7 Tips for Self-Love: Considering the Neuroscience of Mind and Body
Author: Thania Siauw, Psychologist
One of the most frequent issues at the core of my work with people is a diminished sense of self-worth and love. This issue underlies symptoms such as insecurity or feelings of unworthiness in relationships, feeling “lost” in life, difficulties setting boundaries as a parent, bullying, depression, anxiety, identification as a woman or a man, and feelings of disconnection from ourselves and others. Our sense of self is critical in how we interact with the world, and how we expect and teach people to treat us.
I used to feel slightly fraudulent providing people with support in building their self-love, knowing that it was not something I myself had ‘mastered’. Self-awareness, study and counselling support has facilitated a lot of healing for me in this area in recent years, and this has hugely enhanced my practice as a therapist, helping me to practice what I preach, and model that not one human in existence has it all together. I have also realised that our definition of self-love is a constant work in progress, as it evolves through different developmental stages of our lives. Reaching deeper levels of self-acceptance and compassion as we grow older can be a beautiful way of continuously improving on ourselves and cultivating new, flourishing neural pathways that lead us to feeling more well and happier in general.
Working on myself in this way has helped me to understand on a more profound level the incredibly hard work and courage it takes for my clients to develop self-love in a manner that is real, meaningful and enriching. I also now believe that it is okay for my clients to see me as human, rather than as some kind of constantly well-functioning robot. This helps them to see themselves with more compassion, and makes the counselling experience of working on oneself more humanising and realistic, and less focused on ‘workbooks/goals/outcomes/results’. During the counselling process, clients will often experience major shifts in the way they feel and view themselves; however, I consider it a huge success in itself if someone can simply be vulnerable with me, as doing so begins the path to self-acceptance.
Our core sense of self begins to emerge from our earliest of relationships; our attachment with our primary caregiver. We start to view ourselves through the gaze of our parent, and this shapes our perspective of whether we feel like we are delightful and loveable, or whether we might feel like we are “too much” or “too little”.
By age four, our brain has developed 90% of its adult neural structures; our templates for relationships and our core sense of self are all quite firmly in place by this time. The right hemisphere of the cortex is highly active from birth to age 3; which means that we are all about non-verbal and sensory information. So, if we have a parent who is mostly well-functioning, calm and relaxed, they are able to gaze upon us with delight most of the time, and in light of their gaze we learn that we are delightful. If we have a parent who has experienced trauma and is often stressed, depressed, anxious or angry, we can start to learn from their non-verbal cues that we are ‘not good enough’, that we are stressful or overwhelming, a ‘burden’ to other people, or we might learn to get our needs met in ways that become unhelpful later in life. It is this right brain to right brain communication that Allan Schore says is paramount to our sense of security, our trust in people, our perception of the world as a good or bad place, and ultimately, our sense of who we are.
Our perception of ourselves continues to be shaped in childhood by implicit and explicit cues that we receive from our parents, our teachers, our peers, our culture and community, and the media. Add this to surviving in a modern consumerist and competitive society, where we are bombarded everyday with messages that suggest that our value and worth as humans is based on what we have or what we achieve in comparison to others. As a result, a lot of us have been conditioned to base our self-worth on external drivers and expectations, rather than our own internal cues and desires.
The good news is, is that the brain is plastic and malleable. Our neural pathways are not set for life, and can be rewired. This does not mean that it is easy, as our default ways of thinking, feeling, interacting and behaving can be deeply ingrained, which is why we can often feel so completely stuck in our feelings. If however, you are able to learn to feel comfortable with self-awareness and reflection, comfortable with the discomfort of vulnerability, and are motivated to change your brain and how you feel about yourself, then you are certainly in a wonderful position to change unhelpful patterns.
The term self-love is thrown around a lot in pop culture these days, but what does it really mean, and how as adults, can we reverse old patterns of negative self-image?
Self-love can be developed from intentional acts that aim to enhance our physical, emotional, social and spiritual wellbeing. Self-love is not something to attain; rather, it is a practice and conscious way of living that supports us to honour our true selves, and most importantly, to feel good. As Eckhart Tolle says, we are not our thoughts or our feelings; we are the space in which our thoughts and feelings occur. If we make our ‘space’ (our mind, our body, our spirit) a compassionate one, we can experience self-love.
Let’s bring to mind the unconditional love that a parent can have for a child. Would we expect that a parent would love a child less or more based on their appearance, or the grades they got at school? Would we expect a parent to berate their child for feeling anxious about going to a party, making a blunder in front of other people, or not being as good at sport as some of their peers? In an ideal world, the answer to these questions would be no. Self-love is about directing that same unconditional acceptance towards ourselves and practicing compassion towards our perceived imperfections and mistakes. We deserve the same type of love as adults that we needed as children to support us to safely grow and thrive.
Self-love is a skill, and requires our continuous attention and practice. It is like a muscle that needs to be flexed over and over again until it becomes strong and can start to support us in many wonderful ways. If we experience self-love, we can feel more present, in control and empowered. We can feel more comfortable in our own skin. We can make wiser decisions about our life, decisions that support us rather than deplete us. We can feel more connected and aligned with ourselves. We can feel a sense of purpose and meaning in who we are and what we do. Our relationships can be more enriching. We can feel more creative and productive.
For many people, practicing self-love can feel foreign initially, uncomfortable even. This is because the brain can get really comfortable in its usual pathways of behaviour, and practicing something new means challenging old and familiar patterns of neural firing. What’s exciting is that neuroscience has shown that when we practice new thoughts, skills, or behaviours over and over again (flexing that muscle), we can generate new and healthy neural pathways that become the ‘new default’ pattern.
Below are 7 tips to support you to practice self-love, and to start flexing that muscle!
1. Make your mind a gentle space to hang out
We are often our own worst critics, and can get overwhelmed and bogged down by negative thoughts, most likely ones about ourselves. There is actually a really good evolutionary explanation for why we tend to focus on the negatives. Our brains are wired to detect threat and danger, to help us humans to survive as a species. For this reason our brains have dedicated memory systems just for storing threatening or negative events, but do not place the same value on positive events. So anything negative sticks to our memory like velcro and allows the positives to slide straight off like teflon. Dr Rick Hanson calls this the Negativity Bias, and suggests that negative thoughts are integrated instantly in our brains, while we need to give a positive thought our attention for about 10 seconds to effectively integrate it into our memories.
Do you reflect on your day and find yourself mostly recalling only the negative things that happened? Or have you been given feedback from your boss that included positive feedback, but you can only remember the negative comments? That’s the Negativity Bias helping you scan for danger.
What can help with this is to spend 10 seconds thinking of something positive, something you are grateful for, someone you love, an act of kindness, or a happy memory. Give your brain the opportunity to process this experience, to help balance out your recollection of negative experiences.
We can also make our mind a gentle space by taking charge of our thoughts, and realising that thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t know everything. We don’t need to chase after all our thoughts, some of which may be fear-generated and irrational. Remember, we are not our thoughts. Have a practice at watching your thoughts enter your mind, acknowledging them, and then seeing them leave your mind, letting each one go. Some people find it helpful to visualise their thoughts like clouds passing in the sky, or leaves drifting down a stream: to see thoughts as impermanent, with a beginning and end. You don’t need to become your thoughts. By doing this and not letting the thoughts take charge of you, you can allow your mind to feel less rigid and stressed, and instead, feel more gentle, quiet and at peace.
2. Cultivate a deeper level of self-awareness. Allow yourself to feel the full range of your emotions
As humans, we are supposed to experience a variety of emotions, both positive ones and negative ones. Brene Brown’s research shows us that people who live wholeheartedly allow themselves to feel vulnerable. Oftentimes we can deny our uncomfortable feelings and try to ignore them, numb them, or talk them away (e.g., “I’m just being silly, I’m not really sad”). Emotion is ‘energy in motion’ and doesn’t just ‘go away’ – it can manifest in other forms, particularly in our bodies, the physical carrier of our emotions! Our bodies don’t lie, even when our minds are working hard to cover up how we really feel. Imagine a coke bottle being shaken up and shaken up. Each shake might represent a stressful event, big or small (a death of a loved one, relationship breakdown, looming work deadline, kids fighting before school, missing the bus). On the outside we may seem to be ‘keeping it together’ and pushing on through; however, if you open the lid, what happens? An explosion: in human form, a meltdown, a panic attack, a fit of rage, or somatic symptoms, like stomach ulcers, sore throats, headaches, or a compromised immune system.
The key here is to acknowledge and allow your feelings to be felt when they arise, to say to yourself or to someone you trust, “I’m actually feeling really upset right now”. When we do this, we give room for emotions to be expressed and they can then shift and move through us, rather than get bottled up. Acknowledging and allowing release of your feelings is different to becoming immersed and completely overwhelmed by your feelings. Remember, we are not our feelings, but we can hold a gentle space for our feelings to be expressed. Seeking counselling support is one way to help you do this safely, and to learn about sustainable, healthy ways to navigate through difficult feelings.
3. Breathe into your heart space, and spend some time practicing gratitude or positive reflection in this area of your body
Did you know that the heart has its own intelligence? It’s true! Surrounding our heart area are hundreds and thousands of neurons that hold memory. This means that your heart carries knowledge, information and wisdom that helps to support and guide you – it is like a heart-brain. We can often get caught up in the analytical or logical processes of the brain in our skull, meaning that the heart’s intuition can get ignored or rationalised away. By spending some time ‘tuning in’ to your heart, by breathing into that area, and generating some positive feelings in the heart, you encourage connection with the heart, allowing you to access its wisdom more and more.
4. Be kind to yourself and others
Practicing acts of self-care is an enormous and significant part of building self-love. Send yourself the message that you are worth the time, energy and investment for nurturing and comfort. Get to know what you enjoy doing, and become familiar with your self-soothing activities. These activities help to calm down the limbic areas of our brain which can activate stress and anxiety – if we know what makes us feel good, we can feel more calm and relaxed, more often. Some ideas for self-care could include getting outdoors to ground and energise yourself, unplugging from technology for an afternoon or night, going to bed early, having a bath, getting a massage, spending time with loved ones (including pets), colouring in, watching a feel-good movie, reading a book, exercising to get those endorphins going, or listening to some soothing/uplifting music.
Balance self-kindness with kindness towards others. Research tells us that showing compassion to other people can lower our blood pressure, boost our immune system, and help us to feel calmer. Acts of altruism also link to the primitive survival systems in our brain, which are wired to connect to and look after people in our community in order to survive as a species. This is why it can feel so good to give to others! Remember however, that just like we are instructed to on planes, ‘put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others’. If your cup of self-love is empty and you’re giving to others, this is going to deplete you, rather than fill you up.
5. Surround yourself with people who support you unconditionally
Spend time with people who understand you, cheer you on, accept you as you are, and leave you feeling uplifted rather than drained or self-doubting. This doesn’t mean that they won’t challenge you at times, or hold you accountable for your actions; however, their intentions come from a place of love rather than criticism and rejection. Our brains are wired to be part of a supportive social network (this is an instinctive, primitive and crucial need) and this is what helps us to thrive as humans. We cannot exist alone, nor can we flourish if we are around people who make us feel unsafe, judged, or exhausted. In fact, research shows that our brains register social rejection and threat as actual physical pain! Positive social support is paramount to our wellbeing. Our relationships can also often be a mirror to our relationships with ourselves, and vice versa. If you can show yourself that you are worthy of healthy, positive, encouraging and enriching relationships, your perception of yourself will start to parallel this.
6. Immerse yourself in enriching environments
We are highly perceptive and sensitive to our environment, and our brains require aspects of safety, comfort and pleasing aesthetics to thrive. Consider whether you have a space in your home that is like a sanctuary, a place where you can unwind and feel peaceful in. Studies show that simple factors such as a picture of nature on the wall, a plant in the room, natural lighting, warm colours, soft textures (like furry rugs or cushions) and candles can elicit feelings of calmness and happiness in people. Finding a spot outdoors that you can regularly visit, even in your own backyard, will also help to ‘reset’ the brain and help you feel grounded and refreshed.
7. Set healthy boundaries
Learn about what people or situations make you feel uncomfortable, drained, overstretched or stressed. Tune in and listen to your feelings. Honour how you feel and give yourself permission to say no to things that you truly do not want to do. This will give you more time and energy to do the things that you want to do and that make you feel good. Saying ‘no’ is one of the most important acts of self-love.