Self Love

6 Steps to Self-Love

Feb 03, 2021

6 steps to self-love

Self-love is one of the best ways to prioritise your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. As the name suggests, it means to love and accept every part of yourself for who you are.

This means choosing to take actions that support your wellbeing and happiness by putting your needs first, being less self-judgemental, and being true to yourself.

Studies have shown that self-love can help combat depression and anxiety, and it can enrich every aspect of your life including relationships, work, and family.

To help you on your self-love journey, here are six changes you can make today that will prioritise your happiness and wellbeing.

Commit to learning

To truly love yourself, you have to go all-in and commit yourself to making YOU a priority.

As such, it's important to take the time to discover new self-care methods so you know what works best for you. This could be taking the time to read a self-care book, listen to a self-care app, or to join a network of like-minded women with a common goal, such as in the Feel Look Be programme.

The key is to remove anything that will distract from your self-care journey and commit to new ways to care for yourself.

The importance of knowing 'The Power of Now'

In his book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Eckhart Tolle says, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”

That's because nothing is more important than NOW. It's easy to spend time and energy focusing on the past or worrying about the future, but all that really matters is the present moment in time.

Choosing to prioritise your current choices and live in the moment allows you to enjoy living your life minute by minute.

Accept and acknowledge what's happened

It's important to remember that nobody's perfect. We're all guilty of pressuring ourselves to live up to an impossible ideal where we please everyone and never make mistakes. But the thing is, mistakes are good! They help us learn and grow.

So rather than looking back on past choices with regret or worry, choose to forgive yourself and embrace your decisions for helping to make you the wonderful strong woman you are today. Don't look at them as mistakes, but priceless life lessons.

Make yourself No.1

Self-love isn't selfish. Prioritising yourself is an absolute must on your happiness and wellbeing journey. So never feel bad about choosing to put yourself first and take time to focus on your needs.

When you're juggling work, family, and your social life it can be easy to spread yourself thin and put yourself last. To help avoid this, schedule in daily 'me-time' moments - parts of your day designed to focus on your mindfulness, happiness, and taking care of yourself.

The power of sleep

It's so important to prioritise sleep. When you've got 101 things to do each day, sleep can seem like a chore. In fact, when life is busy and stressful, having an early night can make a huge difference to your mental and physical health.

It will also re-energise you for the day ahead. Dr Merrill Mitler, a sleep expert and neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health said, "Well-rested people [operate] at a different level than people trying to get by on one or two hours less nightly sleep,” as sleep affects "growth and stress hormones, our immune system, appetite, breathing, blood pressure and cardiovascular health.” 

Creating a healthy bedtime routine will help turn a 'Must I go to bed?' attitude into a 'I must go to bed!' attitude.

I talk about the importance of sleep in this video

Choose positive people

Research suggests that the company we keep can influence our physical and mental wellbeing, and that some health behaviours - such as anxiety and happiness - appear to be contagious. 

Part of prioritising self-care is to make an active choice to remove negative energy from our lives. Taking the responsibility to only surround yourself with positive, supportive, and uplifting people is liberating and helps ensure that focusing on the now and living in the moment is always a positive experience. 

Feel Look Be

I'd love for you to prioritise your wellbeing this month by joining the Feel Look Be programme.

Starting on Monday 8th February, it's a four-week programme that helps women prioritise self-care (inc. nutrition, mindset, fitness, and health) with daily meal plans, live workouts, live mindset training, and a focus on how to love yourself. Find out more here.