If that title grabbed your interest enough for you to click to read this blog article, then one of two things is true. Either failing to love yourself is ruining your life, or you love yourself so much that you had to see how I could make such a ludicrous claim. I’m guessing it’s the first one. If so, you’ll want to stick around all month as we explore the dangers of not loving yourself, why you might struggle to love yourself, and how to start loving yourself more.
If you don’t love yourself and if you are unhappy with yourself, you can’t give anything else but that.
Gisele Bündchen
To find out if you love yourself enough and can skip this article or if you should keep reading, take the quiz below. Score yourself 0 for “no”, 1 for “sometimes”, and 2 for “yes”. Make sure you’re being honest with yourself as you answer.
QUIZ: Are You Failing to Love Yourself?
- Do you have trouble forming and keeping healthy relationships?
- Do you engage in self-sabotaging, self-harming, or self-destructive behaviors?
- Is believing that you’re worthy of love hard for you?
- Are you struggling with depression and/or anxiety?
- Is trusting others hard for you?
- What about trusting yourself – do you often doubt yourself and your decisions?
- Is negative self-talk the norm for you?
- Do you neglect your emotional and/or physical needs?
- Does receiving a compliment make you uncomfortable?
- Do you mask, edit, or change who you are so people will like or accept you more?
Tally up your answers. If your score was a 6 or higher, you may need to work on loving yourself more. If you scored a 10 or higher, there’s no “may” about it. You’re failing to love yourself, and it’s ruining everything about your life. You’ll get no judgment from me, I’ve been there. I’m writing this mini-series on self-love and creating a 14-day course on falling in love with yourself because I’ve struggled to love myself and saw the negative effects that had on every area of my life, including:
Your Relationship With Yourself
It’s pretty obvious that failing to love yourself is going to affect your relationship with yourself, and not in a good way. When you’re struggling to love yourself, you don’t feel comfortable in your body or with your emotions. You don’t trust yourself to make good choices and judge yourself harshly for any mistakes made. Self-sabotage, self-harm, and self-destructive behaviors all result from a lack of self-love. You’re more likely to be depressed and anxious than those who love themselves. Self-doubt, uncertainty, and comparing yourself with others are in control. You’re unable to accept compliments and you neglect your own needs.
Your Relationships With Others
When you fail to love yourself, it’s impossible to accept and believe that others love you. Why would they when you don’t even love yourself? The problems you have within yourself can manifest as hurting the people you love because you’re unconsciously projecting your issues onto them. This makes it hard to maintain relationships. You may burden others with your unmet needs or seek partners who are unavailable because a deep connection makes you panic. In your mind, a deep connection means that they’ll see the real you, and fail to love you just like you fail to love yourself. This insecurity can lead to manipulation, oppression, guilt trips, abusive behaviors, and seeing problems where none exist. Have you ever been convinced a friend or partner was betraying you in some way when they weren’t? You probably didn’t love yourself enough to trust that they loved you.
Failing to Love Yourself Affects Your Overall Life Satisfaction
If you have a 💩 relationship with yourself and as a result a 💩 relationship with everyone else, it’s exceptionally hard to be satisfied with life. This is why research shows that winning the lottery or achieving great success doesn’t make you any happier than you already were. And, as we talked about in the sections above, failing to love yourself increases the likelihood of anxiety and depression issues. Anyone familiar with those knows how quick and effective they are at sucking the satisfaction out of life. Add to that the unreasonable expectations you have for yourself and others that are never being lived up to, and you can see why this is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
Even Your Financial Success
Now this one might surprise you. A scientific study published in September 2021 found a positive correlation between components that make up self-love (self-esteem, optimism, mindset management, and discipline) and a person’s level of financial success. To make a long story short, the higher your level of self-love, the greater your chances of financial success are. This is because people that love themselves are more productive, are better at advocating for themselves, and make better financial decisions. That may be because they aren’t constantly chasing a dopamine high to fill the hole in their hearts. I’m talking to you, the readers with a shopping addiction.
There’s a flip side to this one, too. A study from 2020 shows that people that base their sense of self-worth on financial success have worse relationships with themselves and others. So, loving yourself increases your financial success, but only if you aren’t basing your self-worth on your bank account balance.
What To Do If You’re Failing to Love Yourself
If you’ve been failing to love yourself, don’t despair. To start falling in love with yourself instead, start here:
- Make sure you subscribe to my weekly emails so you don’t miss out on any of the self-love tips and tricks I’ll be sharing this month. You’ll get a free gift for signing up!
- Play this audio full of self-love subliminal affirmations while you sleep.
- Read last month’s mini-series on how to use positive affirmations to improve your self-talk:
- The science behind how affirmations can rewire your brain.
- How to tell which affirmations work, which ones don’t, and best practices for creating your own.
- and ways to boost the effectiveness of affirmations so they work better.
- Sign up for my 14-day course on falling in love with yourself that drops on February 14th! For the price of a pedicure, you can show yourself some self-love that makes a long-term impact.
Love yourself first, and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
Lucille Ball
