What is self-love? Why do you need to love yourself to live a happy, successful life? Before taking medicine to cure your headache, you make sure it produces the desired effects and is suitable for you.

Similarly, to be convinced that self-love is the key to a happy, healthy, and successful life, you need to be certain of its wonderful effects and this is precisely what we will discuss here.

Let us look at all the ways through which self-love helps you reclaim your life and happiness, and enables you to kiss all your worries, troubles, and negative thoughts an ultimate goodbye.

Self-Love Leads to Self-Acceptance

One major reason why you demean yourself is because you don’t embrace yourself completely.

A survey conducted by the ‘Action For Happiness’, which is a renowned charity organization shows that self-acceptance is directly related to happiness and it is the one habit people practice the least.

HAPPINESS FACTS:

According to Action For Happiness, “Western neuroscience has now confirmed what Eastern wisdom has known for a long time: happiness is a skill we can learn.

Research shows that happiness, compassion, and kindness are the products of skills that can be learned and enhanced through training, thanks to the neuroplasticity of our brains.”

Since you don’t accept yourself, you stay unhappy with yourself and when your life is governed by unhappiness; you remain gloomy and depressed all the time, making you lose interest in your life.

However, by learning to love yourself, you slowly make peace with your flaws and mistakes, which gradually helps you practice self-acceptance and as you accept who you are, you become at peace with yourself.

In addition, self-acceptance helps you accept your flaws as well as encourages you to improve them and your life, which consequently improves the quality of your life.

Hence, self-love leads to self-acceptance, which helps you live a better life.

Self-Compassion Helps Improve Your Health

A study published in the ‘Health Psychology’ journal proves that self-compassion helps you make better health decisions, which in turn improves your health and physical well-being.

When you love yourself, you look for the best things for yourself.

Since you are dedicated to providing yourself with the best of everything, including good food, the right amount of sleep, and sufficient physical activity, when you bring these healthy changes into your life, your health automatically improves and when you become physically healthy, your emotional well-being improves too.

In addition, being physically healthy makes you mentally stronger which enables you to set the right goals for yourself and pursue them to become successful.

Self-Love Makes You Optimistic

Why Do You Need To Love Yourself To Live A Happy, Successful Life?

Are you are a victim of depression, anxiety, chronic stress, and other emotional and mental conditions of the sort because you harbor negative thoughts and constantly ruminate over them?

When you hold a negative thought, you let it stay in your mind for a long time which strengthens it making you constantly ponder on it and think in a similar direction.

Once you do that, you indirectly pave the way for the aforementioned issues.

For instance, when you lost a cycling competition, you experienced a thought that said,

“I lost the competition to an amateur. Gosh, I’m a loser.”

If you ruminate on this thought and have it at the back of your mind constantly, you’ll continue demeaning and devaluing yourself which will slowly make you hate yourself.

When you do that, you become anxious and depressed.

On the other hand, if you love yourself, instead of discouraging yourself, you will comfort yourself and tell yourself that it’s okay to lose and you’ll fight back.

This precise thought makes you optimistic and gives you the hope that you can do better. Hence, the practice of being compassionate towards yourself makes you optimistic as shown by various studies including the research by Dr. Kristin Neff.

Self-Love Boosts Your Confidence

Why Do You Need To Love Yourself To Live A Happy, Successful Life?

When you have good thoughts about yourself, your self-esteem improves because you value yourself and know you are worthy of love and praise.

As your self-esteem improves, your self-confidence increases as well because when you value yourself, you feel courageous and strong enough, to do what you want, and this boosts your confidence.

As your confidence increases, you find it easy to pursue your dreams and achieve them.

Hence, loving yourself has a monumental role in improving your self-belief and self-worth and making you successful.

Self-Compassion Improves Your Productivity

A research study mentioned in the journal ‘Self and Identity’ shows that people who procrastinate a lot have high stress- levels and low self-esteem levels.

This means that one big reason behind why you procrastinate often and have low productivity is because you aren’t happy with yourself and don’t love who you are.

When you don’t nurture positive thoughts about yourself, you feel you lack the ability to do something and this feeling is one of the many excuses that pave way for procrastination.

However, by simply being kinder to yourself and encouraging yourself to do something, you can reduce your stress levels and beat procrastination.

When you combat procrastination successfully, you make the right use of your time, get things done on time, and improve your output.

As your productivity improves, so do your chances of becoming successful. Hence, you need to love yourself in order to de-stress, become productive and successful.

For further reading, see our article on Self-Actualization.

Self-Love Helps You Get Through Bad Times

Not only does self-compassion help you improve your life through the many ways discussed above, but it also helps you get through the rocky phases of your life successfully.

A study discussed in the ‘Psychological Science’ journal discovered that recently divorced people who were kind to themselves and practiced self-love could easily get over the dilemma as compared to those who were harsher on themselves.

When you love yourself, you understand that bad times are a part of your life. So you shouldn’t blame yourself for those undesirable episodes. Instead, you give yourself hope of a better tomorrow and comfort yourself that everything will be fine.

This calms you down and helps you persevere through the hard times and this makes gritty which is by far one of the most important traits you need to become successful and happy.

Practical Steps To Take To Love Yourself

• Pamper yourself: These days that we need to be careful, take time out to give yourself a home spa treatment. Light candles. Have a warm bath or shower with nice smelling body wash, then rub essential oils all over and finish with some lovely perfume.
• Guided Meditations: There are quite a lot of them on YouTube. Check out self-compassion.org for some Self-Compassion Guided Meditations and Exercises.
• Watch Humorous programs on TV or listen to music you love.
• Read books or magazines to lift your spirits.
• Wear make-up every day and look gorgeous all the time

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