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Imagine you’re building a house. Self-love is the foundation of the house – it helps keep it together and anchored. On the other hand, self-care is the maintenance of the house – it’s everything that keeps the house looking beautiful and polished such as repairs, mowing the lawn, decor, and painting the house. To simply put it, self-love is the foundation and self-care is the action that maintains self-love. Let’s explore Self-love vs self-care, the definition of self-love and self-care, what makes them different, how they work together, and actions you can take to incorporate them into your life.
What is Self-Love?
Self-love is the internal feeling of appreciation, acceptance, and respect for yourself. It is feeling worthy with flaws and all. Self-love is showing yourself grace and compassion like you would a loved one.
What is Self-care?
Self-care is a practice that nourishes your body, mind, and soul. It is about maintaining your overall health and well-being. Self-care is putting self-love into practice.
Self-Love vs. Self-Care
1. Self-Love is a Mindset whereas, Self-Care is a Practice
Self-love consists of internal belief in how you view yourself. It is accepting yourself inwardly, showing yourself grace, and realizing your worth. Self-love is the belief that you are worthy of love, respect, kindness, and happiness.
Self-care is self-love manifested outwardly. It’s the action that nourish your emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. Without self-love, self-care can feel surface level without really making an impact.
For instance, when you love yourself, you don’t only book yourself a spa day when you’re stressed but you’ll set boundaries to prevent burn outs. Because you love yourself you put it into practice.
2. Self-Love is Interior whereas, Self-Care is Exterior
Self-love is a feeling that comes from within. It’s how you perceive yourself. Self-love is your inner dialogue and the way you talk to yourself.
Self-care consists of tangible practices that nourish your body, mind, and soul. For instance, exercising, eating healthier, or expanding your knowledge.
Self-love and self-care feeds on each other. For example you can spend countless hours doing your hair, make up, and nails but if every time you look in the mirror you see yourself as ugly. The issue is not loving yourself enough and this can affect you taking care of yourself because you don’t find yourself worthy. Think of it as input(self-love), output(self-care).
3. Self-Love is Life-Long whereas, Self-Care Short-Lived
Self-love requires constant evolution. It takes a lifetime because our relationship with ourselves constantly changes. We are constantly reflecting and growing as people. Therefore, it is a long-term process of loving, appreciating, and accepting yourself.
Self-care consists of daily activities that can change over time. It is something that only lasts for a moment such as taking a bubble bath, getting manicures and medicures, or journaling. Although self-care is important it only gives you a temporary boost and lasts for a certain amount of time.
For instance, going on a weekend retreat for relaxation is self-care but believing that you deserve to have a rest, relax and enjoy your life is self-love, it’s a mindset that lasts a lifetime.
4. Self-Love Consist of Self-Acceptance whereas, Self-Care Consist of Self-Maintenance
Self-acceptance is loving who you are while working to become the person you want to be. It’s embracing every part of you even that parts of you that you wish were different.
Self-maintenance is taking care of your mind, body, and emotions by implementing routines in your life. To simply put, it is the upkeep of your welfare.
For example, a person who looks at their reflection and accepts their appearance and being that their body isn’t perfect is someone who displays self-love. If that person eats healthy and goes to the gym, not because they hate themselves, but because they want to take care of themselves.
5. Self-Love Involves Creating Boundaries whereas, Self-Care Involves Applying Them to Your Life
When you have self-love you tend to establish boundaries because you value yourself and know your worth. Setting boundaries is rooted in you knowing your worth.
Self-care involves implementing those boundaries to protect your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. For instance, walking away from a toxic relationship, prioritizing yourself, and learning how to say “no” to things that don’t serve you.
For instance, self-love is knowing you deserve rest and relaxation and self-care is setting the boundary to say no to things that will drain you of your energy or below your standards.
6. Self-Love Determines Your Decisions whereas, Self-Care Supports Them
Self-love influences the choices you make. Self-love helps you to choose big life decisions that best align with who you are as a person. Whether it be choosing a partner, your career, or how you want to live. In fact, when you love yourself, you tend to align your decisions with your values and morals.
However, self-care helps to support and sustain the choices you’ve made. It gives you the mental and physical tools to take action on your decision.
An example is making a decision to leave your high paying job to pursue your dreams.
7. Self-Love Consist of Deep Emotional Work whereas, Self-Care Consist of Daily Habits
Self-love consists of you doing the inner work. It’s taking time to heal your wounds, love yourself through your insecurities, and be graceful towards yourself. Self-love takes emotional effort.
Self-care is the action you take to heal. It consists of daily rituals that help to maintain your physical, mentally, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
A great example is going to therapy to heal your childhood trauma, this is self-love because you’re doing the inner work. Then to help support your healing journey you journal your emotions and experiences each day, this is self-care because you’re taking action that’ll help you to heal.
8. Self-Love is the Foundation whereas, Self-Care is the Practice
Think of self-love as the root of a tree and self-care as the leaves or branches. For self-care to grow luscious it needs the nourishment from self-love. Self-love is what strengthens self-care. Without having love for yourself, self-care can feel performative and unfulfilling.
Therefore, if you have the best self-care routine but it’s not done in self-love it can feel more like a chore or undeserving rather than fulfilling and nourishing.
How to Use Self-Love and Self-Care Together
Although self-love and self-care aren’t the same thing, they work together. You can’t have one without the other; it’s like yin and yang. Here are some ways that self-love and self-care work together.
1. Self-Love Boosts Self-Care, and Self-Care Reinforces Self-Love
Self-love motivates self-care. When you value yourself you would naturally put your mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being first. In other words, when you love yourself you automatically have the urge to care for yourself. As a result, this will send a message to your subconscious mind saying “I am worthy and deserving of love,” this strengthens your self-love.
To place this into practice you can choose a self-care activity to do each day. Then tell yourself that you’ll do it because you’re deserving of it and do it.
For instance, if you always feel drained so you decide to set boundaries by not working after hours. This will send a message to your brain that you value yourself and is worthy of resting.
2. Self-Love Helps You to Choose the Right Self-Care Practices
Without self-love, self-care can be fake and forced. In fact, lacking self-love can cause you to ignore your emotional needs and instead indulge in the wrong self-care practices or even misuse them. For instance, buying yourself a new pair of clothing items that collect dust in your closet because you refuse to address your emotions of feeling unworthy for the sake of ‘self-care.’ Self-love helps you to choose the right self-care practices to meet your inner needs.
To see if your self-care practice is guided by self-love, make a list of all your self-care practices. Then, analyze and circle the ones that aid in your mental, emotional, and physical welfare.
For example, instead of going to the spa, you might use that time to go to therapy to heal your inner wounds. This self-care activity will feel more fulfilling and increase your self-value.
3. Self-Care Strengthens Your Self-Worth which Reinforces Self-Love
Every time you take care of yourself, it sends a message to your brain that says ‘I am worthy’ and ‘I do love myself.’ Therefore, showing up for yourself daily matters. Taking care of yourself will deepen the love you have for yourself and will build your self-esteem overtime.
You can choose self-care that are non-negotiable for you such as going to the gym, journaling every night before bed, or not working after hours. Stay consistent with your actions and watch your self-worth grow.
For instance, committing 10 minutes each morning to meditate, not only improve your mental health and calmness overtime but strengthens your self-value and self-love.
4. Self-Love Helps You to Set Boundaries, and Self-Care Helps You to Maintain Them
When we begin to love ourselves and know our worth it helps us to no longer put our energy in things that drains us or serves us. Now we set boundaries to protect ourselves.
For instance, if you’re dealing with a toxic person or someone is trying to take advantage of your kindness because you love yourself, you would recognize the issue and implement boundaries by taking action to protect yourself.
Try setting boundaries this week by choosing three that you need to implement in yourself. Then, pair it with self-care activity. For example, not answering calls after 7 pm to take a nice bubble bath.
5. Self-Love Cultivates Inner Healing, and Self-Care Supports the Journey
When you love yourself, you tend to heal your inner being. You can use self-care outwardly to help you with your healing process. For instance, pairing therapy with weekly journaling or yoga to heal your inner childhood traumas.
6. Self-Love Promotes Self-Compassion, which Deepens Self-Care
Self-love teaches you how to show yourself compassion, kindness, and empathy. You will choose self-nourishment over self-punishment. As a result, the compassion you have for yourself will strengthen your self-care.
So the next time you’ve made a mistake instead of speaking negatively to yourself, think of something nice you can say at that moment and give yourself grace.
7. Self-Love Encourages Authenticity, and Self-Care Gives You the Energy to Stay True to Yourself
Having self-love allows you to stop seeking external validation from others and start seeking internal validation from yourself. Self-care helps you to live authentically. For instance, you say no to things that don’t meet your standards or simply you’re not interested in.
8. Self-Love Strengthens Your Emotional Resilience, and Self-Care Helps You Manage Stress
Self-love aids in building inner strength which causes you to handle challenges, setbacks, and failure easily. In other words, you’ll see challenges as growth opportunities rather than failure. Self-care helps strengthen your resilience by doing deep breathing exercises or meditation.
You can create a stress ‘tool box’ with three quick things you can do that’ll reduce the feeling of tension.
9. Self-Love Removes Guilt from Self-Care
Sometimes we as women feel guilty for taking rest or breaks. However, when we have love for ourselves, it reminds us that it’s ok to rest or take breaks. We start to think that rest is an investment for our welfare. As a result, self-care becomes an act of self-respect and self-worthiness.
Instead of feeling bad for feeling resting, remind yourself that you are worthy.
10. Self-Love Strengthens the Mind and Body Connection, and Boosts Self-Care
Self-love encourages you to be intuitive about your body and honor its needs. You start to pay more attention to your body signals. Self-care encourages you to take action. For instance, drinking more water, getting more sleep, or prioritizing fitness.
Take about two minutes each day to do a body scan. Act on what your body needs. For instance, if you feel thirsty hydrate or if you feel tension stretch.
Ways to Implement Self-Love and Self-Care into Your Life
Self-Love:
- Practice Self-Compassion: Start speaking kindly to yourself, even when you’ve made mistakes.
- Challenge Negative Self-Talk: When you criticize yourself combat them with self-affirmations.
- Surround Yourself with Positivity: Be around people who uplift and inspire you.
- Set Boundaries: Protect yourself by putting boundaries in place.
- Celebrate Your Strengths: Instead of always focusing on your shortcomings, acknowledge your strengths and what makes you different, and celebrate them.
Self-Care:
- Make Time for Rest: Make sleep and rest a priority.
- Engage in Activities that Makes You Happy: You can try hobbies that make you happy and as an outlet to express yourself such as painting, dancing, pottery, etc.
- Nourish your Body: Eat healthy meals and keep yourself hydrated.
- Disconnect from Stressors: Take breaks from things that stress or drain you such as social media or your work.
Wrapping Things Up
Self-love is the cornerstone. It’s the way you view and value yourself internally. Whereas, self-care is the practices you perform to sustain self-love. Therefore, one can’t be present without the other. Moreover, they work hand in hand to ensure that you love, protect, respect, and value yourself to live a happier and much more fulfilling life.
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