People know how to forgive others and be kind to them, but when it comes to themselves, it’s a different ball game for them. They kept on being harsh and stressing themselves to achieve something as It’s a human tendency to think that to achieve and produce anything in life, one needs to be self-critical and harsh on oneself, and as a result, one forgets to be kind to oneself and develop self-hatred.
But the flip side is more powerful. self-compassion and self-love are equally important to accomplish any goal as they teach you to be kind to yourself and how to accept yourself with your flaws to make this journey more beautiful and peaceful. It is essential to learn self-love, self-care, and self-acceptance for a better quality of life. So in this blog, we will explore some ways to help you incorporate self-love in your daily life.
Table of Contents
What is Self Kindness?
Self-kindness is a concept that makes you learn to accept yourself with your existing flaws and qualities without judgment. This is a state of showing self-compassion to oneself and forgiving yourself. Incorporating self-kindness in daily life is essential to love yourself as it teaches you that it’s okay to care for yourself and be kind towards yourself without being self-critical and judgmental.
BENEFITS OF SELF KINDNESS
The benefits of self-kindness are beyond your imagination. it is something that is enough to motivate you to start treating yourself with kindness and while falling you to love yourself.
- Reduce stress and anxiety: Anxiety and stress can reduced by learning to love yourself. When you love yourself, you start feeling good about yourself and your existence which makes you feel lighter, reduces stress, and increases inner peace.
- Help to fight life challenges: Life is uncertain, full of ups and downs, and keeps on giving more bitter surprises than sweet, so one thing that can keep you resilient and keep you going in this tough time is self-love. It teaches you to forgive yourself and love yourself, emphasizes you to be yourself and stop seeing yourself as a victim.
- Make you accept yourself: Oftentimes we are not happy with the way we look, earn, live, or the types of people we are surrounded by. As neither life nor any person is perfect, we need to accept ourselves and our life to live a more fulfilling life. Incorporating self-acceptance in your life requires you to learn self-love that can teach you how to love and be kind towards yourself to make this journey easier.
WHY SOME PEOPLE PEOPLE FAIL TO LOVE THEMSELVES
Now you might be wondering when self-love, self-care, and self-respect are such an important aspect of human life then why some individuals fail to incorporate them in their lives. There are two major reasons for that: unawareness and self-criticism.
UNAWARENESS: Suppose in a family where a child has never seen her or his parents practicing self-love or take out some time for themselves then how can we expect from child to do so in the future, when he is unaware of what it is and even if someone knows about it still people do not know how to incorporate it practically in daily life.
SELF-CRITICISM: Most people are best critics of themselves rather than being self-lovers. It is common to see that if anything wrong happens to anyone the first person they will put down or blame is themselves. Their self-critical inner voice does not allow them to be kind to themselves and love themselves.
6 WAYS TO LOVE YOURSELF
BE KIND TO OTHERS
Self-kindness journey begins with how you treat others, whether with kindness or hatred. Treating others with kindness is the first step towards self-kindness. Small gestures of kindness like offering a chair to others before you sit, providing a tissue to someone who is crying, or offering a hand to someone who has fallen will be enough to develop a sense of self-kindness, compassion, and empathy in you. By default, the way you treat others is the same way you treat yourself. As you become used to that feeling,it makes it easier for you to feel for yourself also, Hence it is easier to nurture and love yourself when you become kind to others.
MINDFULNESS
Learning mindfulness is essential to love yourself. In this modern life, things can take upside down at times, which makes it complicated for one to manage his or her emotions or thoughts. It leads them to fall into the trap of negative thoughts and as a result, they become too harsh on themselves and start harming themselves mentally and physically without knowing by taking unnecessary stress.
So practicing mindfulness is key to learning to manage emotion and thought and to learn self-love one needs to know how to manage emotions. it is the journey of self-healing and these emotions hurt individuals in ways that are unknown to them also. Mindfulness is a practice in which a person learns to stay in the present moment through meditation, breathing, or yoga to avoid taking unnecessary stress of the future and past and just relax in the moment.
MANAGE NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
Oftentimes you have heard people saying that they can not stop overthinking when they are alone and most of the time they are thinking negatively about themselves as we are the biggest self-critic of ourselves.
But how can we love something that we hate or think negatively about, we can’t right so then how can we love ourselves when we are constantly nagging, judging, and thinking negatively about ourselves? Negative thinking about oneself is the biggest roadblock in the journey to love yourself.
To overcome this roadblock you need a rational approach in which you need to find out what these negative thoughts are about, whether are they about the past or future, or if can you do something about the things you are thinking of, yes then do it, and if not then learn to let it go.
ACCEPT MISTAKES
You messed up your first date, exam, or interview and feel bad about it. But is ok it is just a mistake next time be more careful, sometimes only in this simple phase do we need to tell ourselves when we commit mistakes but we fail to do so. It is easier to say this phrase to others than to ourselves. When we make a mistake we keep on asking ourselves why we have done that, I should not done this way or it could be better, and blah blah …..
The journey to self-love begins with accepting yourself with all flaws and especially accepting yourself as human. We are full of flaws and we tend to make mistakes, but we forget this oftentimes and keep on being too harsh on ourselves. It is better to learn to accept and forgive yourself for your mistakes just like you do for others to love yourself wholeheartedly and be more compassionate.
PRACTISE SELF COMPASSION
In the journey of self-compassion, it is important to accept yourself the way you are. As humans, we are full of errors and flaws, Hence tend to make mistakes because we are designed this way but we forget this fact often and keep on creeping into the mistakes we commit and keep on getting stressed about it. Self-compassion will teach you how to be kind and love yourself while accepting flaws in yourself.
FIND PURPOSE
Finding a purpose and following it is a way of self-love because in this journey you try to connect yourself deeper level to understand who you are what you want from life and how you will achieve it.
This journey provides you clarity about yourself, and your inner wishes that make you feel more satisfied, happy, and accountable to yourself. Finding your purpose will give you a sense of direction, inner peace, and more reason to love yourself.
CONCLUSION
In the journey of self-love or being kind towards oneself, one needs to be a little patient and determined towards oneself. To love yourself you need to break earlier patterns of self-criticism and self-hating to embrace the self-compassion. Self-love is only about knowing yourself more and accepting it to love yourself more.
FAQ
Q1. Why self-kindness is important?
Self-kindness is important because it allows a person to accept and love himself while accepting his or her flaws. It makes a person more strong, resilient and gives them inner strength by making them believe in themselves and their abilities.
Q2. What are some acts of self-kindness?
To practice self-kindness you do not need to do something big. Small acts to Nurture yourself like taking a rest when you feel tired, making yourself your favorite pasta with some expensive wine, calling your loved ones, and listening to your favorite music, will be more than enough to make fall in love with yourself.
Q3. Can self-affirmation help in self-kindness?
Yes, self-affirmation is the best way to practice self-kindness because it makes you realize your self-worth with positive words and it also helps to keep your negative emotions down and make you feel lighter and happier.