Intro:

You might have heard this term before, and you may be wondering why is there so much hype around this term “self-love”? So what exactly does it mean? Self-love is the concept of maintaining your own well-being and happiness. (Google) Now, although it sounds very simple, most people don’t understand the significance self-love holds!
 So, let’s delve deeper into the topic of self-love and understand how everyone can take advantage of it!

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It’s not as literal or cliché as you might think! Just feeling a certain way about yourself won’t do the trick. You need to actually translate those feelings into actions. Like for instance, if you want to practice self-love through appreciating yourself, you may want to treat yourself to your favourite snack after completing a task. These types of actions subconsciously allow you to express love to yourself, rewarding yourself and motivating yourself for the next task.

Practicing self-love is a very healthy exercise. It allows you to maintain a positive image of yourselves. Now, there is a very fine line in being optimistic and naïve, you shouldn’t be unrealistic or naïve as that would be counterproductive. But, what you do need to achieve overtime is to balance out all the negative feelings we experience (such as anger, frustration or in general just being upset) with the positiveness you can cultivate within yourselves. This will allow you not to be put down by such emotions, because usually what happens is (with most people and especially me) that when I am in a negative emotional state, I start thinking about myself in a negative manner and degrade my perception of self-worth. In the long run, this can be quite damaging to a person’s personality.

Benefits:

Now, I would like to jump into the numerous benefits we can yield from practicing self-love. For instance, it gives us relief from stress and anxiety. Self-love makes us appreciative of ourselves and makes us accept all the good and bad qualities we possess. It makes us conscious of our blessings. You will realise that no one is perfect and everyone has both qualities and flaws. (You will eventually stop comparing yourselves with others!) You will embrace all your flaws because of which you won’t get stressed or insecure when you see other people excel in something you struggle in, because you’ll realise everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. This loving attitude that you will develop towards yourself, will also make sure you feel more comfortable in difficult situations as you will be able to count on yourself (trust yourself) to emerge successful from that situation. (For example, a presentation, or a deadline) (Four benefits of self-love and why it's important)

Personal growth:

Self-love promotes a feeling of satisfaction and serenity within yourselves. When you are satisfied with yourself (and have accepted that you have strengths and weaknesses and you are not insecure anymore), you’ll feel motivated to make strives and work on yourself. Instead of feeling miserable about your flaws and feeling like there’s nothing, you can do to overcome them, you will feel the urge to work on them and turn your weaknesses into strengths. Just by taking care of yourself, which includes taking in the right nutrition, getting the right amount of sleep, and working out. You are expressing self-love through all these actions. You are taking care of yourselves and appreciating what you are gifted with, and better yet even improving on it! That’s what I like about practicing self-love the most, that there is no going down! There’s always progression no matter how small a step you take towards self-love! (Four benefits of self-love and why it's important)

Now I’ll share some personal tips to get started on self-love!

Tips:

Now let’s move on and discuss some steps involved in benefiting from practicing self-love. So now I’ll share some tips on how to start practicing and incorporating some actions in your daily routine to express self-love. (These tips have personally done wonders for me! So, hopefully these will be helpful for you guys as well!)

First of all: Stop comparing yourselves to other! This literally cannot be said enough!! It is imperative to realise that everyone is different, have different strengths and weaknesses, and that you yourself are unique! There is no one out there that is exactly like you! You should be proud of this, and not get disheartened just because of a couple of qualities you don’t have.

This is a very unhealthy habit, as someone out there will always be better than you. It becomes very torturous on your mental health for you to keep on pestering yourself into becoming someone else. I feel like this is quite literally the opposite of self-love because you are constantly beating yourself up because you are not like someone else, without realizing that everyone’s journey in life is different so there’s no point in comparing yourself with others!! So if you change this attitude and start appreciating yourself for who you, that counts as self-love!(Four benefits of self-love and why it's important)

Another very important tip I can give you guys is to overcome your fears and weaknesses! After overcoming the habit of comparing yourself with others, you should move on to working on yourself (and hence express love towards yourself!). You should start evaluating and identifying your fears and weaknesses, I’d recommend you to slowly start working on your flaws. And the reason why I’m emphasizing on working on them slowly is because if you try to rush into fixing such problems you’ll get overwhelmed really quickly and from there on people have the natural tendency to just quit and hit the reset button on all the progress they’ve made till then.

By working on yourself and improving your habits, you will turn into a better version of yourself and show love to your body and mind!

As you guys might have noticed, mental peacefulness and taking care of yourself is the basic takeaway from this episode. We should always make sure we are in a good place both mentally and physically(It’s our responsibilities). Even if it means to put your needs above others, because at the end of the day, you have to start loving yourself before you can love anyone else.

Outro:

That brings us to the end of this episode! Thank you guys for tuning in to this week’s episode! As always, I hope the tips discussed during this podcast were beneficial to you. And please let me know your thoughts on this episode in the comments down below! Also, if you have any interesting topics, you want me to discuss in the future episodes, let me know!

If you enjoy my show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Spotify—and be sure to come back next week for a discussion of [next episode’s topic]. Until then, take care and Goodbye!

Works Cited:

“Four Benefits of Self-Love and Why It's Important.” Healthy Me PA, 2 Aug. 2022, https://www.healthymepa.com/2018/05/15/4-benefits-self-love-important/#:~:text=When%20you%20love%20yourself%2C%20you,creative%20and%20try%20new%20things.).