My Students’ Blog

Creating a Healthy Self-Relationship

By LillieDale B.

Have you ever wondered how some people manage their lives so well? One thing that may be helping them is their relationship with themselves. This is a big part of life that many don’t learn as a skill until later in life. While it isn’t always easy, it is a skill that should be known about, and mastered to live a happy and healthy life. 

Onelove has a lot of tips on this topic. “When you depend on someone else to satisfy these critical needs, you give away enormous power and control over your basic wellbeing”. Giving away your confidence to someone else can affect the entire relationship that you and that person hold. Depending on others to provide you with confidence, love, and power, is an unhealthy habit. The beginning is when everything is happy, then it moves to a slow part of the relationship which causes you to feel the doubt that was there before. Allowing others to dictate your emotions, moods, and actions is harmful to not only yourself, but to others around you. 

Have you ever wondered how some people manage their lives so well? One thing that may be helping them is their relationship with themselves. This is a big part of life that many don’t learn is a skill until later in life. While it isn’t always easy, it is a skill that should be known about, and mastered to live a happy and healthy life. 

Onelove has a lot of tips on this topic. “When you depend on someone else to satisfy these critical needs, you give away enormous power and control over your basic wellbeing”. Giving away your confidence to someone else can affect the entire relationship that you and that person hold. Depending on others to provide you with confidence, love, and power, is an unhealthy habit. The beginning is when everything is happy, then it moves to a slow part of the relationship which causes you to feel the doubt that was there before. Allowing others to dictate your emotions, moods, and actions is harmful to not only yourself, but to others around you. 

Like any negative relationship, negative self-relationships can and will hold you back from your potential.

Having a relationship with your body and mind is the most important part of any relationship. Oftentimes, throughout middle and high school, our self-relationships get ruined. Our self-esteem is challenged, personalities get changed, and the thoughts about ourselves get affected greatly. Like any negative relationship, negative self-relationships can and will hold you back from your potential.  While it’s hard to heal, here are some easy things to get you started. Being able to check-in with yourself, validate all your feelings, remember it’s okay to say no, and set boundaries for yourself and for others. It is completely okay to let others down, and to help yourself become your best version.

Having a good relationship with yourself is not just on a mental level. There are three levels. For the physical level, there are many ways to improve your self-relationship. Helping to decrease stress is one of the biggest ways for your body functions to change and improve. Physical health is tightly related to the brain’s nervous system. Allowing the brain to relax, allows your entire body to relax. If you have trouble relaxing your muscles, try going to a massage therapist, taking a hot bath with epsom salts, and allowing steam and hot water to relax your body. 

On an emotional level, it’s normal to experience different feelings depending on the situation. For instance, having to speak in front of a large crowd may induce stress and anxiety for some, while others may feel no different. This is because every person feels different things. Learning to manage your thoughts and feelings will help empower confidence, and reduce anxiety. When interviewing Crystal West, a person who has worked for their healthy self-relationship, she said “What helps me the most is having quiet time where I can just decompress, just space to breathe.” 

For the mental level, there are techniques to help with pain and anxious thoughts. It is very hard to just let go of everything, but learning techniques, and using them, will help to distract your mind from all those thoughts. It can also help shift negative thoughts, and bring in positive ones. Though it may be hard, it’s okay to take it slow

Creating healthy habits is a good way to both create a healthy mind, and maintain that balance. To start on improving your habits, you must first know what your habits already are. Habits can be anything that is a repetitive action that makes dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin release in your brain. To help change these habits, try replacing them with simple tasks. So for instance, instead of going out with friends for a night out, join friends for a hike, craft night or even a movie night. 

The last thing I can say is, to help create and maintain your self-relationship, is to help your mental focus. First you should evaluate how mentally focused you are at the moment. If you’re able to stay alert and be able to take breaks then get back to work, you have pretty good focus. While if you daydream regularly, or lose track of time, these are signs that your focus needs work. To help focus, you can remove any distractions that may affect your progress. You can also limit your area of focus to small parts of a whole. While it may be hard to only look at one thing, it can help focus. To go along with breaking a whole into small parts, it is also important to take breaks when you get overwhelmed. This allows your mind to relax and refocus. After practicing all this, it’s vital that you keep practicing these actions. Soon enough they will become habits, and almost second nature to you. 

To help the process of creating healthy habits, make a plan to remove these disruptive habits. Think about where you want to be in the near future, and create a plan based on that. If you want to start getting more active, try walking to the grocery store. This allows you to do what you need to do already, while making yourself get more activity into your day. To continue these healthy habits you’ve started, track your progress. Doing positive things that are rewarding to your body and mind will help these growing habits continue on. The last thing to help with your habits progress, is to be patient with yourself. When trying this process, habits do not come quickly when you’re not used to the actions. So while you may not be seeing any progress, trust the process. 

If you take into consideration all these components, it can, and will improve your self-relationship. Keep in mind though, that this process may take a while to become natural to you.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” –William Edward Hickson