Improve your relationship with yourself

It is obvious that you need to put time and effort into building a relationship with your significant other or friends, but there are also important habits that help you improve your relationship with yourself.

Once you get to a place where you feel comfortable, confident, and loving towards yourself, all those other relationships you want to cultivate will also benefit from your newfound self-appreciation, and you might find you have much more positive experiences in all facets of life.

Developing a strong, healthy relationship with yourself might take time, but you can help yourself along by engaging in certain habits. Here are seven amazingly effective ways experts say you can improve your relationship with yourself.

Here are some ways to start improving your relationship with yourself:

Honest evaluation of the areas in your life that need attention

A helpful place to evaluate yourself is to consider the areas of your life where you are feeling drained.

When you start evaluating how you can honour your needs and begin to take action in these areas, you start to build trust with yourself and increase your self-compassion.

Practice self-compassion

A simple way to start practicing is next time you're being critical of yourself, acknowledge that you are experiencing suffering in the present moment and rather than try to shame yourself or bottle it up, ask yourself what you need in that moment and reflect about ways you can show yourself compassion.

Engage in meaningful self-care

Self-care can include relaxing activities or it can include activities that protect your energy such as not responding to work emails after a certain hour or saying no to additional projects or requests for your time.

Self-care also includes getting adequate rest, eating nourishing foods, and moving your body regularly.

Commit to one habit that you keep every day

Imagine that you have a friend who frequently cancels at the last minute or doesn't show up for plans you made together. It is likely that you would start to lose trust in that friend over time.

The same thing happens when you don't nurture the relationship you have with yourself. Rather than overwhelm yourself with trying to establish several new habits at the same time, pick one that is realistic for your schedule and initially no more than 10-20 minutes per day.

Practice meditation

Meditation can help you to change the relationship that you have with your thoughts, which can assist in reducing the impact of negative self-talk if practiced regularly.

The positive effects of meditation can also improve your relationship with yourself and with others. There are meditations designed to improve your relationship with yourself and others, such as the loving-kindness meditation and the self-compassion break.