When we watch any videos and webinars on self-development which try to explain the causes of various problems, we often ask ourselves the following question, “Ok, this is all clear to me. What should I do?” It’s the same with the advice to learn to love yourself. “Love yourself” sounds just as ephemeral and ambiguous as the “do not be afraid” advice. Because it is not clear how to do what is not your reflex and how you can stop doing what, on the contrary, is a reflex. In theory, many people have already learned to love themselves, and this is beneficial, it’s all good and great, it is, in fact, fantastic, but what exactly is this love for oneself? Not everyone truly knows what it is. In today’s article, we will do our best to answer questions like, “How to love yourself when you don’t know how?”, “How to learn to love yourself?” and “What are the ways to love yourself?”
What Does It Mean to Love Yourself?
To find out how to love yourself, first, we must find out what this love is. Many perceive the meaning of the phrase “love yourself” in different ways. For example, someone can eat fast-food every day, calling it self-love, telling themselves, “You only live once, so why am I supposed to forbid myself from anything?” For me, fast-food is rather a way to shorten your life, and it is in no way associated with self-love to me.
Self-love is, first of all, self-respect. When I say the word "self-esteem," I talk about a respectful and caring attitude towards myself as a whole. To my body, to my emotional state, to my soul, to my well-being. I am not talking about being in love with yourself when a person is fascinated with their own image as a narcissist would. I'm talking about respecting everything we are made up of. And not everyone seems to understand what it means. They can take care of themselves, work on their intelligence and spirituality, yet they can be quite miserable in their personal lives or in something else. To live with unloved people, to work in a hateful environment, to be in a distressing situation, to suffer emotionally… all of these things completely contradict all the laws of love for one’s self. By being there where we feel consistently miserable and with the people who make us feel awful - we spit in our own faces. At this point, a person absolutely does not respect their own sanity, which affects their physical state as well. The love for oneself is absent from their life.
It is often difficult for people to change their attitude towards other people and their attitude towards themselves because of long-standing issues that make them feel shame, fear, and anxiety. There is also a fear of failure. All of these roadblocks severely limit your actions, and if you don’t want to break these roadblocks, you won’t ever be able to truly love yourself, you will always be a victim, a slave to someone else, either to another person or to your personal problems. As with anything, the first step is the hardest to make, and it will be hard for you to start breaking your way to freedom. Give it some time, and the results of these actions will give you so much energy and confidence in yourself that the road to self-love will be pretty much intuitive to you. 
Thus, we can say that a person is able to love themselves only when they gain a sense of self-esteem by breaking the barriers that someone has built in front of them. It happens when you step out of your bubble and do something unusual, something that you aren’t used to. Things that you were postponing all of that time, you’ve given up on many dreams, you left them in the past and now you suffer.
If you are not doing what you want, and you’ve buried your dreams for the sake of someone else or for the sake of a safer route in life, then you are wasting your life away. Imagine all the sadness of realization that will inevitably come when you will look back at your life. What have you accomplished? Which one of those accomplishments are you proud of? Have you done anything in this life to make yourself feel better?
Why It's Essential to Love Yourself to Be Successful in Dating
There is a trap that we always seem to fall into when we try, instead of experiencing pleasure ourselves, to give pleasure to someone else. In fact, it is not just a manifestation of selflessness it is an unconscious action that has nothing to do with being selfless.
There is such a following mechanism: if I give someone love, care, attention, I expect the same in return.
Here’s a simple example: I have three dollars; I want to get a hotdog. But I am going to buy a hotdog and give it to you, although you probably don’t want a hotdog right now. And I think that you will buy me a hotdog in return just because of how kind I am. Here’s the problem, I won’t get a hotdog because any rational person in such a situation would just get one and eat it, this is exactly the same thing that you would assume. Yet in our case, you will just thank me, and I will remain hungry. And in the worst scenario, you will think that I must feed you with hotdogs till the day I die.
I’ve made a mistake. I could’ve bought myself a hotdog, both of us would have been happy and that would’ve been the end of it. But no, I have wasted my money to make you a gift when you don’t want one. And the worst part is that I remained hungry. Where does this prohibition on self-love come from? Naturally, all the problems come from childhood. Parents force this way of thinking onto their children, they want their child to grow up a good person, as a noble human being that will be kind. But in the end, a person ends up giving away their virtues, their money, and their time for nothing, when, in fact, the right course of action was to just care for yourself, no one else. But how do you learn to love yourself?
Learning to Love Yourself in 5 Simple Steps
1. Be active. How to love yourself and be confident? Even if there is a lot of work to be done ahead – you must move forward. Learning to love yourself takes time, but it is worth it. There is no joy in standing in one place, one day, maybe not tomorrow or the day after that, you will realize that you have wasted your life on inaction. You may even tell yourself that, “I am going to start tomorrow,” but you must start now. Put on your sports outfit and get out of the house and just go, jog a few circles around the neighborhood and feel the energy and happiness of moving forward, both literally and figuratively.
2. Make choices in favor of yourself. How to fall in love with yourself? To learn to love yourself it is important to not tolerate a bad attitude towards yourself, you must move away from people who do not like you/do not appreciate you, you should create physically and emotionally favorable conditions for yourself, and you must make bold decisions in favor of yourself, no one else. Self-love gives power every time you say “yes” to yourself. It is Omni important.
3. Care for yourself. Sometimes a full-body coffee scrub has a strong effect on your skin. When you just like the condition of your skin and when you know that you’ve made it this way – this a big step towards self-love. And we are not talking about scrubs, we are talking about self-care in general. When you feel excellent and comfortable with yourself. Take care of yourself at home, lay in a bath for an hour or two, get a massage, go see a movie, go to a good restaurant by yourself. All of these actions will gradually move you forward to self-love since all of them are, in fact, manifestations of this feeling.
4. Don’t compare yourself to other people. We often look at the profiles of other people on dating services who seem to us more beautiful, more successful, smarter, and just overall better than us. When we see their photos, we think that they are living a perfect life, there is nothing wrong about them, they are like pure gold. 
But this is not the case. Just think to yourself, you do not know their story, you don’t know these people, your profile would look just the same in a crowd of people, yet you know your personal struggles, and you attach these struggles to your image. To think that you are the dumbest, the most disgusting, the most unsuccessful person in the world is not the way to live your life. So, how to love yourself more – be proud of who you are, stand out in the crowd.
5. Eliminate the roadblocks. The problem of self-dislike is completely solvable. It is important to understand why you feel as if you have no love for yourself. What thing in this world doesn’t allow you to love yourself? What do you need to do to tell yourself that you are worthy, you are proud of yourself? Identify those problematic areas that block the path to self-esteem and self-love, pride, and sympathy for yourself, and begin to work them out, starting with the biggest roadblocks. Do it independently or with the support of a specialist.
How do you love yourself?
To find self-love in a person is to start life anew. Anyone who lived in self-dislike and then acquired the skills that allow themselves to love themselves, to feel pride, to be happy about their lives will testify to this. This is one of the reasons why you should respect yourself, why you should be proud of yourself and battle all the things that bring you discomfort. The sooner you decide to destroy all of these roadblocks that stand between you and your dreams – the better.
There are a lot of people who love themselves partially or formally. For example, let’s take a man that looks very sharp, it would seem to us that he loves himself. But then you dive deeper and you see that he allows other people to treat him badly, to hurt him, he allows others to use him, he ignores his own emotional needs and does not do anything against it. He accumulates resentment, anger, and fatigue inside of himself. He seems very much successful and sharp, but he is not, you cannot call yourself successful if you don’t love yourself. If you can't love yourself – you can’t love life.
Therefore, in this matter, it is extremely important to determine which part of you is not receiving love and attention (emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual). And when you do identify that aspect of yourself that lacks attention you can begin to plan your personal work on yourself. And if there is no strength and enthusiasm for it now, then perhaps you need to recover your energy and emotions to move on forward, give it some time, but don’t sleep on it. Self-love begins when we begin to notice ourselves, our feelings, and needs. And only when we begin to satisfy these needs we start to love ourselves. So, fall in love with yourself and don’t look back.