Experience the world as your best self
I’m sure we’ve all heard the classic joke: one person asks, “let’s say someone wanted to give you $1 million, but, if you accept, the person you hate the most will be given $2 million. Would you take it?“ And the other person replies, “well, I’d be a crazy person to pass up on $3 million.“ As many of us know, one of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, things to do in life is to love yourself. Unfortunately, this can often be made unnecessarily difficult by outside factors. Sometimes in our lives, we need a little help or push in a brighter, happier direction.
Nobody wants to rot away in their bed for days on end, at least not deep down. These are some of the best ways to take yourself from apathy to joy, and step one is always to love yourself.
We live in a fast-paced world, where so much of our labor culture has put an emphasis on working nonstop, no breaks. Tons of employers, the world over, expect people to work through their lunch breaks as an unwritten rule. Not only is this usually illegal, but it’s also not healthy, and it’s harmful to your productivity.
Here’s a story: back in the late 80s, a computer science university student named Francesco Cirillo who’s having trouble concentrating on his textbook. He decided, in an effort to force himself to focus, to take short attempts at reading, and then short breaks. Cirillo started by only using a two minute timer, and then taking an even shorter break, but eventually fine tuned it to the perfect studying intervals:
Human attention span only really works for a short period of time, and we’ve come to realize that it’s just about 25 minutes. Knowing this, we can build our own work schedule around our psychology. This set of intervals is known as the Pomodoro Technique, and it’s worked wonders for plenty of people. Cirillo, in addition to writing a book on the technique, has found a lot of success in the field he studied while developing Pomodoro.
You are always your own harshest critic. This is a phrase most people hear practically on a daily basis. It’s standard procedure to tell someone that when they’re feeling down, but most of us don’t seem to have properly internalized it. Because we all have to live with our own thoughts, most criticism we receive comes from our own minds trying to talk to themselves. Every time we want to tell ourselves that we aren’t good enough, we engage in this negative self-talk. It’s completely unfounded, no basis in reality whatsoever, but that’s hard to accept for pretty much everyone. Noticing that you're doing this, and, as we’ll discuss later, positively affirming yourself when the impulse or thought arises is step one in practicing self-love.
This may seem like such a small issue in your life that you feel there’s no need to address it. Well, it’s true that pretty much everyone has these thoughts from time to time, some more than others, there’s a big difference between the happiness of the people who attempt to rewrite it, and the people who don’t. We can also look to other fields of advice for reasons we should first focus on tackling the negative self-talk we give ourselves. Most finance experts recommend that, if you’re struggling with a lot of debt, the best way to tackle that debt is to work on paying off the smallest debts first. It may not feel in the moments like it’s making any sizable dent, but any progress you can make to get ahead of your life stressors is important progress. It gives you the confidence to healthfully carry out accomplishing the rest of your problems.
Even when our negative self talk, feels like it’s coming from other people. Chances are it could just be our own interpretation. Phrases like they all probably hated my presentation, everyone around me knows I’m having a bad hair day, and they’re probably all laughing at me right now may feel like reasonable statements about other people when we say and think them, but we should always recognize that we can usually be certain that no one actually feels the way we are often paranoid they do. This is a particularly negative example of a subject in psychology, known as the spotlight effect. Every time you walk out in a public space and assume people are staring at you, usually because you feel there is something about you to be stared at, at least, from your own perspective, when nobody actually is.
We, as people, tend to catastrophize, or make our own personal issues out to be much worse than they really are. Recognizing that this anxiety is completely unfounded, and likely a result of the spotlight effect is core to stopping yourself from engaging in negative self-talk.
This brings us to the way to fix it: positive self talk. Every time you notice yourself engaging in negative self talk, try to rephrase it in a positive way. The biggest difference between positive and negative self talk is your ability to change and to change the things around you. Remember, we aren’t just amorphous blobs wandering through the street waiting for something bad to happen. We are people who, no matter how small the issue, have the ability to create change. If you wake up in the morning and think for yourself today is going to be a bad day, you’ve already decided that you have no power to improve your situation. A better way to approach this, especially if you’re already having this thought in the morning, is to rephrase it as I may not feel great right now, but I can always try to make my day better.
Positive self talk can have a chemical effect on your brain. It’s been found that telling yourself positive affirmations, more on that in a sec, lights up the same part of your brain that deals with self image. It may not feel like there’s an immediate effect, or it may feel that way, but no matter what, it’s positively rewriting how you look at yourself. Positive self-talk also triggers the reward center of your brain. It doesn’t work the same way as a drug would do that, instead increasing it more, naturally, allowing you to approach your day with more confidence than you previously would have.
I know this one might sound kind of dumb. If you don’t have any experience with it, just bear with me. One good way to improve your own self-confidence is to tell yourself daily affirmations. If you get up each morning, look yourself in the mirror, and say something nice to yourself, it has the same chemical effect on your brain, as if someone else were to say it to you.
This isn’t just something you should do if you feel particularly in the dumps either. Giving yourself positive daily affirmations is a great mental hack for anyone, but it’s especially good for those of us going through rougher periods in our lives.
Yes, it will absolutely feel weird and kind of stupid in the beginning, but it absolutely works. It may even feel disingenuous to start, but, as we covered when talking about negative self-talk, the negative things we tell ourselves: catastrophizing, believing the spotlight effect, and all the self doubt, those are lies the brain is trying to make itself believe. Those are disingenuous things, and we only start to believe them because if you tell yourself something enough times, you’ll always believe it’s true, even if there’s absolutely no evidence of it. Like with so many other things on this list, we can use that to our advantage. Even if you don’t believe in it at the start, you will start to believe your daily positive affirmations as you tell them to yourself more times. That is the benefit of this technique.
So, I challenge you to, tomorrow morning after you wake up, go to your mirror, or pull up the camera on your phone to front face, look into your own eyes, and tell yourself positive things. Maybe you’ll sit there and think about it for a minute or so, saying anything that comes to mind that could make you feel a bit more prepared to face the day. Maybe you come up with two or three things immediately, and you decide to just stick with those. Maybe you just pick one thing. Just one little positive thing to tell yourself. Baby you look great in that pair of glasses. Maybe you’re going to do a good job at work or school today. Maybe it’s a simple just telling yourself that it’s all right, whatever it may be. It’s small, but it’s still a step in the healing process, or, if you aren’t healing, it can be a great way to boost your own self-confidence, which you’ll always need in the world.
Everyone has their own journey, but these tips can fit into anyone’s schedule, no matter how busy. You don’t need an expensive yoga mat or a Spotify subscription to love yourself. All you need to know are the best ways to hack your own brain, and you can use your brain to do it.
