"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." - Sharon Salzberg.
What is Self-acceptance?
Self-acceptance is the act of an individual's acceptance of all of his/her attributes, both positive and negative. It includes body acceptance, and self-protection from negative criticism. You accept your all personality traits exactly as they are. You accept them without making any changes to them. This includes your physical and mental attributes.
Self-acceptance means acknowledging your value beyond your attributes. It is also known as radical self-acceptance. It gives you more confidence in yourself and makes you less prone to criticism. To achieve Self-acceptance, you must learn to accept yourself fully despite your flaws.
Importance of Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance is a combination of everything it involves accepting your behavior, and attitude, acknowledging them, and working towards making a desirable change.
It involves accepting your body, protecting yourself from negative remarks, and believing in one's capabilities.
Practicing Self-acceptance helps a person to realize his/her qualities, including both good and bad and to remove feelings of guilt, sadness, and unhappiness.
When we begin to accept who we are, we give ourselves a chance for improvement.
Self-acceptance helps us to uncover our hidden talent that we didn't know about ourselves.
Self-acceptance allows us to understand and acknowledge our traits and habits.
Rather than focusing on what we don't possess, we begin to start to embrace ourselves about the qualities which we have.
We tend to focus more on ourselves and less attention is paid to others.
Self- Acceptance is directly linked to our psychological well-being.
It helps us to stay alert, helps us to generate new ideas.
Keeps us more active and focused.
Helps us be consistent with our work without dwelling on negative thoughts rather than focusing on the positive aspect of our lives.
Without self-acceptance, people's psychological well-being is likely to suffer. As they become very self-critical of themselves and are more prone to depression, anxiety, and stress. Resisting acceptance of yourself can make you feel anxious about yourself, your body and give stress signals to your brain which significantly damage your body. Difficulty handling stressful situations, fear of being judged by other people, fear of losing control of one's life. These people always dwell in negative thoughts which affect their mental and emotional health.
Different ways to nurture self-acceptance are as follows
Understand your strengths and weaknesses
Each individual has different strengths and weaknesses for example one person is good at math while the other is not. So don't get disheartened, get involved in things that enhance your strengths.
Understand that you are unique
Understand that each individual is unique and irreplaceable, everyone is born with different skills and one needs to focus on their skills and should embrace their capabilities.
Show your gratitude to other people
Be grateful for people around like friends and family tell them they mean everything to you.
Don't compare yourself to other people
Each person is unique and is born with different capabilities, understand yourself.
Work towards your goal
Set a target for yourself so that you accomplish what you want in your life, and work towards yourself.
Allow yourself to recognize your mistakes
Every human being makes mistakes, don't feel ashamed about yourself for making mistakes, and try to learn from your mistakes.
Surround yourself with people who accept you
Be with people who accept you as you are without making any changes, this will increase your Self- acceptance.
Talk about your feelings to others
Communication is very important so talk to people around you and share your feelings, thoughts, and ideas this will boost your Self-acceptance.
Build Confidence
Feel confident about yourself, accept your flaws, don't hesitate to make changes.
Don't live in the past, focus on the present
The past cannot be undone, so focus on the present, make your present beautiful, and live in the present.
Learn from the experience and let go of everything
Experiences make us strong and mature so learn from your past experiences, don't regret anything and make necessary changes so that you don't feel pessimistic.
Be Optimistic
Think positive and positive things will happen to you for example- If you have a test tomorrow, don't be afraid to study rather than study hard and in the end, your hardwork will pay off.
Develop self-love
Self-love is very important, feel good about yourself, accept yourself fully. You are perfect as you are.
Help others in difficult times
Helping others will make you feel good about yourself and thus, boosts your self-acceptance.
Ability to control anxiety and stress
Try to do activities that will decrease your anxiety and stress such as Yoga and meditation that will calm your mind and will give you clarity about yourself.
Conclusion
Self-acceptance is the ability to accept yourself fully, focusing on the positive things in life and making changes accordingly despite your flaws. As everyone in this world makes mistakes, nobody is perfect. We humans need to accept ourselves as we are, as every individual is unique and has different capabilities, embracing good things about yourself while also considering your weaknesses and working towards bringing change in yourself. Self-acceptance is related to our overall well-being, especially including our happiness. The more we accept ourselves the better we enjoy our lives. People who have greater Self-acceptance tend to show less depressive symptoms such as anxiety, stress and have positive emotions such as high self-esteem, optimism, courage and happiness. While people with low self-acceptance tend to suffer more they become anxious, fearful, Pessimistic tend to experience more depressive symptoms such as depression and anxiety. So one should try to embrace his/her qualities and should focus more on themselves, helps us to identify what makes us different from others, how we can make a difference by being ourselves.
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