What is Self-Love?

Self-love means that you accept yourself fully, treat yourself with kindness and respect, and nurture your growth and well-being. Self-love encompasses not only how you treat yourself but also your thoughts and feelings about yourself. When you love yourself, you have an overall positive view of yourself. This doesn’t mean you feel positive about yourself all the time. There will be times when you feel angry, disappointed or frustrated with yourself, but you still relate to yourself with love. You learn to love and accept yourself irrespective of your shortcomings without magnifying their importance. Now let’s learn why is self-love important:-

1. Self-love is important for self-growth. It helps you be aware of your needs and goals and respect them. 

2. Self-love creates healthy relationships. People who lack self-love, don’t value themselves, often form people-pleasing behaviours, putting others’ needs before their own and are more likely to tolerate abuse or mistreatment from others. 

3. Self-love attracts positive energy. The energy of how you feel about yourself, your focus, and your spirit can be either a strong attractor or a detractor of what you want and need in your life. You will see a remarkable change in people’s behaviour shifting favourably towards you if you practice self-love.

4. Self-love is important for happiness. Without self-love, you tend to overvalue the needs of others, putting yourself and your needs as the lowest priority. Many even make self-sacrifice their motto, believing that this will make others happy. This behaviour might seem noble on the face of it, however, creates resentment and unhappiness within,

5. Self-love enables you to love others. Loving yourself enables you to love others in a better way. By loving yourself, you eliminate unnecessary jealousy, insecurity, and anger from your relationship. Since you have learned how to appreciate yourself, you are more capable of appreciating others as well and providing them with unconditional positive regard.

A big barrier to self-love is the belief that self-love = narcissism. But self-love is NOT the same as being narcissistic, it’s simply a positive way of relating to yourself.

We’ve made a comparison below on how self-love differs from being narcissistic :-

Another common barrier to self-love is that people believe that if they love themselves, they are being selfish. However, there is a fine line between, being selfish and loving yourself.

We’ve created a comparison below to help you recognise the difference between the two: