This list is inspired by Mindspo's series about Top 10 Rules for Self-Love.
As a mental health therapist, I know a lot about helping teenagers improve their self-love and I'm ready to share with you my TOP 10 RULES FOR SELF-LOVE.
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RULE 1: Prioritize + Maintain Your Basic Self-Care
Self-care is of the utmost importance. If you are not taking care of yourself, other people won't know how to care for you and you won't know how to communicate your needs moving forward.
So if you want to love yourself and you wanna improve your relationship with yourself, it's really important to take care of all of those basic self-care needs.
I'm not necessarily talking about the luxurious self-care that we all love and enjoy: doing face masks or painting your nails or buying a new car. Nothing like that. Though that is very important to self-care and it is important to splurge every now and again.
I'm talking about the very basics. Like making sure that you take care of your hygiene, that you are getting well-rested sleep, that you are keeping yourself well-fed and your nutrition is solid.
So check in on those basic self-care needs and make sure that you are staying on top of that.
RULE 2: Show Appreciation
Show appreciation to yourself, your body and for your own capabilities, your emotional experiences, all of that.
Also, be sure to show appreciation and express that to others as well.
We often take for granted what we appreciate. We assume that because we appreciate these things other people know that we appreciate that. But it's sometimes really good to go out of your way and let them know very clearly, kindly, and directly,
RULE 3: Be Kind
Oh, my goodness, kindness is so important. When you can just be a kind person, it makes everything smoother and gentler.
Oftentimes, when we feel frustrated or upset or really passionate about something, that can be a little off-putting to people. And now they're paying much more attention to the emotions that you are putting out there and not necessarily what your request is or what your boundary is or whatever it is that you're trying to express.
It might be hard to be kind in all of your interactions, so if you find yourself being unkind, try pausing and course-correcting, and that will make a huge, huge difference.
When you put kindness out there, people will be kind to you in turn. It's really difficult to be unkind to somebody who's so kind. You kinda feel bad about it, right?
Showing kindness to yourself and to other people will help you improve your self-love relationship.
RULE 4: Stay Curious
Oftentimes, when we find ourselves assuming or filling in the blanks without actually fact-checking or considering other possibilities, we can land ourselves into some pretty troublesome, negative downward spirals.
How many times have you texted somebody expecting an immediate response and they don't respond for many hours or even many minutes?
SO Stressful, right!!?
Suddenly we have created all sorts of scenarios like, "Oh my gosh, what if they're hurt? What if they've been in an accident? Even worse, what if they've forgotten about me?" Ooh, it does not feel good.
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So instead, before you have all the facts, don't fill them in.
You might consider them, but also stay curious to other more positive possibilities. Perhaps their phone battery died and they thought that their phone was charging, but it wasn't plugged in all the way. Perhaps they're needing to save their data for something. Perhaps they're not in a good spot where they can readily text you back immediately.
There are a variety of reasons that somebody might not be behaving in a way that we could understand or that is upsetting to us.
One of the ways that I really like to practice curiosity is by playing the “What If?” game. This is a game that I like to play by myself, with other people, where you literally like set a timer, like say for six minutes and you think of all the worst-case possibilities or scenarios: What if they died? What if they're hurt? What if they did forget about me? You just kind of go down that negative spiral.
Doing this can help to unearth some of those scarier thoughts and validate that these are possibilities. The likelihood of them actually being true might not be as accurate, but like you wanna give yourself some credit for even considering some of these negative possibilities.
Then set a timer for like maybe a minute and think of all the neutral possibilities. These are things that don't necessarily have a strong emotional charge one way or the other. They just kind of are: What if they didn't charge their phone? What if they are texting me back right now?
Then you wanna move on to all of the positive possibilities. So for this, I would double the time that you set your timer for the negative possibilities because it takes a little more energy and effort to train ourselves to think positively 'cause we are primed to consider the negative. It's all about safety. For example, if you set an alarm for six minutes for the negative, I want you to set an alarm for 12 minutes for the positive round.
Consider positive possibilities like: What if they're not texting you back because they're actually out buying you flowers? What if they're thinking of you right now? What if they actually haven't forgotten about you and in fact, they're in the middle of planning something really nice to do for you? Lots of different possibilities here so consider the positive too.
And again, go wild here. It doesn't have to be realistic. Just like the negative ones didn't necessarily have to be realistic. You just wanna give yourself some extra time to practice staying curious that there's more than one option.
Don't lock into an automatic response as being actually factually true, 100%.
RULE 5: Get Comfortable With Making Mistakes
You have to be okay with making mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. Life is not meant to be perfect. It's meant to be messy. That is how we learn and grow as human beings and individuals.
And if we never made mistakes, we wouldn't have the opportunity to learn, up-level, and adjust, or maybe improve something that caused that mistake to begin with.
I might even intentionally encourage you to go out and make a mistake on purpose. A small mistake. Like, don't make a big mistake like showing up to your SAT test an hour late. Don't do that. But maybe practice like walking around with two mismatching socks and see if anybody notices. Or maybe like forgetting to paint one of your nails and see if anybody notices.
Get comfortable making mistakes.
So when you make mistakes, you actually improve that loving-kindness feeling to yourself. And it reminds you that you are human and that it's okay. More often than not, we can repair from mistakes that we've made. Not always. Its not an absolute. But more often than not, there are workarounds around that or ways to improve things moving forward.
RULE 6: Ignore The Gossip
Now I know in today's world and age, people love gossip. People love talking about other people. People love considering why somebody did something. People love trying to like figure things out together.
If you happen to come across gossip that concerns yourself, ignore it.
It's not for you to hear. It's not for you to know. I know that's like a wild thing but what I have found is that more often than not, when gossip comes to me by way of another individual that has nothing to do with anything, it's almost always meant to serve up trouble.
And honestly, if somebody does not have the emotional maturity to talk with me directly about it, I might feel hurt about that of course. It's important to validate your emotional experiences. At the same time, if they're talking about you behind your back, it's really none of your business.
That says way more about them and their attitude and mindset and their experience than it does about you as an individual.
So keep that in mind. You will find yourself loving yourself a lot more if you're able to just kind of dismiss and ignore the gossip and just kind of tune it out and be like, "It's a bummer that they wouldn't just come and talk to me directly about that. I could set the story straight or clarify things for them." But if they're not willing to do that, there's really not much you can do in that situation.
RULE 7: Stay True To Your Values
Stay true to yourself, true to your values, and what is important to you. People are going to talk about other people no matter what. We literally have whole channels and reaction videos and movies and stuff dedicated to really just talking about people.
It kind of makes me feel a little icky, I find often when I find myself watching some of that reality TV show. Is it entertaining? Absolutely. But I find myself actually being more negative and antsy afterward too.
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What I found over and over again is that regardless of people talking badly about you or coming up with assumptions about you, if you stay true to yourself, do not feed into the gossip, and stay true to your values, people are going to notice that.
When your actions line up with what you say about yourself over and over again, that's building integrity. And integrity is going to be noticed by the onlookers even if somebody in the moment is not coming to your defense.
*Which I know is really crappy. I wish that more people would just like step up and challenge some of this stuff. But even if they aren't, they're gonna be watching and noticing how you respond to this.
If you can respond maturely and with kindness and grace, people are gonna notice that and they're gonna start questioning all that talk that that other person said about you. So staying true to yourself is gonna improve that self-love.
RULE 8: Validate Your Automatic Responses
It is so important to validate your automatic responses. Oh man, part of self-love is not always being gooey and kind to yourself though, I mean, that does feel nice. It does feel great.
Sometimes you've gotta step into the darkness.
You've gotta do some of the shadow work. You've gotta acknowledge the icky parts about yourself. And when you can validate that that is part of your human experience too, then tou're gonna feel so much better about yourself.
Being able to allow yourself the time, care, and attention to acknowledge those automatic negative thoughts, those dark feelings, those icky urges that you might be experiencing is going to let your automatic responses know, I see you. I notice you. I hear you. And then you can make a conscientious choice whether or not you want to move forward with that automatic response or if you'd like to pivot in a different direction. You get back in the driver's seat with that.
If you are looking for a little more help and guidance with that, I highly recommend that you check out the Coping Skills Crash Course. We go through a whole thing in there about how you can kind of like hang in there through some of these icky, uncomfortable feelings and thoughts and urges.
RULE 9: Feel Your Feelings
You've got to feel your feelings. You've got to allow yourself to experience the full breadth of all your feelings. Whether they are positive, whether they are negative, whether they are comfortable, or maybe they are really cozy, whatever that experience is, it's important to feel your feelings.
If you do not give yourself the time and space to feel your feelings, they will come out in some other way. Trust me. It's one of the things that I drill into all my therapy clients.
You've got to acknowledge and feel your feelings if you want to improve your relationship with yourself.
You can't love yourself if you're not loving all the parts of yourself and all the experiences of yourself. So it's important that if you are feeling sad, let yourself feel sad for a little bit. Don't just always push it away or push it to the side. Don't ignore it.
If you're feeling anxious, it's okay to experience anxiety. When you try to stuff it away is when things like panic attacks pop up or depressive episodes, or maybe some sort of like angry outbursts.
So by allowing yourself the time to feel your feelings in bite-sized pieces, you're actually going to be improving that relationship with yourself.
RULE 10: Share Your Experience With Others
We know that people need people. Now, a lot of people will say things like, "You have to love yourself first before anyone can love you." Ah, I don't think that's true. I know from the research that we need positive social support and connections to heal from things like depression, disconnection, and loneliness.
One of the main things that we find over and over again that we call a protective factor (something that actually improves our mental wellness and well-being) is positive social connections.
As you are going through this journey of self-love for yourself, share with others your experience. Share the positive, share the negative, and share all the different layers.
Now, when you are sharing, of course, you wanna make sure that you're not trauma-dumping on anybody. If you are finding yourself constantly spilling or like needing extra assistance with that, get a therapist. We are here to help you through those episodes. We're literally trained to listen and help support you in those moments and not make it about us. It's all about you.
Be selective that when you are sharing with other people that they have demonstrated trustworthiness. You don't have to share everything or the whole depth of your situation. You may wanna share like bite-sized nuggets here and there and see how they do with that before you share more with them.
When you are able to share and receive sharing from other people, that builds trust and intimacy. The more that you are able to build trust and intimacy, the more solid, positive, and healthy your social connections can be. And that is how you improve self-love.
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