How to Start Loving Yourself: the Guide for a Modern Man

04.04.2018

You’d think that there’s nothing simpler than loving yourself. What can be more important and pleasant? But quite often people just can’t find enough strength to do it. Why can’t we cherish ourselves? Well, someone is constantly trying to find flaws in his character, some dream of being prettier, and others just take people’s opinion too close to heart.

If you look at the relationship between two loving people, you’ll see that love is a hard work. At first, there’s passion, a physical attraction, and after a while, it becomes clear that if you want to live happily, you should ignore some minor shortcomings, and there are things you definitely need to change. The same thing is with love for yourself. It’s important to understand what you can forgive yourself and what you need to work on. Our tips on loving yourself will help you with that.

Why loving yourself is so important

Self-love is the basis of a happy, harmonious life. When you experience this delightful feeling, you begin to change for the better. Self-love is a wonderful power that heals your body and soul. If you love yourself, everything in your life happens easily. If a man loves himself, others see it. Each person is unique, and that’s what makes every one of us important. Don’t try to keep up with certain standards. You don’t have to change yourself just to be like everyone else. You need to love yourself as you are and love your uniqueness and individuality.

The lack of self-love or inability to love yourself often results in complexes. You probably have a friend who thinks that he has no luck with girls just because he’s not handsome enough. But there are a lot of cases when professional sportsmen with an ideal body can’t find happiness, while guys who are far from being perfect become womanizers. The thing is that some people love themselves for who they are. They enjoy both their body with all its flaws and their own character, and others feel it.

People who love themselves find peace with themselves. They move towards their goals and achievements calmly and confidently. They’re brimming with joy and happiness. If a man is satisfied with himself, people around him will treat him the same way.

10 reasons to love yourself

1. If you don’t love yourself, then how can you expect others to love you?
2. No matter how you look and what people think of you, you’re unique. Don’t you think that the fact is that there’s no other person like you in the Universe is weighty enough to start loving yourself?
3. Even if you don’t respect yourself yet, you’re still an integral part of this life, and maybe only you have the opportunity to change it for the better.
4. Only after you learn how to love yourself, you can truly love someone else. After all, it’s impossible to give something, not knowing what it is.
5. Self-love is the first step on the way to inner and outer harmony in your life.
6. Showing love for yourself and your body, you don’t let illnesses and sorrows break your spirit.
7. Loving yourself, you learn to love your life, surrounding yourself with interesting people.
8. Self-love is an opportunity to create something for people around you.
9. Self-love is the only way to discover your true self.
10. Once you learn to love yourself, you’ll open the whole new world you never noticed before. And most importantly, you’ll begin to live a life full of emotions.

Now that you see why loving yourself is so important, it’s time to figure out what self-love means.

Meaning of loving yourself

People perceive the concept of self-love differently. For instance, someone’s diet consists only of fast food, and they say that they just love themselves too much to resist the temptation. But in fact, fast food is, rather, a nice way to make your life a bit shorter and has nothing to do with love for oneself.

So, what does loving yourself mean? First and foremost, self-love is self-respect, that is, a respectful and careful attitude towards yourself in general: to your body, your emotional state, your health, or your soul if you want. We’re not talking about narcissism when a man is completely fascinated by himself. We’re talking about respect for everything we’re made of. Many have problems with this. They can take good care of themselves, develop intellectually and spiritually, but at the same time suffer terrible discomfort in certain aspects of their lives, living with people they don’t love, working jobs they hate, being in a depressing environment, and suffering emotionally. And this completely violates all the unwritten laws of self-love.

Being in places where we feel uncomfortable and with those who exhaust us, we humiliate ourselves. At this moment a person doesn’t respect his own emotional state, which affects the physical one, too. If it’s your case, then you just don’t understand the importance of loving yourself.

Loving yourself doesn’t mean...

Being selfish

Paying too much attention to ourselves, we often forget that our behavior affects others. Our physical and spiritual comfort shouldn’t cause discomfort to other people. It’s clear that by taking care of ourselves, we expect others to pay special attention to our own person. But we shouldn’t forget that no one owes us anything, and we can’t demand much from people.

Pampering your weaknesses

I love myself, so why not reward myself with a cigarette at the end of the day? Why not skip training and take a nap instead? Why not drink a couple more shots? This is not self-love. You’re just indulging your bad habits, not loving yourself.

Justifying your bad attitude to others

Sometimes we’re unfriendly towards people around us, being overly aggressive, or even yelling at strangers just because we think such behavior is a manifestation of our feelings. Of course, you have the right to anger, resentment, or irritation. But this doesn’t mean that you can be rude to people.

Ignoring your feelings

Yes, you don’t need to ignore your feelings either. You love yourself, so you try not to notice sad things happening around you. But if you come across such things, hiding in a shell isn’t the best idea, as negative emotions will remain in your head. You have to get rid of them immediately. No one will deal with your feelings better than you.

We can say that a man is able to love himself only when he forms his self-esteem at the expense of his victories over himself, or when he does something unusual or new to himself. Something that he didn’t dare to do before but always wanted to. At such moments, his self-esteem gets stronger, and he starts to understand what it means to love himself. If there’s no self-respect, then there will be no place for self-love.

Steps to loving yourself

Now, let’s move on and find out some practical tips. So, how do you start loving yourself?

Step one: learn to forgive yourself. Forgiveness is the most important step that can’t be missed. We all have moments we wish to forget because they’re too painful and insulting. If you want to learn how to love yourself, you need to start with forgiving yourself for these moments. Dwell on them and realize that the past can’t be changed, and it’s foolish to let it affect your future.

Step two: stop feeling like a victim. A man who doesn’t love himself will never find happiness. For many, the problem of self-love lies in early childhood and starts with parents, who teach that one should compromise, share, and ignore insults. Sure, this is important, but there must be a line one shouldn’t cross. As a result of such upbringing, a person starts to believe that self-respect and self-love aren’t the main traits. You need to explain to yourself that being a bit egoistic is normal. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can just step over people, but there’s no need to sacrifice yourself and your life either.

Step three: learn to praise yourself. How to start loving yourself? Praise yourself as often as possible. Pat yourself on the back for cooking a delicious breakfast or not smoking a cigarette, for walking instead of driving, or for a job well done. Don’t focus on small troubles, but if there is something to praise yourself for (and there’s always something), be sure to do it. Still proud of yourself for asking that girl to prom? Praise yourself again. Do it every day before going to bed.

Step four: Start giving yourself gifts. Feeling nervous? Having stress? Give yourself a gift! Pamper yourself with what you love. It can be a movie ticket, a delicious dinner, new clothes or shoes, a cup of coffee, whatever. Just think about what you would like and make yourself a small present. You need to associate this gift with pleasant emotions. We give gifts to those we love, right? And it’s so great to see their smiling faces. So why not give a gift to yourself? After all, we also love ourselves, and we also need to please ourselves.

Step five: start talking with your reflection in the mirror. Talk to your reflection in the mirror for at least five or ten minutes every day. It’s great if you have a large mirror in which you can see your whole reflection. Stand in front of it and address your reflection by name. Choose the words you like to hear most. Tell your reflection that you’re a wonderful person and say everything that you’d like to hear from others. Try to praise yourself instead of criticizing. You don’t want to hear criticism in your address, do you?

4 things you should give up to start loving yourself

Now you know how to start loving yourself and what you should do to boost your self-esteem. But that’s not all. If you want self-love to become an integral part of you, you’ll have to give up a few destructive habits. So, if you’re ready to embrace the feeling of self-love, here are four things you should leave behind.

1) The habit of judging yourself and others. You probably know how hard it is to swallow unkind judgment. But you don’t feel better judging yourself. So why not stop doing it? There’s nothing wrong with the desire to make yourself a better person, but the critical approach isn’t the best in this case.

2) Letting your appearance affect your self-esteem. Before you begin loving yourself, first thing you need to learn is to stop letting the changes in your body define your personality. Sure, it’s ok to be a bit sad because of extra pounds you gained, but such fundamental trait as self-love shouldn’t be affected by that.

3) Resisting changes. When things you’re not able to control change, it can harm your feeling of being important, as the role you’ve been playing for years no longer exists. That’s the main reason why we’re afraid of changes. But you’ll have to learn how to stop resisting inevitable changes sooner or later.

4) The habit of identifying yourself with people around you. We often let relationships define us, as we begin to identify ourselves with our loved ones, forgetting who we are. Start loving yourself first and see yourself as a unique personality.

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