Be kind to your mind

August 26, 2022August 26, 2022 by Shawn

“As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “authenticity”.
As I began to love myself I stopped craving a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “maturity”.
Charlie Chapin

“Be kind to your mind.”

It sounds straightforward, but what does it actually mean? Why do we struggle to do it? In this post, I’ll talk about cultivating mental well-being through self-love, why it matters, and ways to put it into practice.

Here’s a thought experiment.

Tomorrow, you’re going to be paired with one person for the rest of your life. You will be together every moment: eating meals, running errands, making friends, and exercising. Obviously, this person’s mindset and personality are going to have a big impact on your quality of life. You hope they’re caring, understanding, and affirming. But what if they’re unkind? Impatient? Judgemental? That would suck.

The thing is, we’re all living a version of this thought experiment already. We’re stuck with ourselves, paired for the rest of our days.

So, how do you treat yourself? How do you speak to yourself? How do you react to your successes and failures? For many of us, the answer is: not great. We regularly treat and speak to ourselves in ways that we would never imagine behaving towards or talking to another person, let alone a close friend.

Ditching the floaties

I remember learning to swim as a kid. I was equal parts enthrall and terrified, ever oscillating between “Woah, I’m swimming!” and “Help, I’m drowning!” But once my mom gave me those little floaties that you wear on your arms, it was all gravy, baby. You couldn’t get me out of that pool!

The only problem is that this kept me from actually learning to swim. I loved the comfort and security of bobbing around in the sun with my Michelin Man arms, and I lost all motivation to learn how to do it on my own. It was only the firm parenting of my mother that forced me out of my comfort zone and into the literal deep end.

Once we become dependent on floaties of some sort – the prestigious job that makes us miserable, the mindless overeating that makes us feel like crap, the alcohol that fills us with regret the next morning – it’s hard to give them up.

And unlike when we were 5, we don’t have a parent to give us a nudge. We have to do it for ourselves.

Why is self-love so important?

#1: It’s a basic need

Self-love is a basic human need. When we can’t give it to ourselves, we cope by looking for substitutions externally. This is a pointless quest. No person or thing can ever give you the love that you can give to yourself. Author Brené Brown calls this “hustling for your worth.”

This becomes problematic when we adopt self-love substitutions that make us miserable.

Alcohol and drugs are two self-destructive examples, but there are many ways that a lack of self-love can manifest. Regularly over-indulging in food, shopping, surrounding yourself with toxic people, and perfectionism are all common ways that people try and fill this void.

#2: It impacts everyone around you

Self-love is important because it is the foundation for healthy relationships.

How you treat yourself will be reflected in how you treat others.

If you’re snappy and impatient with yourself, there is a good chance that behavior will show up in the way you treat the people around you: your friends, family, and coworkers. If you make a habit of encouraging yourself, even in the face of failure, then you’re better able to do the same for others. In short, loving yourself makes it easier to give love to others, and generally makes you a better partner, parent, friend, and teammate.

#3: It creates freedom

There is a direct connection between self-love and freedom. When you are unable to love yourself you seek it elsewhere. Over time, a dependency on external sources of validation (aka floaties) can develop.

Eventually, cutting that dependency out of your life, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that you need to make a change, can seem risky and scary. This is one way that people end up living lives they never intended to live. They don’t know how else to meet their basic psychological needs. If they did, they wouldn’t tether themselves to things that, on some level, make them miserable.

To love yourself is to sever the bonds between you and your hustle is to free yourself to do the things you truly desire.

5 ways to practice self-love

#1: Avoid the doom loop of self-loathing

Don’t make self-love contingent on some arbitrary milestone. This often sounds like:

“Love myself? I’m 100 pounds overweight and I hate how I look. I’ll love myself when I lose 50 pounds.”

“I’ll feel good about myself when I get this promotion.”

Maybe this works for some people. Even if it does, I don’t think it’s healthy. More often, it does the opposite of what we intend. Our negative self-image makes us feel worse. We cope in ways that sap our health and happiness. Left unchecked, this thought pattern can take us into what I think of as a “doom loop of self-loathing” that leaves us less able to achieve whatever lofty ambition we’ve made our self-love dependent on.

The paradoxical thing is that we often need to change our internal reality before we can shift our external reality.

Instead, love yourself without condition. When you do this, you stop doing shitty things to yourself, like eating too much, staying up too late, or drinking too much. Practice seeing the inevitable challenges as opportunities to grow. The doom loop inverts this logic and keeps us stuck.

#2: Write a letter to your future self

I learned about this technique from entrepreneur and writer Sahil Bloom.

The process of writing a letter to your future self forces deep reflection on the present and thoughtful rumination on the future. I’ve written 7 letters to date. All 7 have led to meaningful newfound clarity and real-time adjustments that have contributed to new growth and progress.
The four areas I am sure to address in each letter are:
1. Reflections on the present
2. Changes to make
3. Goals for the future
4. Fun & crazy predictions

Granted, this isn’t a totally new idea, but I like Sahil’s take on it. Writing a letter to your future self encourages you to talk to yourself like you would talk to a dear friend. You will be honest, but also thoughtful and compassionate.

In addition to encouraging a healthy self-dialogue, I think it’s a great way to introspect and set goals for the future.

#3: Raise your awareness

The benefits of mindfulness and meditation are well documented. In the context of self-love, awareness allows you to notice things like negative self-talk as it comes up. You can begin to recognize where these feelings live in your body and what people or situations might trigger them. When you notice them, you can challenge the thought. There are some great strategies on how to do this here.

#4: Cultivate gratitude

Research shows that people who are more grateful also tend to have higher self-esteem. When you intentionally notice the ways people are good to you, you create a stronger sense of your own value.

One of my favorite gratitude-building tools is from Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass.

“Whenever anything excellent or mediocre or lame or annoying happens to you, meet it with the statement, “This is good because . . . ” and fill in the blank. Once you make this a regular practice, you’ll see how much easier it is to be in gratitude for much more than you realized.

It’s particularly important, Sincero writes, to be grateful when bad things happen.

“If you focus on the negative aspects of the more challenging things in your life, it will ust lower your frequency, keep you in pain and resentment, attract from negativity to you, very possibly make you sick, and very definitely make you crabby. If you instead look for ways to be grateful for everything in your life, it not only raises your frequency, but it allows you to grow by opening you up to a lesson.”

We shouldn’t deny the bad aspects of a situation. We should accept and acknowledge shittiness in a situation when it exists. But we also shouldn’t miss the opportunity to extract some good from it.

#5: Don’t compare

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Theodore Roosevelt

Comparison is natural. I’m certainly guilty of it. We’re social, tribal creatures who are hardwired to measure ourselves against others. Unfortunately, this often leaves us feeling unmotivated and inadequate. This is one of the reasons we’re so obsessed with celebrities: we’re both in awe and envious of them.

Comparing yourself to someone else is a fallacy because no two people are the same. Measuring yourself and your accomplishments against Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, or Doja Cat is apples to oranges. We all possess our own unique lived experiences, interests, and talents.

Instead of comparing yourself to a famous person, Tim from accounting who just earned two promotions in two years, or the college friend who just launched a successful company, try this

Be happy for their success (see #4 above)
What do you admire about them?
What are you yearning for at this moment?

Chances are, whatever you admire in the other person is a quality that you already possess, even if it’s not fully developed yet. This is the reason you noticed it in the first place. Your yearnings at that moment are like a compass pointing you in the direction in which should channel your energy and focus.