Food for thought from the NYT The Morning today.
How to Like Yourself More
Taking time to enumerate the things you like about yourself each day may sound terminally woo-woo or conceited, but in practice, the results can be pretty transformative.
Best practices
I want to be a person with practices. A yoga practice, a mindfulness practice, a gratitude practice. I’m not totally sure when a nourishing activity passes into the realm of a practice, but I think it has something to do with intention and devotion. You prioritize doing this thing that has a positive effect on you or others or on the world you live in — say, sitting in quiet contemplation for 20 minutes each morning, or journaling every night before bed. You commit to doing it on a regular basis, and after enough reps, it becomes part of who you are.
I’ve been hesitant to declare — to myself, never mind anyone else — that I’ve established any of the aforementioned practices because I’m skeptical of my ability to stick with them. I tend to burn hot in the initial phases of something that promises to improve my life, and then lose steam very quickly. I’ve done the first day of the “Yoga With Adriene” 30-day challenge at least 30 times.
One need not be so doctrinaire about one’s practices, I know. The point is to do and feel better, not to get a gold star. I’ve wandered away from many practices only to return to them, usually because I miss them, because seeing the benefits of doing something is often not as powerful as experiencing its absence. That’s the case with something I’ve been doing for the past eight months or so — not every single day, but enough days to tentatively call it “a thing I do,” if not a thoroughgoing practice.
At the end of the day, I try to write down as many things as I can think of that I appreciate about myself. It might be how I handled a difficult situation, or that I checked something off my to-do list that I’d been putting off. It might be something witty I said, or the way I reframed how I was thinking about a situation. Some days there’s not much content to work with, and I might just appreciate that I made the bed even though I really didn’t want to, or that my hair looked kind of good.
When someone first recommended I try this, I thought it sounded very self-involved, maybe a little pathetic — was my self-esteem so impoverished that I needed to ply myself with compliments? (It turns out that some days, in fact, I do.) But over time I realized that what at first seemed facile was actually sort of revolutionary.
I’d tried practicing gratitude before and found it quite effective. You take a few minutes to write down things you’re thankful for — the kindness of a stranger, the way your child looks at you while you’re reading a bedtime story, the smell of honeysuckle when you bike past that one tree. You remind yourself how lucky you are, that while you’ve been fretting or regretting or despairing, all these good things and people and possibilities are part of your story, too.
With gratitude, you think about things outside yourself. You remember that you’re not alone, that there’s more going on in your life than what’s in your head, and this offers perspective. An appreciation practice entails thinking about yourself, but it’s not the opposite of gratitude; it’s a refraction of it. It’s expressing gratitude for oneself, which at first feels conceited, but eventually, for me, has come to seem anything but.
Left to its own devices, my mind will take stock of the day like a detective, looking for things I did wrong, could have done better or left undone completely. With an appreciation practice, I start with, “What did I do right today?” These are the behaviors and moments we tend not to linger on because they’re usually the parts of the day with the least tension. They’re not the sort of headline stories you might think to tell someone when asked how your day went. They’re not amusing or annoying. They don’t really make for good cocktail party fodder.
But the cumulative effect of memorializing these situations, day after day, is you start to see patterns in your behavior, to note the positive effect you’re having on those around you. And when you see that, you start to like yourself more. And who couldn’t stand to like themselves more?
I’ve found myself behaving differently — more assertively, more compassionately — simply because I know that, tonight, I’ll sit down and look at my day, and I know how good it will feel to appreciate these things about myself. I want to make future me proud. And on bad days, when I’m less than thrilled about how I dealt with things, I have a log of all the things that I’ve appreciated about myself in the past.
Once you start actively looking for things to appreciate about yourself, you realize how you’ve outsourced that task to other people. It feels wonderful when someone else tells you that you did a brilliant job in that meeting, that you really gave them solid advice, that you look great today. An appreciation practice enables you to bring that job in-house, to enlist yourself as your biggest fan. Other people are never paying as much attention to you as you are, so there’s a lot about you to appreciate that goes unremarked upon if you wait for someone else to acknowledge it.
), but it’s a strange human condition that we tend to focus so much more on all the negative — whether it’s about ourselves, the world, or other peeps.
