Let’s All Resolve to Love Ourselves This Year
With 2016 coming to a close and the New Year beginning, there’s a sense of hope in the air for a new-and-improved you in which you do all sorts of things you never had the energy to do before. Whether it be more exercise, a better diet, better grades, etc., 2017 has people everywhere hoping to better their lives with the expression, “New Year, new me”. Let’s be real though, New Year’s resolutions are typically, at best, followed until Valentine’s Day. Let’s discuss why resolving to love yourself is a far easier and better resolution to follow throughout 2017.
Loving yourself encompasses most other New Year’s resolutions already.
When you decide to love yourself and put yourself first, this includes taking care of yourself. All of the typical weight loss goals, healthy living binges, and exercise regimens that take the front and center of many resolutions are all ways in which a person is trying to better themselves. When attempting to love yourself and your body the best that you can, it’s a given that this involves exercising, eating well, and making health conscious choices. Plus, loving yourself and your body doesn’t have strict time limits like your weight loss goal does, making healthy choices far easier to follow through on and making crash diets less appealing.
Self love also involves self care regimens that New Year’s resolutions tend to overlook.
With self love comes self care, considering loving yourself involves caring for your mental health. Whether this be through face masks, meditation, mani/ pedis, or just watching guilty pleasure movies, self care can help a person relax and unwind from the stresses of everyday life. Most resolutions forget about mental health in exchange for physical health, but without a healthy mindset, you won’t feel motivated to keep up your exercise routine.
Self love is the easiest New Year’s resolution to keep up for the entire year.
When your only real resolution for the year is to love yourself more, it’s easy to keep this practice up the whole year. Taking a long nap after a stressful day? You’re just loving your body enough to know that it’s exhausted and needs a break. Ditching the diet in exchange for IHOP pancakes? You’re just treating yourself because you’re awesome and love yourself, and you undoubtably deserve it.
All in all, self love is a hugely important part of being confident, happy, and comfortable in your own skin. Although usually ignored for the more cliché resolutions of juice cleanses and daily yoga practices, self love can make you more conscious of your overall mental and physical health, and less likely to be self critical and self deprecating. Instead of trying to change our outwards appearances and ourselves in general, let’s all just try to love ourselves for who we are.