The internet lied to us about self-love

4 questions that finally made self-love make sense to me

In the wellness and fitness space, the internet took self-love and turned it into an aesthetic.

Candles. Bubble baths. Silk pyjamas. Positive affirmations. Buy yourself flowers. Treat yourself.

And none of that is inherently bad. Some of it is lovely.

But it has also created this strange confusion where people now hear the word self-love and immediately imagine softness without discomfort. As though loving yourself means never pushing yourself, never feeling friction, never being asked to do anything you do not already feel like doing, and that any discomfort should be avoided in the name of compassion.

As though self-love and self-improvement are somehow in contradiction, and choosing one means abandoning the other.

But when workouts are constantly skipped, structure dissolves, and everything starts to feel scattered, a creeping sense sets in - that being endlessly gentle with yourself isn't actually moving you anywhere. That this version of self-love isn't really holding you. It's just letting you drift.

And so the instinct isn’t to refine it.

It’s to swing in the other direction.

Suddenly it is discipline. Relentless discipline. 4am alarms and cold showers and a podcast recorded by men who appear not to have slept since 2018.

Stop being lazy. Stop making excuses. No one is coming to save you. Grind harder. You’re a little b*tch. Useless. Soft. Behind.

There is always some variation of self-rejection masquerading as motivation, topped with some level of insecurity fuelling the urgency. The message is that self-love made you indulgent, and now the only answer is harshness.

Hate yourself into change. Disgust, pressure, urgency are what create results.

spoiler alert: it does

… for a while.

Shame and urgency do create momentum. Fear is a real motivator.

But the whole system is built on self-hatred, which is an exhausting thing to sustain.

The moment life gets in the way, one missed day becomes proof of failure, failure becomes proof of weakness, and the entire thing eventually collapses. Because harshness has no flexibility. To be constantly at war with yourself is an exhausting, joyless way to live.

And so you're left with a relationship where you can only show up when you feel bad enough about yourself. The moment that intensity drops, everything drops with it.

Which is such a strange conclusion, really. As if the only alternatives available to us are self-indulgence or self-punishment. The candle or the 4am alarm. Pick a side.

So what is it, really, when we speak of self-love?

We all have our own version of what self-love looks like in practice.

But when we strip it back, what is it really meant to be?

I think it’s simpler - and less comfortable - than either side tends to admit.

At its most basic: treat yourself like someone worth taking care of.

And I want to start with the fact that real self-love is not always the easiest option. In fact, some of the most accurate forms of self-love feel inconvenient, effortful, and at times, deeply unglamorous.

And this is where things become much less sentimental and much more useful. Because you can love yourself and still ask more of yourself. In fact, sometimes asking more of yourself is the loving act.

Why general advice keeps missing the mark

General advice fails because it doesn't account for the fact that the same sentence can be the right thing for one person and completely the wrong thing for another.

Telling the person who is already drowning in self-criticism to ‘be more disciplined’ doesn’t help - it just gives the inner critic a microphone.

Telling the person who is already avoiding structure to ‘be kinder to yourself’ doesn’t help either - it hands them a justification for the very pattern keeping them stuck.

It either tightens what’s already too tight or loosens what’s already too loose.

It doesn’t create balance; it deepens the imbalance.

Which is why, without understanding your own tendency, even good advice can take you further away from what you actually need.

Four questions worth sitting with

Good advice doesn’t just have to be true. It has to be true for you, right now. And the only way to know that is to be honest about where you actually are.

These questions will help you do that.

1) Which voice is most familiar to me (at this current moment, in this specific situation)?

Which side do you naturally lean towards? And what would balance look like for you?

Because what feels normal is not always what is serving you. It is often just what you’ve rehearsed for years. At some point, the habit became the identity.

• For some people, what feels familiar is self-attack.

Criticism. Pressure. Restriction. Punishment.

This is the person who is terrified of a rest day because stopping feels like the beginning of completely falling apart.

Who eats a cookie and spends the rest of the day in a spiral of self-loathing, mentally calculating damage, planning compensation.

Who holds themselves to a standard so unforgiving that any deviation doesn't just feel like a slip, it feels like proof - proof of weakness, proof of failure.

So when they’re told to be kinder to themselves, to rest, to stop punishing themselves after every slip - it feels uncomfortable. Almost wrong. Like they’re letting themselves go.

but maybe that discomfort is exactly the point.

Growth doesn’t always look like pushing harder. Sometimes it looks like softening.

• For others, what feels familiar is avoidance.

Staying in that in-between space where nothing is quite bad enough to force change, but nothing is structured enough to actually move them forward.

A resistance to doing the thing that would actually help, because it requires a bit of discomfort, a bit of discipline, a bit of follow-through.

So the point isn’t to label yourself permanently as one or the other.

It’s to notice your tendency, in this area, at this moment, and being open and willing to move against it when needed.

That means asking honestly:

Where am I choosing short-term comfort over long-term support?

Where am I being unnecessarily harsh?

Where am I avoiding effort that would actually help me?

2) If my daughter/brother/best friend came to me with this exact situation, what would I tell them to do?

If someone you loved and cared about was constantly exhausted, overindulging, overwhelmed, not really taking care of themselves, you wouldn’t just say ‘honour yourself’ and leave it at that.

You wouldn’t let them drift under the guise of ‘being gentle’, nor would you push them into exhaustion under the guise of ‘being disciplined’.

You’d respond to what’s actually in front of you.

The reason this question is useful is that it bypasses the distortion.

When it’s your own life, there’s a story attached - I’ve always been like this, I can’t, it’s different for me.

When it’s someone you love, you see clearly.

You already know what balanced, supportive action looks like. You might just be less consistent at extending it to yourself.

3) What would actually support me right now?

Not what feels easiest. Not what I usually do. Not what fits the version of me I like to identify with.

But what would actually help.

Some days the honest answer is rest. Genuine, necessary rest because you’ve been pushing hard, your body is depleted and not resting would set you back. Some days the honest answer is to show up anyway, not because you ‘feel like it’, but because you know that the version of you that does is always glad they did.

The goal isn’t to swing from one extreme to another. It’s to build flexibility.

To know when you need kindness and when you need discipline.

4) Do I actually trust myself to do what’s good for me (or have I given myself enough reasons not to)?

We love rules.

A clear framework. Eat this, not that. Train like this. Rest like that. Be disciplined. Be gentle. Pick a side and stay there. Just give me the framework and I’ll stick to it.

That’s why extremes are so attractive. The 30-day protocol. The detox. The strict plan. The all-in approach. They’re clear. Binary.

You’re either on it or you’re off it. You’re either doing well or you’re not. There’s no grey area, no need for discernment.

Rules remove the need to question yourself.

They tell you what to do. They take the responsibility out of your hands.

But the problem with borrowed scripts …

is that they eventually meet a situation they weren't written for. And when that happens - when the plan meets real life, when the rigid system meets a hard week - you're back to your own judgement. And if you don't trust it, you go straight back to default.

And that’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Because trusting your own judgement requires something rules don't:

self-awareness, honesty, and a willingness to admit that the answer changes depending on the day, your state, your patterns, the story you're currently telling yourself.

It requires an actual relationship with yourself rather than a framework someone else handed you. And most importantly, it requires you to trust your own judgement about what you need, and actually doing something about it.

What this looks like in practice

Would you trust a friend who kept making promises to you and breaking them… or would you start taking their words a little less seriously?

Here's the hard bit: self-trust isn’t built on intention. It’s built on evidence.

Do you trust yourself to take care of your body when you’re stressed or busy? Or only when you feel motivated?

Do you trust yourself to stop when something isn’t helping you anymore, even if it’s comfortable?

Do you trust yourself to follow through on the small things you say matter?

Every time you tell yourself you’ll do something and don’t, you gradually chip away at your trust in your own word and credibility with yourself.

Which is why rebuilding that trust doesn’t happen through grand declarations or sudden bursts of motivation. It happens in the small, unremarkable moments that no one else sees and that accumulate over time:

• The time you went for a walk even though the sofa was comfortable and nobody would have known

• The time you did the thing you said you would, not because you ‘felt’ like it, but because you'd told yourself it mattered.

but also:

• The time you took a rest day because you'd been pushing too hard, and you trusted yourself enough to recognise the difference between rest and avoidance.

• The time you ate the cookie, enjoyed it, and moved on - and proved to yourself that one decision doesn't have to become a spiral.

Over time, those moments accumulate into something more solid. You start to build a kind of internal evidence that you can rely on yourself, that your wellbeing is not something you only attend to when it’s convenient.

And so you make peace with the fact that there’s no script. That the answer changes depending on the day, your state, your patterns, your level of depletion, the story you’re currently telling yourself. And instead of finding that destabilising, you start to find it workable.

Because you’re building the capacity to read it clearly.

Here’s what I’ll leave you with

Self-love isn’t something you arrive at once and keep forever. It’s a lifelong process. Something you practise, lose, refine, and come back to again and again. There isn’t a clean finish line where you suddenly ‘have’ self-love and never question it again. It shifts with your life, your circumstances, your energy, your patterns.

It shifts. It blurs. You’ll notice yourself sliding back toward one extreme or the other, sometimes without realising until you’re well into it.

That’s fine. That’s part of it.

That's exactly where self-compassion comes in

Being able to look at what happened without exaggerating it, without attaching it to your identity, and without making it mean something bigger than it is. It’s saying, clearly, “that wasn’t ideal, but it’s fine, I’ll sort it tomorrow,” and actually following through.

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” — Oscar Wilde.

You don’t learn to swim and then never enter the water again.

The practice is the thing. The returning is the thing. The point here is to catch yourself a little sooner. To build enough self-awareness that you recognise the familiar pull - toward punishment, toward avoidance - and can make a slightly different choice a little more often.

And every time you come back to these questions, after a hard week, a bad month, a season where you completely lost the thread - you come back slightly more fluent in yourself than you were before.

We’re looking for one voice to follow, when actually the work is learning how to hold two.

There’s a version of you that needs compassion.

And there’s a version of you that needs direction

That’s what I think self-love is.

It was never the candles.

xo

Zara