all past events or hurt to influence how you will act and the love that you will give/receive today. Every day is a fresh start and a chance to prove that we are much better than we where yesterday.
You are NOT the sum of your past experiences, because every given moment is a chance to change the future and reshape your life. Start by saying to yourself “I forgive you”.
3. Follow Through With Your Goals
In order to build respect for yourself and self-confidence, you should also develop persistence to following through with the goals that you set. They don’t have to be something extraordinary, in fact having simple goals are really effective. Things like setting daily tasks or breaking up your bigger goals into smaller ones. Get into the habit of “doing what you say you will” and eventually you will find that you have much more self-respect and believe in your power to accomplish your dreams.
4. Read More to Expand Your Mind
As Dr. Seuss said: “the more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”. Self-development is an important form of self-love that many often forget. You can love yourself more by expanding your mind and increasing your knowledge from written form.
Here are some great book recommendations on the Law of Attraction you can check out.
5. Let Go of Unrealistic Expectations of Yourself
The truth is that almost every human being has some form of unrealistic expectations that they have about themselves. We put so much expectations upon ourselves because we want to do so many things.
Learn to love yourself more by removing this unrealistic expectations that place undue stress upon your mental and physical well-being. All good things will come in due time. Just trust the process and keep doing the work.
6. Take Inspired Action
A great way to practice self-love is to also start taking Inspired Action towards our goals and dreams instead of just waiting for things to fall into our laps. This means making full use of the opportunities presented to us and to stop procrastinating on the things that we want to achieve in life.
7. Exercise Regularly
One way to get an instant boost of confidence and positive vibrations is also by exercising regularly! Exercise not only changes the body, but also does wonders for the mind, your attitude and your mood.
8. Take Regular Short Breaks
Having self-love means not overworking yourself and appreciating the fact that your mind & body needs regular rest to recharge. It has been shown that work efficiency declines the longer you work without rest, don’t forget to take a break every now and then to take your mind off work and do something that makes you happy.
9. Give Credit To Yourself for Your Achievements
It’s okay to be humble, but make sure you also give proper credit to yourself when its due. This is a really important step to achieving mindfulness and building your self-confidence. Positive reinforcement is also better long-term than negative reinforcement, the same thing goes with our subconscious mind and mental well-being.
Celebrate the wins that you have in life and reward yourself amply for a job well done!
10. Practice Mindful Meditation
Daily meditation can be a really effective technique in grounding yourself and achieving mindfulness for your day. You don’t even need to spend a lot of time, just 10-15 mins in the morning will do. Meditation techniques are also great for overcoming resistance when trying to apply the Law of Attraction.
11. Eliminate Self-Limiting Beliefs
Self-limiting beliefs are negative beliefs that have been ingrained in our subconscious for a long time. In order to move forward and achieve great things, we need to be able to overcome these limiting beliefs as well and not allow them to affect our actions and attitudes in the future.
12. Listen To Music That You Love
Sometimes music is the perfect medicine for the heart and the soul. The right tunes can instantly put you in a jolly state of mind and reduce negative stress or tension. If you’re feeling a build up in pressure, why not take some time to practice self-love by playing your favorite tunes and vibing to the music.
13. Do Something Fun Every Day
Trying to manifest your dream life may not be the easiest endeavor but one should never forget to also ensure that your happiness level is kept at high. Research has shown that happy people are more likely to achieve success and heightened clarity so doing something that you can look forward to every day is really important to keep morale strong.
I’ve found that the best activities are always those spent with my loved ones and so I make it a point to do so for at least half an hour every single day. I usually have this in the afternoons or evenings so it gives me some form of motivation to get my work done qucikly!
14. Love Yourself By Smiling More
Your smile is one of the greatest gifts that you can give to the world. It injects instant positive energies and raises the mood for not just the person receiving it but yourself as well!
That’s why this is one of the best ways to love yourself and others during the day. Even in difficult situations, never forget what the power of a smile can do.
15. Learn to Say No
When you try to be nice to everyone, sometimes you find it difficult to reject the requests of others and end up having to shoulder all the tasks and burdens upon yourself. This isn’t healthy because if you do not take a firm stand, you may end up overworked, stressed and frustrated.
Learning to love yourself is also about standing up for yourself and not saying yes to everything! In fact, it’s extremely important that you know how to prioritize the things that are important to you so that you can give it your fullest attention and not feel overwhelmed. You deserve to be comfortable and to put your own mindfulness first before attempting to take on others.
It’s okay to prioritize the needs of your loved ones, but the important thing to remember is that your own well-being and happiness also affects those around you. Your goal should be to build a positive environment that you can thrive in and love yourself more.
