The average self-love score is a 53 on a scale of 0-100, according to a massive, multi-country survey1https://www.thebodyshop.com/en-us/about-us/activism/self-love/self-love-index/a/a00043. So, if you struggle to love yourself, you are certainly not alone!
In this guide, we will equip you with habits, practical actions, and spiritual practices to help you cultivate a loving relationship with yourself.
What is Self-Love?
Self-love is the feeling of acceptance when you look at and think about yourself. People with high self-love are usually confident, happy, and positive about themselves and their situation in life. They also tend to avoid people-pleasing and treat themselves with respect.
People with high self-love tend to: | People who struggle with self-love tend to: |
Regularly practice self-care | Neglect self-care |
Hold healthy boundaries | Struggle to set boundaries |
Have positive thoughts running through their mind | Experience negative thought spirals |
Choose partners who respect them | Settle for unfulfilling or even toxic relationships |
Enjoy their successes | Downplay their successes because they feel undeserving |
Strive to build an awesome life that matches their desires | Settle for life conditions that aren’t a good fit |
Why Is It Important to Love Yourself?
It’s important to learn how to love yourself because otherwise, you will never feel truly content, happy, and at peace.
Self-acceptance is a precursor to self-love. If you never accept who you are, then you will always be in a tussle with yourself. You’ll always feel tension that you should be different or better. When you look in the mirror (literally or introspectively), it will always feel like something is wrong and needs to be changed. But when you can truly rest in who you are, you can feel tremendous relief and peace.
And once you turn that acceptance into love, then you don’t just tolerate the person you see in the mirror; you embrace and celebrate them! This feeling makes life so much lighter and more enjoyable.
Science2https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125121005.htm supports this notion: feelings of being loved have been linked to feelings of well-being.
Think of what it feels like to love another person. A partner, friend, family member, or animal. You simply enjoy their essence and want them to succeed. You can also feel this way toward yourself!
19 Tips To Love Yourself When You Don’t Know How
Most of us were never taught how to love ourselves. So, for many, this can feel like learning an entirely new skill. But like any skill, self-love is very learnable! Try out the tips below.
Loving-kindness Meditation
Another approach to finding self-love is through the Buddhist practice of metta, which translates to loving-kindness (although you don’t have to be Buddhist to practice this).
To offer loving-kindness to someone is kind of what it sounds like—sending loving feelings their way. I like to think of it as rooting for them.
Metta meditation is usually taught in five steps:
- Offer loving-kindness to yourself
- Offer loving-kindness to a dear person in your life
- Offer loving-kindness to a neutral person in your life
- Offer loving-kindness to someone who you find difficult
- Offer loving-kindness to all living beings
While step 1 is the most literal way to love yourself, all five steps will help open your heart to others and yourself. However, for some people, it may be beneficial to offer love to themselves first before expanding it to others.
For some, this practice might take effect right away. For others, the phrases may feel rote and mechanical at first. However, if you give it time, studies3https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176989/ do suggest that practicing loving-kindness meditation increases positive emotions, decreases negative emotions, and increases empathy.
Action Step: Try it out!
Many meditation teachers suggest using a mantra to offer metta. Here are some:
- May I be happy
- May I be strong
- May I be safe from negative thoughts
- May I be at peace
Try to close your eyes and say the affirmations several times to yourself, bringing your mind back to the mantra gently every time it gets distracted. Then, go through the other 4 steps.
If you’d like a guided version of this Meditation, here’s a good one from renowned Buddhist teacher and loving-kindness aficionado Sharon Salzberg:
Pick friends that raise you up.
One choice you can make to show yourself love is to select a social circle that gives you love and energy. These are the genuine, honest people in your life who will support you, even during the low times of your life.
We very rarely stop to take stock of who is closest to us.
Action Step: Fill in the blanks below:
I spend the most time with these 5 people:
I spend the most time thinking about these 5 people:
Now, take a look at those lists. Do you like them? Do these people give you energy or take energy from you?
Keep the people who bring you up. For those who weigh you down, can you create distance and bring more positive people into your life instead?
If you’re not sure how to meet new people, try one of these approaches:
- Join a social club on Meetup.
- Learn how to make friends as an adult.
- Find a group sport you love.
- Join a religious group.
- Volunteer!
- Write a pen pal.
- Learn to network online.
- Join People School to meet like-minded professionals.
If you are in the market for new friends, you might also want to brush up on your conversation skills. If that’s the case, check out this training to help you become a conversational wizard.
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Mirror exercise
Here’s an activity to shift your narrative around how you view your body.
Many of us experience some type of body dysmorphia. We might see pictures of friends and admire how beautiful and radiant they are. But when we see ourselves in the mirror, it’s almost like we’re looking at one of those “funhouse mirrors” that distort what we see.
To chip away at this narrative, try something else.
Try to look in the mirror and search for things you appreciate.
Action Step: Look in the mirror and state aloud 5 things you appreciate about your body.
It doesn’t have to be the biggest, most groundbreaking thing. It could simply be the cute freckle on your knee. The more you do this, the more you will habituate how you see yourself.
View yourself as a friend
So many of us have brutal self-talk. If someone plays a sport and makes a mistake, you might hear them shout at themself, “You idiot!” Or a creative person might make art and call it “crap.”
This type of self-talk is common.
But can you imagine if you talked to a friend like this? If you yelled at them for any tiny error they made and regularly called them an “idiot?” Or called their art “crappy?” You’d be fired from your friend duties right away!
One of the most powerful inner switches you can make is to treat yourself like a best friend.
Good friends accept, support, and encourage each other.
Action Step: The next time you catch yourself beating yourself up, take a pause and ask, “What would a best friend say to me right now?” Then try to tell yourself just that!
Write yourself a love letter
This is a creative, sweet, and effective way to strengthen inner self-love dialogue.
Just as you might write a love letter to a partner or dear friend, try writing one to yourself.
You can even go the extra mile and glitter it up with markers and stickers and mail it to yourself.
Action Step: Get out paper, markers, and a pen and write a love letter to yourself. Try to include things you appreciate about yourself and things you are proud of.
Find a loving part of yourself
This is the ultimate tip in self-love.
Find some part of yourself that can always tap into love, acceptance, and compassion. This part of you will probably feel wise and calm. The HeartMath Institute4https://www.heartmath.com/blog/health-and-wellness/what-is-heart-coherence/ is a group that has dedicated itself to scientifically studying human states of love, calm, and peace. They refer to self-love as a physiological state called “coherence.”
This is a state of being that feels calm, grounded, and heartwarming. There are lots of ways to get into a state of self-love (or coherence). You can:
- Think of a beautiful place in nature where you feel totally at peace and grateful
- Reflect on a pleasant and heartwarming childhood memory
- Think about someone who you love most in life
- Conjur up a memory of a time when you felt loved and cared for
- Imagine the energy of happiness, love, and joy as an energy that is emanating from your heart
This state of being is always there, and if you slow down, you can always access it.
To live from a place of self-love is to find the part of you that can always offer love and spend as much time there as possible.
Action Step: If you’re not sure how to find this part of you, here is a beautiful meditation from the late spiritual teacher Ram Dass to help:
Positive journaling
On a similar note, here’s a journaling activity borrowed from Tony Robbins.
It operates on the idea that if you orient your attention and embodied experience toward positive emotions, then those feelings will grow.
Here’s what you do:
Action Step: Answer the following questions:
- What do I feel proud of in my life?
- What about that makes me feel proud?
- How does that feel in my body?
- What do I appreciate about myself?
- What about that do I appreciate?
- How does that feel in my body?
- What do I feel joyful about in my life?
- What about that makes me feel joyful?
- How does that feel in my body?
Feel free to riff off these prompts with other positive feelings.
Stop tolerating
If you feel short on self-love, you might create crummy life circumstances for yourself.
Maybe your apartment is a mess with a constant stack of dishes and fruitflies. Maybe you eat the same unsatisfying canned tuna every night.
But imagine you had a romantic partner who you loved deeply. If you were going to have them over for their birthday, what would you make your place look like? What would you do for dinner? You’d probably feel inspired to clean the place up, buy some flowers to put out, and cook a beautiful dinner.
That would be a devotional act of love to your partner.
And I’m sure you know where I’m going with this…
You can do the same thing for yourself!
Treat yourself like your own romantic partner who deserves beauty and nice things.
Action Step: What in your life are you tolerating?
If you were your own romantic partner, what changes might you make?
Reflect on your strengths
It can feel so nice to have your strengths acknowledged. And you can be the one to acknowledge them!
Being good at something helps propel you forward and gives you a sense of purpose.
Are you good at writing? Drawing? Board games?
Dig deep and ask yourself this question:
What am I good at?
Action Step: See if you can come up with at least 5 answers to each of these questions:
I am good at _____.
I am great at _____.
I am amazing at _____.
Some people might resist acknowledging their strengths because it might feel rude or like they are bragging. But in this case, I’m giving you permission to celebrate your gifts!
Practice gratitude
Gratitude is one of the best practices for offering care to yourself.
Some days, it might feel hard to find things you are grateful for. But even on such days, you can be grateful simply for the gift of life!
Mel Robbins says in her TEDx talk that the chance of even being born is 1 in 400 trillion.
How amazing is that!?
To put 400,000,000,000,000 into perspective, here are some more odds:
- The odds of choking to death5https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-to-choking-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,from%20choking%20per%20100%2C000%20population.&text=Choking%20is%20also%20hazardous%20among%20young%20children. on a piece of food: 1 in 2,696.
- The odds of being struck by lightning6https://www.britannica.com/question/What-are-the-chances-of-being-struck-by-lightning#:~:text=The%20odds%20that%20one%20will,struck%20by%20lightning%20every%20year. at some point in your life are 1 in 15,300.
- The odds of winning the lottery7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics#:~:text=If%20the%20six%20numbers%20on,in%2049%20chance%20of%20matching.: 1 in 13,983,816.
Putting your attention on the ways that you are lucky is a form of loving yourself.
Action Step: Try writing out the following:
- 3 experiences from today you are grateful for
- 3 people in your life you are grateful for
- 3 personality traits of yours you are grateful for
Adopt the perspective that you have nothing to prove
Some folks struggle to offer themselves love because they feel like they need to prove something first. Either prove something to their parents, their peers, society, or themself. They need a certain amount of money or endless career growth before they feel worthy of love.
The only problem with this approach is: what if you never get there?
What if you never have enough money or you never feel successful enough? What if you can never “prove” your worth?
Usually, the reason people want to prove themself is so that they feel worthy.
But another perspective you can take is to bypass the “proving oneself” stage on the road to worthiness. What if you see yourself as worthy right now? You don’t have to do anything or impress anyone. You are worthy of love and respect just by being here and being you.
How would you spend your time, and what projects would you embark on if you had nothing to prove?
Action Step: Try journaling on these questions:
- What do I feel like I have to prove?
- Who do I feel like I have to prove myself to?
- What does that feel like?
- What does it feel like to imagine that I already had the approval I was seeking?
Break the habit of immediately saying “yes.”
“Sure, I’ll help you move this weekend!”
“Yes, I can meet you whenever works for you.”
“I’ll be there!”
If you say yes to every offer that comes your way, then you will build a life full of other people’s desires.
But what about what you want?
When you set boundaries, it isn’t just about saying no to others; it’s a profound act of self-love.
One way to offer yourself love is to say no to others, which gives you room to say yes to yourself.
Setting boundaries also sub-communicates to yourself that you have self-worth and self-respect. Plus, it’s impossible to have healthy relationships without healthy boundaries.
Action Step: The next time someone asks something of you, don’t answer right away! Take five minutes to get very clear on if you are actually a “yes” to the request.
Recognize that self-love can be harder for marginalized groups
Self-love is a journey. And it’s one that can often be steeper for marginalized1https://www.thebodyshop.com/en-us/about-us/activism/self-love/self-love-index/a/a00043 or historically oppressed communities. You may have received subtle (or not-so-subtle) societal messaging that you aren’t valued or that you need to be different than you are.
This relentless messaging can tint your self-perception and embed deep-seated conditioning that’s hard to shake off.
Acknowledging this struggle is a crucial step in consciously unlearning these biases and embracing a self-love that’s both healing and revolutionary.
Carve out some “you” time
In the relentless pace of life, carving out time for yourself is a necessity. Whether it’s a night, a weekend, or even a dedicated 10 minutes each day, this “you” time is a sanctuary for rejuvenation.
It’s in these moments of solitude that you can reconnect with your inner self, rediscover your passions, and simply breathe.
Without time for yourself, you’re living on other people’s schedules and hooked onto their agenda.
Action Step: Can you schedule a weekend for yourself sometime in the next few months where you can do whatever you want?
If that’s too ambitious, how about a single day this month?
And if that feels too tough with your life circumstances, how about 10 minutes this week?
Straighten up your finances
Here is a practical and down-to-earth way to show yourself love. Get financially healthy! Financial health is an important part of self-care.
Of course, money won’t give you meaning. But if you are living in financial scarcity, the lack of money makes life a whole lot harder and more stressful.
According to PwC’s 2019 Financial Employee Wellness Survey8https://www.pwc.com/us/en/private-company-services/publications/assets/pwc-2019-employee-wellness-survey.pdf, 65% of women and 52% of men listed financial matters as the main cause of their stress.
Getting your finances in order is a way to reduce your stress. Wouldn’t removing some stress be a loving gift to yourself?
If you’re a financial beginner, I recommend brushing up on these resources:
- Learn 61 ways to save money.
- Try a simple 3-fund portfolio.
- Learn to budget smart with You Need a Budget, or YNAB for short.
- Or try one of these budgeting apps
Please note that we are NOT financial advisors, so take this advice at your own risk. 😉
Make sleep your night job
One way to show yourself love is by being kind to your body and letting it sleep as much as it wants to.
Did you know a lack of sleep can increase your risk of cancer9https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/what-happens-to-your-body-when-you-lose-sleep, cause thinking issues, lead to weight gain, and even contribute to depression10https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/detecting-depression#1?
We’ve all had those days where we regret watching just one more episode of Gilmore Girls.
How would your boss like it if you showed up late to work every morning? I want you to respect your body and be on time for your sleep.
Turn your phone off, black out the lights, and unleash the lavender mist. Whatever it takes to be consistent!
Treat your sleep like a job.
Take the trip
If you feel short on self-love, you might talk yourself out of going for the things you really want in life.
Maybe it’s quitting your job or finally trying out piano. For many of us, it’s travel.
Many folks have a desire to try out a big trip, but it feels unattainable. Too far away. Too difficult. Or they think things like, “Psh, who am I to travel the world?”
But you can! And one way to offer true love to yourself is to give yourself permission to take risks and go for what you want!
When I left my comfortable home in Atlanta for the unfamiliar city of Shanghai, I had no idea I would:
- learn Mandarin
- love eating stinky tofu
- make lifelong friends around the globe
- or even meet my future husband
So when people say you’ll “find” yourself when you travel… I think there’s an opportunity to find MUCH more.
Misfortune (“I lost my flight ticket!”), bewilderment (“People live like THAT!?”), and general annoyance (“Not another fly!”) will likely happen.
Plus, by learning a new perspective in life through travel, you’ll gain a greater appreciation of life… and, hopefully, learn to love yourself even more!
So, if you haven’t been bit by the wander bug yet, ask yourself:
What’s the best thing that could happen?
Channel creativity
One way to support your self-love journey is to create.
Why? Imagine your body is a vessel that fills with energy.
If the energy isn’t released, that vessel eventually overfills and flows over. This excess energy often leads to negativity, anger, and self-hatred.
We need to avoid excess energy and find a way to channel it.
Now, this isn’t just a bunch of voodoo magic. There are studies11https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804629/ that show a relationship between having a creative outlet and mental and physical health.
My challenge for you is to find a way to create or express. It could be dancing, knitting, writing, or guitar. And if you already have an outlet, continue to do it! It doesn’t have to be an amazing feat; anything counts!
Here are some resources to get your creative juices flowing:
- Ultimate List of Hobbies for Adults
- How to Unleash Your Inner Creative Genius
- Our video below with Chase Jarvis on how to find your creative calling:
Seek out a therapist
Another option is to get some support on your journey of self-love and mental health.
Therapy is a powerful way to untangle your childhood conditioning and trauma and to find a clearer picture of who you are underneath.
If you’d like to take this route, Psychology Today is a great resource for finding a therapist in your area.
Takeaways on How to Love Yourself
Maybe we should all take the famous advice of Justin Bieber – love yourself.
But remember, love is a journey.
No matter how fast you want to be loved, self-love grows slowly like a tree. Once you plant the roots and do any of the practices from this article, it takes time to see the roots blossom.
But once they do…
I promise you, the journey will be worth it.
Here are a few tips to remember:
- Find a loving part of yourself and return to it as often as possible
- View yourself as your own best friend, and treat yourself that way
- Take a few minutes to write down the things you are good at
- Pick friends who bring you up
- Carve out some ‘you’ time
And if you’d like some ideas on how to improve your confidence, you might appreciate this guide.
Article sources
- https://www.thebodyshop.com/en-us/about-us/activism/self-love/self-love-index/a/a00043
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191125121005.htm
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176989/
- https://www.heartmath.com/blog/health-and-wellness/what-is-heart-coherence/
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-to-choking-in-the-us/#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the,from%20choking%20per%20100%2C000%20population.&text=Choking%20is%20also%20hazardous%20among%20young%20children.
- https://www.britannica.com/question/What-are-the-chances-of-being-struck-by-lightning#:~:text=The%20odds%20that%20one%20will,struck%20by%20lightning%20every%20year.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics#:~:text=If%20the%20six%20numbers%20on,in%2049%20chance%20of%20matching.
- https://www.pwc.com/us/en/private-company-services/publications/assets/pwc-2019-employee-wellness-survey.pdf
- https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/what-happens-to-your-body-when-you-lose-sleep
- https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/detecting-depression#1
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804629/
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