The importance of self-love: 5 reasons why you should love yourself.

Are you having a hard time making time for yourself? Do you feel like practicing self-love is a waste of time? Or maybe you feel like you don’t deserve it?  If so, I want to tell you that even though this feels right, you’re wrong and you need to change this mindset. We all deserve love, most especially from ourselves. In this blog post, I’m going to share the importance of self-love.

What is self-love?

It is defined as prioritizing your own well-being and happiness. It means you take care of yourself – your physical, mental and psychological well-being. It also means being kind and accepting of yourself. 

To understand it better, self-love is treating yourself the way you treat your best friend. 

We want what’s best for our best friend, right? We want them to be happy. We are there when they’re down, with no judgment. We accept and love them for who they are. 

We’ve heard this “love yourself” a lot of times but most of us still neglect its importance. It feels like something easy to do, something innate. But, it is actually really hard to do for most people. 

Is it because of our fast-paced world?

Is it because of our childhood trauma?

Or maybe because of our perfectionism?

No matter what’s the reason behind it, we have to deconstruct the harshness we have towards ourselves and learn to love ourselves again.

5 Reasons Why You Should Love Yourself.

If we have been living our busy lives disregarding our wellbeing, and we’ve been okay so far, we might question if it’s necessary to practice self-love. 

But when we continue to keep prioritizing everything else besides ourselves, sooner or later, this will take a toll on our quality of life. There might be already a manifestation of this in our lives but they seem neglectable, for now. 

To encourage you more, let’s talk about the importance of self-love.

1. Make healthy choices for yourself.

Living a healthy lifestyle and practicing self-love come hand in hand. If we practice one without the other, it will most probably fail. If we want to be healthy without self-love, then who are we doing this for? If we practice self-love without taking care of our health, do we really love ourselves?

When we love ourselves, we do our best to provide everything we need: a good sleep, healthy food, plenty of water, and exercise. And we do these because we want to, not because someone told us to. Self-love makes choosing to be healthy easier. 

By practicing self-love, we become more conscious of our choices. 

Is this good for me? Which is the better choice? Will this negatively affect my health?

You may want to read this – 12 Wellness Tips for the Workplace.

2. Boost your self-confidence.

The main reason why we’re not as confident as we want to be is ourselves, especially our self-criticism. It is hard to be confident when we ourselves don’t believe in our own capabilities. Too much tough love and negative talk just lower our self-esteem.

By practicing self-love, we accept our flaws and try to be compassionate when we do something wrong. We also try to see the best in us. Doing these can definitely help boost our confidence. 

It is like cheering for our friends. We don’t focus on their bad stuff. Instead, we focus on what they can do and then we gas them up. 

We should do the same to ourselves. Let’s look at the mirror and actively choose to see what’s good.

3. Achieve your goals.

Harsh words may seem effective at first when we are trying to achieve something. But eventually, it can affect our psyche and this will gradually burn us out. 

With self-love, it becomes easier to achieve our goals because we learn how to manage our stress, take care of our health, and accept that we can make mistakes along the way.

In addition, we prioritize our needs and wants over anything else when we practice self-love. This may sound selfish but it is not wrong to work hard for what’s best for us and for what our hearts desire. (Obviously, as long as we don’t hurt other people.) 

It really makes working on our goals a lot more fun when we do it with love. 

You may want to read this – How to Achieve your Goals and Dreams.

4. Maintain healthy relationships.

Not seeing red flags in relationships usually comes from us not knowing our boundaries and our worth. Of course, there are other factors to this such as our upbringing and traumas. But how we treat ourselves greatly determines how we let other people treat us. 

By loving ourselves first, we get to understand ourselves more, and learn what we need and can offer in a relationship. As a result, we will be able to set clear boundaries and communicate well which are both important in maintaining healthy relationships, and even end a toxic one. 

Aside from these, we should also learn how to stand on our own and not depend on others to love us. Doing so will help us avoid co-dependency.

5. Live a happier life.

Another importance of self-love is that we can live a happier life or have higher life satisfaction. Practicing self-love develops a more positive mindset. This then enables us to see the beauty within us and in our surroundings.

It is absolutely difficult to be happy when we are busy looking for something wrong or tearing ourselves down. 

Accepting and appreciating who we are, and not depending on others for our worth can be so liberating. And we’ll only truly be free and happy when we love ourselves.

Be your own best friend.

I know that it is difficult for some to love themselves. These inner voices that say we’re “not enough” have been buried in our subconscious by different factors. And we have to look inwards and uproot these beliefs. 

I understand that this is not easy especially when you grew up in a community where prioritizing your wellbeing is a selfish option. 

But we know that it isn’t. Self-love is not some luxury that only a few can afford and can have. We all have to, in our own ways, practice it. Or else we’ll go insane in this crazy world. 

It will be hard at first but it will get better and once we become comfortable with it, it will just keep on getting better.

To get started, let’s be more kind, compassionate, and supportive towards ourselves. Let’s treat ourselves like our best friends. 

Share in the comment section how you practice (or plan to) self-love! 

Rooting for you,

Blaise ♡