Between social media and just doing your best to impress in everyday situations, it is easy to feel like you are constantly in the spotlight. This can lead to surrounding yourself with negativity in hopes of encouraging yourself to improve, but using negative thoughts to reinforce goals will only set you back further. Instead, you should work to develop a routine and a mindset that encourage self-love in a way that makes you happier and more prepared for days when things are a little rocky.
What is Self-Love?
Before you can practice self-love, you have to define it for yourself. At its most basic, self-love is treating yourself kindly and making an effort to things that are uplifting, but in practice, self-love is different for everyone. Some people may define self-love as drinking a cup of tea and winding down with a book before going to bed. Others might define it as doing a face mask or taking a bubble bath a certain number of times in a week. Whatever your practical definition of self-love is, it needs to embody things that are positive for you.
Self-Care
Once you know what you want self-love to look like in your own life, you have to develop a routine. Again, this does not mean you have to do a certain thing a certain number of times a week or even on a certain day. A self-care routine is less about a schedule and more about routinely taking care of yourself in manageable ways.
The best way to do this is to take a look at your life and focus on places where you feel you are more negative. From there, you can develop habits or add activities to your routine that combat the negativity. For instance, if you find that looking through social media makes you think negatively about yourself, find a way to use it as a tool to compliment yourself instead. If your best friend is having fun on vacation, don’t use her status updates as a way to put yourself down for not doing enough, instead think about something amazing you did for yourself recently.
Self-care can also include adjusting your schedule to allow for more sleep or to encourage yourself to drink more water. Health, mentality, and your habits all contribute to self-positivity, and they should all be considered when you develop your self-care routine.
Live You
Finding a way to focus on yourself without letting the opinions or standards of others get in the way is a struggle. You have to pick and choose what you care about and where you will let your ideas of who you are (and should be) merge with others’. If you let the opinions of others take over your own, you will probably end up miserable. Living to please others is difficult and not a productive way to encourage self-love. Saying that you should not care what other people think is obvious, but it also isn’t helpful. You can acknowledge what others think without hurting your ability to be happy. You just have to be careful about what you let affect you.
