Caring for yourself and actually doing the work of taking care of yourself are not easy feats. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, and still do to this day. That said, I have found two distinct paths that were very helpful to me, and so I wanted to take the time to write about them today.

These tips are specifically aimed at people who either don’t value themselves enough to take care of themselves, or who are too dismissive of the value to do the work. Either way, you are worth the effort, you just need to believe it.

Fake It ‘Till You Make It

Straight up, you’re just going to have to lie to yourself. You’ll know you’re lying, but the more you hear the lie, the more it will start to be ingrained as the truth. I did not have a high self-esteem while I was growing up. I thought a high self-esteem was a sign of arrogance and vanity, and I didn’t want to be either of those things. But this led not to a “normal” self-esteem, but a low one. I believed no one would have any reason to be interested in me, and that kinda of thinking leaked into other aspects of my life. Then, one day, I decided to try lying to myself. I stood in front of the mirror, and picked some detail about myself to compliment. Frankly, I felt stupid. I kept at it, though. Every few days I would try again. I learned that it was helpful to compliment myself as if I were complimenting someone on the street.

I still do this today. Self-esteem is a fluid thing. Some days it’s high, and others you’re in the pits. So you have to keep it up, but it does help. Today I can confidently look in the mirror, and identify myself as someone that looks pretty good. At least, I can believe that others would say I look good.

I can’t overstate how ridiculous it can feel to tell yourself how good you look when you don’t believe it, but you really do just have to keep at it. Lie to yourself, and allow yourself to lie. Allow yourself to listen to the lie. Eventually it will stop sounding crazy.

Internalize Compliments

You can’t be dismissing compliments. You can’t just brush them off with a kind “thank you”, and then never think about it again. If someone compliments you, yes you should thank them, but you should also consider that maybe, just maybe, they actually meant that compliment. After all, why would they go out of their way to say something nice about you if they didn’t mean it, even if just a little.

My wife is a pro at giving compliments. If we’re out and about running errands, and they see someone with a nice hairdo or a cute outfit, they’ll make sure to let the person know. Mind you this isn’t always met with some grand interaction. Sometimes it’s even met with a look of annoyance from the other person, but my wife always genuinely means the compliments they give.

Dismissing the compliments you receive only serves to harm you. You’re not necessarily being humble, but rather you may be being self-destructive. Internalize those compliments. They’ll serve to make the lies in step one more believable.

Cared For → Missing Results → Taking Action

Now this one may be out of reach for the singles out there, but I’m including it here because I’ve been amazed at the effectiveness of it this week. Go figure, but my wife cares more about my own wellbeing than I do. They will sometimes go out of their way to do the steps to help me be healthy. Whether that be applying cremes and lotions to my skin so that it’s healthier, or bringing me my vitamins so I don’t forget. It’s all very sweet of them. At the end of the day, though, that’s not their job. I’m a grown person, I should be able to take care of myself, and so I can’t expect them to stand over my shoulder and parent me.

Case and point; they used to “force” me to drink these shots of ginger juice, and eat kimchi. Both are very good for your gut, and they’re also very good for my chronic heartburn. Eventually my wife stopped asking all the time if I had my shot, or had some kimchi that day. Again, it’s not their job. And pretty soon, I started to get sick more often and my heartburn flared up almost every day all day. After taking some time to think about why I had been so sick lately, I realized it had been almost a month since I had done any of the things my wife had been trying to get me to do. You bet that some of my next paycheck went towards getting more ginger shots and kimchi. Sure enough, I felt better within the week.

My point here is that sometimes you just need someone else to kick start the process of caring for yourself. I never really took care of my gut because I’ve been dealing with this my whole life, and nothing I tried ever seemed to help, so what was the point. My wife was able to kick start this process of taking care of my gut by more-or-less forcing me to take the steps I needed to. And when they stopped, the absence of any effort from me was obvious. Not only did they show me that I could be better, but that I do have it in me to do the work to be better.

The Choice Is Yours

I don’t have a good way to close out this one. I feel it’s more rambley than my usual post, but what is there to say. At the end of the day, you have to choose to take care of yourself. It won’t always feel right. You might not always feel worthy of self-care. In that sense, the choice is yours. You can keep going as you are, or you can force yourself to put in the work, even though you “know” that you don’t deserve it.