People always want to start their days with a positive quote from a random personality or popular figure. They tend to do it so since they want a mantra that they can follow throughout the day. Looking at the brighter side seem to be the only way to show how much you love yourself, but let me warn you: not all positivities can bring a positive effect to your life.
Being positive sometimes may be essential, but toxic positivity is something you should avoid. As what the words say, toxic positivity is a way of seeing things positively but we are unaware that it is even a toxic move. The concept of it is thinking that you are growing healthy and every little thing you do is positive enough to establish your life. However, everything becomes toxic when you totally focus on positive thoughts and reject anything that will trigger those negative emotions a person should typically be feeling.
While it is essential to stay positive, toxic positivity happens when you ignore or shrug off negative vibes and unpleasant emotions. If you fail to notice them, you are just making them even bigger. As they remain unprocessed and unnoticed, those emotions will become bigger and bigger until they are too much not to be noticed and too hard to be resolved.
When you let toxic positivity reign in your life, you are losing your chance to give yourself relate to what others are going through right now. If that is the case, it can make you look less approachable and not relatable at all, causing them to lose interest in your existence.
Accepting negativities, of course, can definitely make us feel bad about it. But facing the emotions you are most afraid of will teach you how to cope with them until you can handle them while eliminating their occurrence little by little. After all, bringing your burdens off your shoulders and chest is way easier than pretending like everything is still okay and not falling apart.
Our emotions are not there to scare us or harm us. Instead, they occur to give us hints on how our brains would like to respond to the events happening around us. It is not always about looking at the silver linings in life. If you want to learn how to truly love yourself, you should know that your human brain does not work that way.
To help you out, we will teach you the simple things you can do to love yourself without practicing toxic positivity. But before you can continue, you can read “How Emotional Intelligence Plays HUGE Role In Healthy Relationships” to know more about emotional intelligence which you can also apply to yourself. In that write-up, you will discover how EQ is more important than IQ, and how low emotional intelligence can affect your healthy relationships as well as your other social relationships.
- Understand Yourself
- Open Your Heart
- Be Grateful
Understand Yourself
Growing healthy means choosing to love yourself first. And in order to do that, you must talk to yourself first so you can be able to understand what is going through your mind. There is so much advice our families and friends have to offer. However, you should realize that your life is your life, not theirs. Your life is something only you can manage and understand — your actions, words, and everything that is happening around you.
When it comes to understanding yourself, your thoughts are the only things that matter. The way you do that explains how much you take care of and love yourself healthily. If there are types of relationships that will need you to consult other people first, in this one, you need to love yourself first by listening and understanding yourself through ups and downs. If you are happy, sad, angry, or frustrated, you should learn how to manage yourself and those feelings without depending on anyone else.
You see, when you begin to love yourself, growing healthy will never be a problem anymore. Your own senses will send you signals that can surely help you get through anything. Once you learned to do that, you will see more as you take notice of everything you do and everyone around you. You will also learn that little by little, those things that are once blurry to you will finally be more apparent.
To start understanding yourself, you might do the following tips every day:
- Give yourself a good rest. I know you are aware that your brain cannot work correctly if your body is too exhausted to translate the signal. So taking a break to shoo away toxic positivity from your life is a must. You can have a ten-minute break whenever you accomplish something, or you can achieve that 8-hour sleep every night.
- Give yourself a treat by eating healthy. You can refer to our articles titled “5 Healthy Diet Tips That Can Boost Your Immunity During Coronavirus Outbreak” and “7 Healthy Foods For All Diet Types That Can Help You Add MORE Weight” to get some tips about healthy eating.
- Taking a break is essential especially when you want to offer yourself some space to boost your spiritual aspect. For another set of tips, you can read “Stress Management: Here’s How You Can Deal With Work Burnouts”. This one primarily tackles taking a break from work. In this article, you will learn how to manage your stress and the things you should do to regain your balance once again.
- Exercise regularly. To love yourself is to take care of your physical aspects too. Make sure you dedicate a few minutes of your day to getting active.
According to the Vitae Realising The Potential of Researchers website, you should understand yourself by realizing your talents. And you can do it by asking:
- Think about significant points of achievement or challenge in your life to date
- Why are they significant?
- What have you learned from them, and how might they influence the type of career path you pursue?
Open Your Heart
If you want to love yourself, you must learn to open up yourself first. Accepting that you are not perfect instead of pretending that you are perfect can help you in growing healthy enough to love yourself. When you acknowledge your emotions, lapses, and mistakes, then you will surely have to reach a higher level of self-care and self-love while eliminating toxic positivity.
To do this, you may retrace your childhood to find the best lessons in your life. Understanding every negative emotion, your lows, and the shameful words and deeds you did before but regretting now is the best way to open your heart little by little. This way, you might also be able to accept the things that caused you to close your heart before and find out how some of them might be a victim of your false understandings. Expanding your mental capacity is also another thing you can do to love yourself. Maybe you see the world differently since you saw the wrong in them.
However, if you can recall, it only worsened because you failed to notice it. So one way you can do to fix it is to learn from your past and not shut your door anymore. This is the only way out to release yourself from the hurtful truths that have been confining you for years now. This is how you can escape from your emotional problems to be able to deal with your current emotions now.
Maybe, you closed your heart because of something that happened a long time ago, but you still have a hard time letting them go, or perhaps you just do not want to accept the truth about it. Once you learn how to accept your pain and mistakes, you will discover that too much optimism does not exist at all. If you choose to conceal your negative emotions, you are just ignoring a part of yourself, and it is not a healthy way to live yourself.
We know that growing up, you have always wanted to learn how to love yourself first. But you should know by now that we all have a dark side and it only takes honesty to yourself to accept all of that. Forgive yourself for everything that happened in the past that caused you to feel that way, and embrace the fact that you can no longer be changed what happened but you can still do better next time by learning from it. Make no room for jealousy, that way you will succeed and love yourself more.
Be Grateful
While growing up, I refused to have toxic positivity. Instead, I looked at the negative things and learned from them, then I convinced myself that something good would happen once I understood that. Being grateful for everything that happened to you is something you can learn while growing healthy, and it can shape your mindset and attitude into a powerful one — powerful enough to teach you how to forgive and love yourself.
Scott H. Young, the author of the book “Ultralearning” said, “If you want to make any improvement in your life, you must first accept the way it is now. Don’t try to judge it and make it wrong. Don’t try to glorify it or distort the truth to make it more attractive. Just accept the way things are.”
He added that personal improvement occurs when a person acknowledges their current situation and finds pain in it. That is because extreme pain can push people to do something about it, and no matter what the ending would be, they will still learn something from it.
Harvard Medical School’s Health Publishing published “6 Ways to use your mind to control pain” under Harvard Women’s Health Watch. In 2015, they listed that mind-body therapies for yourself can help you get through the pain.
“I tend to think of these techniques as similar to flavors in an ice cream store. Depending on your mood, you might want a different flavor of ice cream—or a different technique,” Dr. Ellen Slawsby, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who works with patients at the Benson-Henry Institute, said. “Practicing a combination of mind-body skills increases the effectiveness of pain relief.”
In order to prevent toxic positivity, these are the things they advised people like you to do when they want to love themselves first.
- Take a deep breath. It has always been a technique to calm yourself down while giving yourself time to internally ask your body how it is doing. Breathing in peace and exhaling your tension and stress can help you get your body back to the rhythm.
- Find the best relaxation response. When you are stressed, your heart rate gets faster and it puts your body on high alert. To contradict this, you should learn how to focus on deep breathing and maintaining a good oxygen level in your body.
- Once you finish your breathing exercises, you can now start listening to more calming music that can continuously maintain your body’s good rhythm.
- To love yourself is to offer something that will surely make your day enjoyable. You can opt to read or write stories and poetries, walk and reconnect with nature, cook your favorite dish, and more. Practicing how your emotions respond when you are doing this, and can remove toxic positivity in all aspects of your life.
Reality is neither good nor bad. There is an old Buddhist saying, “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.” To love yourself is to allow yourself to see both big and small pictures and overcome the challenges in life. You do not need to complain anything about your struggles because that is what can make you stronger and healthier. And once you champion all of that, I assure you that you will feel the life satisfaction you have always been waiting for.
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