How to Feel Better About Yourself
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.”
– Oscar Wilde
Feeling better about yourself can happen in a lot of ways. But, ultimately, feeling better about ourselves means ‘feeling’ is the operative word. I make this clarification for a few reasons…
In American culture, I have found that we are taught to overly cognize our experience while diminishing the felt qualities of said experience. It may be that this phenomenon is common in other cultures as well but I can’t comment on that due to my own limited experiences.
One of the challenges working with trauma is that it can cause us to dissociate, or disconnect, from various aspects of our experience. When dealing with elevated levels of stress it can be common to disconnect from our felt experience.
This happens as a way of coping with the physical discomfort caused by distressing experiences in our bodies. Tuning out, or tolerating, physical discomfort and pain can be a sign of how we have learned to soothe intense physical experiences rather than caring for ourselves in those moments.
I also notice that a lot of men have a difficult time establishing a connection to their feelings. My personal take on this is a social critique and how men are taught to relate to their feelings.
Socially, we (men) are taught that feelings and emotions are not good, or weak, and by extension, if we experience them, we are not good or weak. This has led to an epidemic of emotionally disconnected men.
Whatever the reason for being disconnected from our feelings, the reality is such that, feelings are a language that our body uses to communicate with us. We think thoughts, we feel feelings.
Feelings are felt in our bodies and tell us something about the lived experience we are having. Since feelings arise in the body, to feel better, we must get more deeply connected to our body and felt experience.
If we want to feel better about ourselves, we need to start with feeling better in our bodies. When we feel better being inside of our own skin, we will feel better about ourselves.
With all that being said, let’s take a look at some ways we can effectively work to feel better about ourselves.
Improve your relationship with yourself
First and foremost, we need to improve our relationship with ourselves. If we have disconnected from our body in some ways, or have a bad relationship with our body, then we may have a difficult time positively connecting to our feelings.
Work on building trust with yourself. This happens over time, just like any other relationship. If we have a tendency to neglect ourselves or not pay attention to our needs and wants then we are actively eroding trust and the relationship we have with ourselves.
If we neglect our relationships with others, they will deteriorate. The same can be said for ourselves. To cultivate the relationship with ourselves, we must set aside time and energy to actively build that relationship over time.
Show up for yourself. This is one of the ways we can actively build trust. In the same way that showing up for others improves our relationships, showing up for ourselves improves our internal relationship.
Relationships are cultivated over time. It takes time to build trust. We have to show up repeatedly and consistently. If you, or somebody you know, struggle with trusting themselves, this is one of the primary ways to improve that.
It takes consistent energy applied over time…that’s also a metaphor for anything else in life worth doing…it takes consistent effort applied over time.
Take time to get present with your needs and wants. Find creative and healthy ways of taking care of yourself, honoring your experience, and getting your needs met.
Take regular time to check in with yourself
In the spirit of getting your needs and wants met, take time to check in with yourself regularly. Make it a regular practice. Plan it daily, weekly, or however often you find it is needed. Here are some questions to guide the process:
- How are you feeling?
- What do you need?
- What is working?
- What isn’t working?
- What could be better?
- What is left undone?
- What do you lack for tranquility?
Taking time to get present with yourself will help you get connected with how you are feeling. It goes a long way towards learning to acknowledge your wants and needs. Once you can get connected to yourself you can then take action to do things to feel better.
Learn to love yourself unconditionally
One of the barriers to feeling better about ourselves is that we may not show ourselves enough love regularly. This can take many forms but the easiest is actually telling ourselves, “I love you,” regularly. How often do you tell yourself, “I love you?” When we are in intimate relationships with others this can be a common occurrence. But, with ourselves, it may not be as common.
Get in the habit of saying “I love you” to yourself multiple times every day. You don’t have to have a reason to say it. Just say it. And, mean it.
If you find that you have a hard time telling yourself “I love you,” it may be worth taking a deeper look at. It may also be worth looking at how you can love others. Being unable to show yourself unconditional love may be a reflection of a tendency to give ‘conditional’ love. Meaning, to show love to others they have to earn it. This can create obstacles in relationships.
If you have been on the receiving end of conditional love then you know how it feels. If our parents showed us conditional love growing up, then as we get older we may not feel that we deserve love unless…fill in the blank.
This is where so many challenges for loving ourselves arise. I will love myself when… I will take care of myself when… I only need to do this one thing or make this grand achievement, then I will know that I deserve to be loved. In some weird masochistic way, we may engage in unhealthy love as a way of proving to ourselves that we deserve to be loved.
If you find that you may be doing this, I’m here to tell you…cut that shit out…please. You are worthy and deserving of love no matter what. We are all human. We all make mistakes. We all have flaws, face barriers, and confront obstacles along the path of life. This doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be loved. It just means that life can be challenging.
If we look into the world and look at the examples of violence and destruction, in many ways a lot of it can be traced back to the perpetuation of lovelessness.
If we truly love ourselves then how can we engage in acts of violence and destruction? Those actions afflict the perpetrator and the victim. The creation of trauma just perpetuates from there and spreads through relationships and interpersonal interaction.
In a previous post, I wrote about the contagiousness of emotion. If we go even deeper than that, we will find that love and lovelessness are also contagious. The way we treat ourselves will reflect to those around us. If we don’t know how to truly love ourselves, can we truly know how to love others?
There is an epidemic of lovelessness in this world. It starts with us repairing that. Love yourself every day that you are alive. You deserve it. And, it sets the stage for every other relationship you will enter into. If you love yourself conditionally, consider that you are loving those around you conditionally as well. The better you can love yourself, the better you will be able to love those around you.
You are worthy and deserving of love all the time. Just because you have made mistakes doesn’t mean you don’t deserve love. If you haven’t made mistakes, you aren’t really living.
Quit the judgment and the criticism
One of the ways that we show ourselves conditional love is through our habits of internal criticism and judgment. The ways we criticize and judge ourselves are ways that prevent us from showing up lovingly for ourselves fully. We may not like certain qualities about how we think or feel but rarely is criticism or judgment the answer. Actually, quite the opposite.
When we criticize and judge ourselves we disown parts of our experience that may be more helpful for us to embrace. Instead of resisting the darkness, accept it and honor it as part of your human experience. This doesn’t mean to act on it…it just means to honor and acknowledge it.
By giving space to the totality of who we are, we give permission to ourselves to feel hurt, disappointed, broken, or many of the other challenging emotions that can be difficult to feel.
This sets the stage for what you accept about yourself and what you don’t. Learn to accept and love it all.
Practicing mindfulness is a great activity to help break the chains of judgment and criticism. It is the art of practicing non-judgmental awareness. To be present with our thoughts and feelings as they are without judging them and letting them be without attachment.
Start with forgiveness
Practice forgiving yourself every day. This can be a powerful practice. I would also recommend practicing forgiving yourself for all the little things that may seem insignificant.
When we let little things pile up they can turn into much larger things. This can lead to a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ type scenario. Give yourself some grace and be willing to forgive yourself daily.
Just because you forgive yourself doesn’t mean you won’t learn a lesson or that you will forget something that may be necessary for growth. It just means that you won’t hold onto damaging thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
Forgive yourself for holding onto things that bring you pain, frustration, anger, or other painful feelings. Be willing to take a deeper look at destructive feelings you may be holding onto.
Emotional labor is a real thing. Spending too much energy holding onto destructive feelings will slow you down and drain your limited supply of time and energy.
Forgiveness is a tool by which we give ourselves permission to let go of emotionally draining experiences. If you find yourself having a difficult time practicing forgiveness, get meta with it. Forgive yourself for having difficulty forgiving. You may find that simply acknowledging the difficulty is enough.
Forgiveness doesn’t require us to be perfect. It requires us to acknowledge, honor, and give grace to ourselves and our life experience. Even if you have difficulty forgiving, simply honoring that reality and not judging it can do wonders in feeling better about yourself.
Practice self-care regularly
Practicing self-care is all about being intentional to make space and time to care for ourselves. I mean, it’s even in the name…if we want to feel better about our-’self’ then practicing ‘self’-care is a means to do just that.
Self-care is about preserving and maintaining our homeostasis. Anytime our stress response is activated, it disrupts our internal homeostasis. Having techniques for restoring and balancing our physiology can help preserve our well-being, restore homeostasis, and uplifting our internal experience.
When feeling stressed, take time to practice deep breathing, go for a walk, journal, color, take time to play, or find some way of getting your body into a relaxed state. If you want to know more about how to manage stress, you can read a previous post of mine about how to Kill Stress to Death.
If you want to feel better about yourself, treat yourself as if you matter. Practicing self-care is a practice that demonstrates and affirms to yourself that you matter and your well-being is important.
This goes back to the point about building trust with yourself. When you practice self-care regularly, you are actively building trust with yourself by directly honoring your relationship with how you feel and taking care of yourself.
Write a love letter to yourself
Take time to write a love letter to yourself. Take time to write an affirming and loving letter addressed to you. Be your own admirer. Use this as an opportunity to speak lovingly to yourself.
Acknowledge your strengths, apologize to yourself for anything you may be holding onto, accept your flaws, forgive, and thank yourself. Writing a love letter to yourself is an opportunity to affirm, acknowledge, and support yourself.
What are you proud of? What are you knowledgeable about? How can you show yourself love regularly?
Here is a link to 30 self-love journal prompts that can help you get started on your love letter to yourself. Don’t hold back.
Practice daily love habits
What better way to feel better about yourself than to make sure that you build habits around affirming self-love? Just as we build habits that lead to successful life practices, build habits that promote self-love.
Many of the things mentioned so far could be love habits if practiced regularly. So, do just that. Find a practice in this post that you like and make sure to plan and practice it regularly. Put it in your planner. Make sure to carve out time for it. Prioritize it at the top of your list.
Love has to be nurtured. Nurture your self-love with affirming practices that help you feel better. Loving ourselves cannot be taken for granted. It doesn’t just happen. It is a result of actions taken to develop and cultivate it.
Just as the plants in our garden grow by being nurtured and cultivated over time, our self-love grows by nurturing, cultivating, and attending to it.
Eat well, hydrate, practice good sleep hygiene, and exercise regularly
This is an honorable mention. The fact of the matter is, feeling good about ourselves is a felt experience. If we feel like shit in our body…then we are going to feel like shit. It’s that simple.
To feel good, we have to take care of our bodies. That means making sure we are eating nutritious foods, keeping our bodies hydrated, practicing good sleep hygiene, and exercising regularly.
This doesn’t mean you have to overhaul everything you’re doing to accommodate this. But, it does mean, that if you are neglectful in these areas, it will contribute to you feeling less than stellar in your body.
Add some greens to those meals. Drink an extra glass of water or two throughout the day. Keep a consistent sleep schedule by going to bed and waking up at the same time every day. Walk around the block when you’re feeling sluggish. Get some cardio in to get that diaphragm moving.
You can practice all the self-care in the world and if these basics are not in place, you may be sabotaging all your effort. Make sure that some part of your routine addresses these things if you want to feel better about yourself.
To sum up
- Check-in with yourself regularly
- Love yourself unconditionally
- Practice mindfulness — the art of non-judgemental awareness
- Forgive yourself regularly
- Practice self-care regularly
- Write a love letter to yourself
- Practice daily love habits
- Eat well, hydrate, practice good sleep hygiene, and exercise regularly
In the end, you can’t help anyone get somewhere you have never been. If you want to love others and be loved by others, it is built on a foundation of knowing how to properly care for, and love, ourselves. Otherwise, knowledge and understanding are missing.
Take space and time regularly to cultivate your self-love and you will feel better about yourself. You will feel better about your relationships. And, you will feel better about life in general.
