Self-Hatred is Hard to Overcome
About five years ago I was in a bad place emotionally. I didn’t love myself. In fact, a lot of the time, I hated myself. I was an addict. I was injured. I was depressed. And it was all my fault. Despite how much I was suffering, I didn’t feel compassion for myself. Instead, I judged and berated myself. I regretted the choices I had made and wondered why I’d made them.
How could I be so stupid?!
I knew, intellectually, that hating myself was only making matters worse. I was struggling socially and romantically because, when you don’t love yourself, it’s near-impossible to love other people. I knew, intellectually, that I needed to love myself. But just telling myself that I should love myself didn’t work.
It turns out that you can’t just decide to stop hating yourself and start feeling self-compassion.
Act Like You Love Yourself
But there is something you can do – something I did that changed the way I felt about myself. And it’s pretty simple (but not easy): just act like you love yourself. That’s right – I’m suggesting that you fake it. But hold on, I have good reasons for giving this advice, and I have my own experience to back it up.
First of all, I’m not saying, “Fake it till you make it.” There’s no time when you will have “made it.” There’s no end-point to this effort. Self-love is an ongoing process, not a destination to arrive at or a goal to achieve. As with all things self-improvement, you’ll never “get there.”
Instead, I’m saying what Amy Cuddy said in her TED Talk: “Fake it till you become it.” If you act like you love yourself, you will increasingly become someone who really does love yourself. Genuine feelings of self-love will result from initially empty self-loving actions.
“Feelings follow behavior.” –David K. Reynolds1
Self-Love via Self-Perception
Because of a phenomenon known as self-perception, your brain is always watching what you do in order to decide how to feel. If you act like you love yourself, your brain will be forced to conclude that you really do love yourself, and it will generate feelings to match.
By investing time and energy in loving actions toward yourself you’ll be sending your brain a message that you are worthy of self-love.
You can engage in loving actions in spite of not feeling self-love and in spite of thinking bad things about yourself. When you do, both your feelings and your thoughts will shift in the right direction, making it easier to continue engaging in self-love.
Negative Thinking is Hard to Overcome
Self-hatred is a product of self-critical thoughts. And while it’s good to work on counteracting those automatic negative thoughts with more helpful and more accurate thoughts, the best strategy is taking positive action. This is because actions speak louder than thoughts. Changing your behavior has a more powerful and immediate impact than changing your thoughts.
But this is not to suggest that thoughts don’t matter. Of course they do. Negative self-talk is not just a symptom of insufficient self-love; it is also a cause of insufficient self-love. So addressing negative self-talk is a worthy endeavor, and I encourage you to do that work. Here are some things you can do to develop a healthier relationship with your thoughts:
- Cognitive therapy, both professional and self-administered
- Giving yourself permission to be human
- Cultivating mindfulness
- Loving-kindness meditation
- Pride journaling
Just keep in mind that this work is slow and difficult. So don’t make this your only strategy. Your primary strategy should be to take loving action toward yourself, to fake it until you become it.
Self-Care is Self-Love
So how do you fake it? How do you act like you love yourself? The answer is simple:
Take good care of yourself.
Ask yourself, What would I do for myself if I really did care about myself? and then do those things.
When I was in a pit of depression and self-loathing, that meant getting better at self-care: eating well, exercising, meditating, and, most critically, getting sober. Doing these things radically improved my relationship with myself, and I’m still doing them today. Taking time each day to maintain and improve my physical and mental health sends a strong message that I am worthy of such care, that I am worthy of love.
Self-care is self-love.
You might think of an entirely different set of self-loving behaviors to take, but they’ll definitely have something in common with the ones on my list: They’ll all be ways of doing what’s best for your future selves.
And that raises an important distinction: Self-love is not the same as self-indulgence.
Self-Love is Not Self-Indulgence
A parent loves their child by taking care of them and by looking out for their best interests – not by giving in to the child’s every whim and desire. Letting the child have cake for breakfast or stay up late watching TV might make the child happy today, but that’s not what’s best for the child in the long run. The love of a wise parent is precisely the kind of love you need to show yourself in order to cultivate the feeling of self-love.
This method also aligns well with a piece of wisdom I learned from Stephen Covey: “Love is a verb.”2
While love is, of course, a feeling, it is also a verb. It’s an action or, as I’m arguing here, a series of repeated actions. When I did not feel love for myself, I was also not taking loving actions toward myself. When I changed my behavior and started taking loving actions toward myself, the feeling of self-love soon followed.
Self-Love is a Decision to Take Loving Action
A lot of people think self-love is about making a decision to love yourself. In reality, it’s deciding to act like you love yourself over and over again. And if you do that, you’ll find more and more that your thoughts and feelings align with your actions.
That is how you cultivate self-love.
1 Reynolds, David K. Constructive Living. University of Hawaii Press, 1984.
2 Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Fireside, 1990.