The first part in the self-love series helped us to understand just what self-love is and gave us some framework for identifying self-love in our lives. As we incorporate more self-love there are numerous benefits that go along with this addition that are definitely the icing on the cake of this healthy practice.
Mental health benefits:
Honoring yourself is the first step in the lifelong journey to nurture personal growth and learning to manage adversity. The practice of self-love teaches you the importance of putting yourself first and in time gives us the following:
· Increased happiness.
· Improved self-awareness.
· Improved self-esteem.
· Improved self-forgiveness.
· Decreased stress, anxiety and depression.
· Improved self-acceptance.
· It assists us in building our confidence to set boundaries in relationships and learning how to say no to things that don’t honor your needs or bring you joy.
· Self-love improves our relationship with ourselves, but also with others because when we feel better overall we interact with others in a more positive way. It makes us more empathetic to others because we are now showing ourselves more compassion and patience.
· Self-love also gives us the capability, over time, to become less reactive emotionally by teaching us how to calm down instead of immediately getting upset and reacting to a stressor. By practicing self-love we learn to take time to stop and think about what is going on. Through this we improve our resilience when things don’t go our way.
· Through simple daily actions and a mindfulness practice, we can cultivate a sense that we are worthy, valuable, and lovable no matter what is or isn’t happening around us. We can learn to interrupt our default thought patterns and instead show ourselves the care we all deserve.
Physical health benefits:
Through prioritizing ourselves and our needs we can:
· Take time to get up, move around and stretch as our body indicates it needs to.
· Take time to go to the gym or take a walk outside to improve your thinking, learning and ability to make rational decisions. It can also reduce feelings of anxiety.
· Regular exercise leads to improved brain health, weight management, and reduced risk for certain cancers and other diseases.
Benefits of self-compassion (which is related to, but different from Self-love):
· Greater happiness.
· Higher optimism.
· More ‘good moods’.
· A greater sense of wisdom.
· More motivation and willingness to take initiative.
· Increased curiosity, learning and exploration.
· Higher agreeableness.
· More conscientiousness.
Those with low self-compassion have a greater risk of avoidance of their problems, more rumination over negative thoughts and feelings and overall worse functioning.
In seeing all of these benefits and qualities listed above, I find it truly amazing and encouraging to know that we are able to do that for ourselves. As you will see in the final part of this series there are simple changes, choices and potentially some new habits that can be formed to put you on the path to having these benefits in your life!
References:
Next time:
Stay tuned for my next blog in 2 weeks for Self-Love Part 3: 12 Tips to Cultivate Self-love.
Related Post Links:
Self-Love Part 1:
Self-Love Part 3:
Author: Jen Hassaj | 3-8-23
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