50 Easy Ways to Deepen Your Relationship With Yourself
We spend an enormous amount of energy tending our relationships with other people. We remember their birthdays and their coffee orders. We notice when they're off. We give them the benefit of the doubt, sometimes far past the point where they've earned it.
And then there's the person we've been with since the very beginning — the one who will be there on the last day too — and most of us treat her like a stranger we're vaguely annoyed by.
I think about this a lot, usually late at night, which is when I do most of my thinking. How much of my life I've spent being a good friend to everyone except the one person I can't leave.
What it actually means to have a relationship with yourself
It sounds like a self-help phrase, I know. Vague and a little embarrassing, like something printed on a candle.
But it's not complicated. A relationship with yourself is made of exactly the same things any other relationship is made of: attention, honesty, kindness, time, and a willingness to keep showing up.
Think about what makes someone a good friend to you. They know what you like. They notice when you're tired before you say so. They tell you the truth gently. They don't hold your worst moment over your head forever. They want to hear about the thing you're excited about, even if they don't fully understand it. They let you be quiet in the room with them.
Now ask yourself honestly whether you do any of that for you.
Most of us don't. We know our own preferences less well than we know our mother's. We push straight through exhaustion and call it discipline. We speak to ourselves in a voice we'd never use on someone we loved — or on someone we merely tolerated, for that matter. We treat our own interests as frivolous and our own needs as inconvenient.
A relationship with yourself is just the practice of turning some of that ordinary friendship inward. Not self-obsession. Not endless analysis. Just knowing who you are, being decent to her, and keeping her company.
Here's how you start. Fifty small ways, none of which require a retreat, a journal you'll abandon in March, or a personality transplant.
Part One: Learning who you are again
1. Find out what you actually like. Not what you liked at nineteen, not what your family assumes, not what's convenient. Ask the question fresh.
2. Notice what you reach for when nobody's watching. That's information. That's the real you, unsupervised.
3. Keep a running list of things that light you up. A color, a song, a smell, a kind of weather. Add to it whenever you notice one.
4. Pay attention to what drains you. Same principle, opposite direction. You can't protect your energy until you know where the leaks are.
5. Ask yourself what you want before you ask what's reasonable. You can decide what's practical later. Start with the honest answer.
6. Learn your own rhythms. Some of us come alive at 6 a.m. and some of us at midnight. Stop apologizing for yours and start building around it.
7. Notice your body's signals before they become emergencies. Hunger, thirst, tiredness, the tight jaw. Catch them early.
8. Reread something you loved as a child. You'll find out something about who you were before the world had opinions.
9. Ask yourself what you'd do with a completely free day. Then notice how long it takes you to answer. That hesitation is worth sitting with.
10. Write down three things you believe. Not things you're supposed to believe. Things you actually do.
Part Two: Keeping your own company
11. Take yourself out. A coffee, a matinee, a walk downtown. Alone on purpose, not alone by default.
12. Sit somewhere without your phone for ten minutes. Just look at things. This is harder than it sounds and worth every uncomfortable minute.
13. Eat one meal without a screen. Notice the food. Notice that you're the one having the experience.
14. Take the long way home. Choose the route with the pretty houses instead of the fast one.
15. Let yourself be bored. Boredom is the doorway to nearly everything interesting. We've almost entirely paved over it.
16. Go for a walk with no destination. Turn when a street looks appealing. That's the whole activity.
17. Have a night that belongs only to you. Same night each week, if you can. Guard it the way you'd guard plans with a friend you love.
18. Learn to enjoy your own silence. Not the TV as background noise. Actual quiet, for a little while, until it stops feeling like a room you're waiting to leave.
19. Do something badly, on purpose, in private. Sing, draw, dance, whatever. Skill was never the point.
20. Wake up early once, just to have the house to yourself. Or stay up late. Whichever is the hour nobody else claims.
Part Three: Changing how you talk to yourself
21. Catch the voice in your head and identify whose it is. Very often it isn't yours. Very often you can name the person it belongs to.
22. Say it out loud and see if you'd accept it. If a friend said that sentence about herself, would you let it stand?
23. Swap "I should have known better" for "I know better now." Same information, entirely different consequence.
24. Let yourself be a beginner. You're allowed to be bad at something for as long as it takes.
25. Stop narrating your day as a list of failures. You did dozens of things right today and one thing wrong, and you know exactly which one you're going to think about at 2 a.m.
26. Forgive yourself for something small. Practice on the little things. The big forgiveness gets easier with reps.
27. Take a compliment without deflecting it. Just "thank you." Sit in the discomfort. It gets easier.
28. Talk about your own interests without apologizing for them. No more "it's silly, but." It isn't silly. You like it.
29. Notice when you're being kind and give yourself credit. We track our failures with obsessive precision and our decencies not at all.
30. Write yourself one sentence of encouragement. Say it the way you'd say it to someone you loved, because you are talking to someone you love.
Part Four: Tending the life you live in
31. Make your bed. A small kindness to the person coming home tonight.
32. Keep one surface clear. Just one. A place your eyes can rest.
33. Drink the water. It's the least romantic advice on this list and the one that changes the most days.
34. Sleep like it matters. You are not more virtuous for being exhausted.
35. Move in a way that feels good. A walk, dancing in the kitchen, stretching on the floor. Not punishment. Not penance. Just being on good terms with your body.
36. Get outside before noon. Even five minutes on the porch. Morning light rearranges something.
37. Use the good thing. The nice candle, the real dishes, the perfume you're saving. You're the occasion.
38. Wear something you like. Not for anyone. Just so that when you catch yourself in the mirror, you're pleased.
39. Feed yourself properly, and with some pleasure. Sit down to eat. Make the thing you actually want.
40. Handle one small dreaded task. The email, the phone call, the drawer. The relief is out of all proportion to the effort.
Part Five: Making room for delight
41. Protect something purely because you love it. No justification required. It doesn't have to earn its place.
42. Say no without an explanation. "I can't make it" is a complete sentence. You'll survive the silence after it.
43. Make something with your hands. Bread, a garden bed, a bad painting. Making things proves you're still moving forward.
44. Keep a small collection. Rocks, postcards, teacups. Something that's just yours to be delighted by.
45. Follow a curiosity down the rabbit hole. Two hours on a topic with no use whatsoever is not wasted time. That's what a mind is for.
46. Make a playlist for a mood you're in. Then actually listen to it, all the way through, doing nothing else.
47. Plan something to look forward to. Small is fine. Anticipation is half the pleasure and it's free.
48. Let yourself want things. Wanting isn't greed. It's just the map of who you are pointing somewhere.
49. Be unembarrassed about your joy. The unfashionable hobby, the music you've supposedly outgrown, the thing that makes you light up. Cynics will find something ridiculous regardless. Let it be your happiness.
50. Write down one good thing before you sleep. One line. Do it for a year and you'll have three hundred and sixty-five pieces of evidence that your life was better than you were giving it credit for.
In closing
You don't need all fifty. You need one, tonight, and then another one tomorrow — because a relationship with yourself isn't built in a weekend of intensive work any more than a friendship is. It's built in the accumulation of small decencies: the glass of water, the honest answer, the walk you took the long way, the moment you caught that unkind voice and decided not to agree with it. None of them look like much on their own. All of them together look like a life. And the quiet, remarkable thing is that the person on the receiving end of all that care has been waiting a very long time for you to notice she was there.