Five Practices of Self Love to Build Inner Peace and Confidence

Photo Taken: Rickets Glen State Park Benton, PA

What is Self Love?

I believe that self-love is acknowledging and taking ownership of pouring into your own cup, and creating healthy boundaries so that you do not allow others to define or determine your worth.

Self-love is a vital component to improving your overall wellbeing, confidence, and happiness. Practicing self-love should be prioritized each and every day of your life.

Humans tend to train their brains to focus on finding happiness through external validation. Rather than trying to improve our overall wellbeing through our own pursuit of passions, talents, hobbies, and behaviors, we continue to chase societal norms, post achievements, hide failures, hyper-focus on materialism and consumerism, and chase social status to give off the illusion that we fit in, are successful, and happy.

We ignore achieving internal validation through self-love when we focus on external validation. When you choose to tie your worth to how others in society view you, you lose sight of what success means to you.

The holy spirit perfectly crafted us to not only serve others selflessly, but to live a life in alignment with our truest and most authentic self. The Holy Spirit wouldn’t want you to do what everyone else is doing, the Holy Spirit would want you to follow your heart and pursuit the things that bring you peace and joy when pouring into your own cup.

Pouring into our own cup by practicing self-love will take years to prioritize, and decades to master.

When you learn to fall in love with who you are, what makes you happy, and how you define success; you stop looking for approval and validation from others, and start training your brain to pursue the things that bring you confidence, peace, and joy.

Practicing Self-love and building inner confidence will always result in people formulating their own opinions about you. The real superpower of self-love and inner confidence is you choose to believe the only opinion about yourself that matters- your own.

When you begin having a strong sense of self by pursuing acts of self love, you will not allow other people’s opinions of you to hold power over you and your worth. When you don’t allow people’s opinions to hold power over you this is how true confidence and inner peace is discovered.

Self-love practices should be a main focus of each day, even when we are in bad head spaces due to negative self-intrusive thoughts.

The point of today's blog is to share 5 acts of self-love that have really benefitted my own overall wellbeing, confidence, self-worth, and internal peace. You can take from this blog what resonates and leave behind what doesn't.

As a wellness coach, I have learned that not every wellness tip, self-help book, self-improvement blog, or mindfulness practice aligns with me. As I continue to heal and grow, I adopt the self-help practices that resonate with me and my routine and let go of the ones that don't. I hope one or many of these acts of self-love I am sharing with you today resonate and work for you the way they have abundantly worked for me.

Self-Love Tip #1: Feel ALL the Feelings

30 years of my life were consumed by hiding, minimizing, or straight up ignoring any negative emotions and feelings I had when I was going through a challenging life experience. Instead of processing how I was feeling in the moment, and sitting with my feelings, I would choose to become avoidant with my feelings and distract myself with work, social media, drinking, the gym, gossiping about others, or fixing other people's problems so I didn't have to focus on my own.

Humans can spend an entire lifetime avoiding negative and uncomfortable feelings. Choosing to face these uncomfortable feelings is a vital part to growing, healing, and learning about ourselves.

Each and every one of us is full of flaws, traumas, and insecurities. When we are trying to seek validation from the external world we try to shove any negative feelings, flaws, insecurities, and traumas down so that we appear like we have a picture-perfect life, and are successful. Sometimes hiding feelings can also be a trauma response to not feeling seen and heard as a child, and that is how you continue to manage your emotions as an adult.

Practicing and trying to implement Tip #1 gives you permission to acknowledge and heal through all your feelings, even if you used to be avoidant of them in the past. The positive, negative, uncomfortable, and sad feelings are okay, and I encourage you to feel them all. Acknowledging your feelings, along with your strengths, shortcomings, insecurities, and flaws allows you to process, grow, and heal towards being a better version of yourself in the present and for the future.

To truly appreciate joy is to fully understand and embrace what the abstinence of joy feels like. 

Self-Love Tip #2: Monitor The Energy in Your Environment

The second act of self-love flows from the first act. It is not only important to feel all your feelings, but also monitor your energy in the environments you are spending a lot of time in.

If someone is making you feel uncomfortable, tearing you down, or criticizing you in a way that is not constructive but demoralizing, monitoring your energy around this person helps you realize what rooms you don’t belong in, or at least certain environments you need to set healthy boundaries in for future interactions.

It is a true act of self-love to pay attention to your energy after spending a prolonged amount of time with different individuals in the environments you spend a lot of your time in.

There is your work environment, home environment, social environments, family environments, church/religion environments, and networking environments.

You can be around individuals and environments that recharge you and make you feel refreshed, while other individuals and environments will make you feel drained.

If you don’t spend time monitoring your energy, and practicing awareness around the people you interact with, you can become drained and have constant feelings of burn-out.

The more often you self-reflect and check in on your energy, the better you get at protecting your peace.

As Newton liked to say, “Energy can not be created nor destroyed.” It’s important to remind yourself and reflect on where you are depositing your energy. Some environments will take your energy without any reciprocation or return, while other environments the energy that you give is reciprocated back to you in some capacity or even more.

Tip #2 is so important to practice daily. Just like finances, you should monitor what you spend when it comes to your energy. If it feels your only spending and not receiving, a healthy boundary needs to be created to protect your peace, and overall wellbeing. Protect yourself from the environments that drain you, and relish and find joy in the environments that recharge you, and bring you peace.

Energy can not be created nor destroyed. Monitor your energy.

 Self-Love Tip #3: Create Healthy Boundaries to Protect Your Peace

The third act of self-love can be very hard for most individuals to implement, especially if you suffer from chronic people pleasing, and seeking acceptance of others.

A boundary is defined as an imaginary line that limits access or marks the edge of something. In tip #2 we talked about monitoring your energy around people and environments. When you become aware that certain people or environments are not improving your overall wellbeing and costing you a sense of peace from expending too much of your energy, that is where a boundary needs to be created.

Boundaries (when it comes to your overall wellbeing) are simply a way to limit the energy and access others have to you. If you are surrounded by a person who criticizes, makes fun of you, is chronically negative/complaining, or brings you down; most the time you can just stop associating with this person. BUT... Life has a way of getting challenging if this person is a colleague, a family member, part of your friend group, or a roommate.

A healthy boundary limits the access of energy that you are investing into someone else, so that you can preserve your overall wellbeing, inner peace, and continue to live a life in alignment with your true and authentic self.

Life does like to hit us with challenging circumstances, and cutting off complete access of yourself may not always be possible, but setting a healthy boundary would be the next best thing.

Tip #3 has helped preserve my overall wellbeing and confidence since adopting healthy boundary setting. If you utilize tip #1, # 2 and tip #3 together you really have the tools to continue fostering acts of self-love for yourself, while preserving your inner peace and confidence.

Healthy boundaries when it comes to your overall wellbeing limit the energy you are investing in someone else so that you can maintain your energy, inner peace, joy, and happiness. 

Self-Love Tip #4: Positive Investments Into Your Daily Diet and Exercise

Your physical health and nutritional health play a role in your overall wellbeing. The foods that you eat, and physical activity are two ways to model treating your body like a temple.

The food you eat impacts not only the energy you have to physically move your body but also plays a huge role on your brain health.

Have you ever had a small period of time where you eliminated and minimized sugar, and focused on healthy whole foods? When you do this in your daily routine you feel more energized, have less brain fog, and feel in a happier state mentally. The issue with processed foods is that they are hyperpalatable and super addicting, which creates a chronic addiction for the need, want, and desire of processed foods. When you eat highly processed foods your brain does trigger a dopamine "happy" response, but most of the time after this quick dopamine jolt has ended, you are faced with regret for not prioritizing the right foods to fuel you body with.

I am not saying never eat the things you love and enjoy if they are highly processed, but learning moderation, and prioritizing whole foods is a true act of self-love.

The same principle applies to movement and physical activity. Strength training not only sets your aging body up for success, but it has shown in research to make a positive effects on your mental health and mood. As a wellness coach I have never come across someone who regrets working out, but I have come across many individuals who tell me that they "wish they would have made the time." Self-love for yourself would be adopting diet and exercise as a high priority, and making time for it.

It is important to consume proper foods to fuel your body, and prioritize strength training and cardiovascular exercise. These acts of self care ensure that you are creating a health balance mind, body, and spirit. 

Self-Love Tip #5: Positive Investments in Your Spiritual Health

Tip #4 talked about developing healthy diet and exercise habits to sustain a healthy mind, body, and spirit. I wanted to dive a little deeper into the meaning behind "spirit." A person's spirit is made up of who they are at their core.

Our core could also consist of fears, traumas, and insecurities that we may need to discover about ourselves and better understand.

A spiritual journey helps us to uncover these deepest darkest secrets about ourselves, and gives us the power and opportunity to continue loving ourselves through it all.

Although diet and exercise can help connect our mind, body and spirit. Other spiritual health deposits can look like:

• Moments of silence in nature reflecting on your life's purpose

• Allowing yourself to feel negative emotions, but processing and reflecting on what could be causing them

• Prayer and meditation

• Deep Breathing

• Gratitude Practices
  

Choosing to nourish your spirit is an act of self-love because it will help you develop a strong sense of self. Your purpose is often times deeper than showing up at a 9-5 job, and then going home to sleep. We find ourselves in robot mode at times by only doing the things we have been conditioned to do. True discovery of self can only be unthethred through spiritual and reflective practices.

You may find fulfillment by working a 9-5 job to pay the bills but spiritually feel charged when you donate your time caring for animals at a shelter. You may feel encouraged or dedicated to spreading the word of God. You may feel a strong desire to teach and guide others on their fitness journey because of how much living a healthier lifestyle has positively impacted your life.

Pouring into your spiritual health is a great way to develop a stronger sense of self and find your higher purpose. It takes an entire lifetime to grow down into who you are at your core. When you pour into your spiritual health, you can start living a life more authentically and true to who you are. Self-discovery through spiritual health practices is also a great act of self-love to develop more peace, balance, and confidence, and abundance in your life.

A healthy person nourishes not only the mind and body, but also the spirit. 

Thank you for tuning in today to this blog post, and I hope you adopt and practice the acts of self-love that resonate with you.

Much Love and Happy Habits,

Juliane Volosky

Author of the Happy Habits Health and Wellness Blog