How to Love Yourself: Treat Yourself Like Your Own Best Friend

Everything you've done and everywhere you've been is a part of who you are—you!

Self-love isn't about fixing all the "bad" things about yourself. Instead, accept that they're all parts of the same whole. When you love yourself, you love all of you because you wouldn't have the good without the bad.

If you expect yourself to be perfect all the time, you'll never be pleased with anything you produce. This can lead to low self-esteem. Instead, make a point to appreciate the work you put into completing a task, rather than looking for flaws in what you produced.

This should be practiced rather than focusing on the negative things. It's human nature to see negative things as bigger and more important than positive things, but this also does tremendous damage to your self-esteem. When you find yourself focusing on negative or less favorable events in your life, immediately try to name 3 to 5 things that you can be grateful for. Look for the positive side even when bad things happen to you.

When you call yourself a name, you reduce yourself to a single thing that you don't like—you're not treating yourself as a whole person. If you wouldn't call your best friend these names, don't call yourself those names either!

This sort of "catastrophizing" is really bad for your self-esteem because you spiral from a small error to basically believing that everything is doomed—and that's rarely the case. Challenge those thoughts with realistic and logical observations to reframe your conclusion.