What is self love? Self love has been seen in the past as vanity and selfishness. There is another definition; the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines self love as giving regards to one’s own happiness.

Self love is one of the most important steps to living a happy and fulfilling life. Having self love will impact your life in great ways.

Becoming Mindful of yourself is one of the steps to achieving self love. To be mindful, you need to be thinking about yourself. You need to put yourself first in certain situations. You need to focus on what you want for yourself personally and not what others want for you. Let’s say that your parents want you to be a doctor, but you want to be an artist. You need to focus on your best interest.

Act on what you need in life. Don’t focus too much on what you want, but what you need in life. To stay focused on what you need in life you can’t have negative distractions in life.  A negative distraction in life can be just one person. If someone is always bringing you down, making you feel bad about yourself, or isn’t helping you excel as a person, then they don’t deserve to be in your life. Once you recognize that they have no benefit in your life, you should be able to kick them out of your life.

Practicing self care is another good step to reaching self love. Being emotionally well is just as important as being physically well. Taking care of your body is just another step to making you feel good. You can’t expect your body to be healthy when you stay up till 3 a.m. and eat junk food. I had an ice cream sandwich at 2am yesterday, so we all do it. We should just do it less.

Setting boundaries and limits for yourself is a very important step. As human beings we make mistakes. We aren’t perfect. We can’t handle being under a lot of pressure and stress 24/7. It’s to much on yourself mentally. Let’s say that you have an 2 essays due,  you work from 4-7 p.m. on weekdays, and your friend is relying on you to tutor them in Science.  You won’t be able to handle all that work. Try dropping or rescheduling the tutor session with your friend. If they are a true friend they’ll understand the situation.  Or maybe try to get someone to cover your work shift. You have to cut something. When you set limits and say no you’ll be able to love yourself more.  Set limits or say no to things that harm you mentally, physically, or things that express yourself poorly.

❤Loving yourself should come before everything else.❤