5 Stupid Self Help Tips I Now Follow and Practice Every Day
Self-improvement is hard. The good news about it is that there’s no direct real answer for how someone can improve their lives. I’ve read a lot of self-help books in the past few years and while they offer plenty of great tips and paths to self-improvement, the general consensus is that as long as you’re doing what feels right and what makes you happy, then that’s probably the path you were meant to take. The bad news is that there's a lot of self-help tips and tricks out there that don’t always work for everyone so sometimes you have to trial and error a lot of different ideas until something fits with your life and what you want from it.
Here are five seemingly stupid self-help tips I used to think were ridiculous or just straight up didn’t understand until I started practicing them and found that they actually greatly improved my life.
Self Care is More Than Just Bubble Baths
Wouldn’t it be so nice if all of your life problems could be solved with a long soak with a special bath bomb, some treats, and a good book? When I was at the top of my burnout workaholic small time YouTuber game, this was exactly what I thought could cure all of the problems in my life. My idea of a break was allowing myself a night to play video games rather than edit a video or write a bit of whatever novel I was working on. This, unfortunately, is not true self care. It’s a nice way to give yourself a break and make sure you relax, for sure, but actual self care that will improve your life in the long run typically involves work and sometimes that work is painful. For example, going to the gym. I’m not convinced anyone actually likes going to the gym at first. It’s hard work, pushing your body to limits that it hasn’t seen before or in a while, and sweaty. Gosh so sweaty. But going to the gym in the long run, ideally, will allow you to be more fit and capable of accomplishing your health goals.
Real self care should help you improve your life overall so that way you’re not just living from bubble bath to bubble bath barely holding onto your sanity. Fun things like bubble baths or afternoons reading are tremendous self care tactics for short term relief, but truly improving your life and caring for it requires some long term investment and work. That can look like attending graduate school to qualify for a new career path more in alignment with your values or breaking up with a long term partner because they’re no longer matching your goals for life or even quitting what you thought was your passion because it claimed more of your life than you were willing to give it. Discomfort is part of the growth. You’re allowed to, and should, feel uncomfortable in your journey to grow your happiness.
If you’re interested in my full thoughts on this concept, I wrote more about how happiness doesn’t always make you happy with this blog post that you can check out here:
The Happiness Project and How Happiness Doesn’t Always Make You Happy — Maddie Gudenkauf
Avoid Social Media
Given how my main hobby and aspiration for many years was social media management, you couldn’t have paid me to get rid of my social media. Logically, I knew it was toxic and is basically only a cheap vehicle for false self-promotion while also serving as a horrible catalyst for unnecessary comparison, but I thought I could be better than it. I thought staying ahead of the curve by knowing all of the ins and outs of the social media games and just curating my feed accordingly would make me better than everything awful with social media. Plus, I was honestly a bit lonely and thought social media could make up for that loneliness with the perceived socialization from it.
Nope, nope, nope, nooooope.
Despite believing I was “in” on the joke known as social media, I really only found true improvement in my self-esteem and self-care practice when I greatly reduced my social media presence. I’ve mentioned before that I can’t fully get rid of it, but I truly didn’t realize how much my brain was still subconsciously playing the comparison game until I actively unfollowed so many accounts that I got shadowbanned from Instagram for a couple hours for suspicious activity. Once the shadow ban was lifted, I unfollowed even more accounts and felt incredible. Now my relationship with social media is much healthier. Rather than depending on it as a crutch for external validation from people that don’t even actively care about my life, I truly only use it as a resource to keep up to date on people in my life or a brief entertainment measure when I truly need something dumb because my brain can’t handle anything else. I’m even posting to it more now than I did in the past because I just want to share my thoughts about the interesting books I read and little moments from my life that I want to remember for myself in the future as a little recap of the month rather than as an opportunity to promote the false brand I created for myself.
Social media is truly an addictive monster. Humans were not meant to know everything about everyone and you were not meant to share everything with everyone. Trust me, reducing social media in your life will improve it.
Read more about my thoughts on social media here:
Practice Gratitude
The idea to practice gratitude has always been one of the most basic testaments of self care and it always sounded so incredibly woo-woo to me. The idea is that you’re supposed to express happiness for everything and anything that happens in your life. However, if you’re in the thick of actively hating your life then this tip is absolutely one of the hardest to exercise. I guess that’s the point though is that it’s hard (see the first self care tip about how self-care shouldn’t be easy), but I discovered that it’s actually incredibly beneficial to look for the little things to celebrate even when everything else is looking tough in your life.
While most self-help advice recommends a daily journal to build a gratitude practice, I’ve found that I already write plenty so adding a daily journal entry to my active writing routine actually hinders my attempt at daily gratitude. (By the way, another trick to a good self-care routine is to adjust it to something that’s actually beneficial to your life so you actually practice it rather than ignore it because it's too hard to practice in your life.) So instead of the daily journal thing as recommended by most self-help books and podcasts, I try to mentally take a little moment each day to find something to reflect on and celebrate.
If you’re just getting started, it’s easier to start this practice during already existing moments of joy. For example, if you’re in the middle of a fun party that you’re enjoying, just take a moment to tell yourself “I’m thankful for good friends and good music” to get into that rhythm of practicing gratitude. Then when you find yourself in a neutral environment, you already have the cadence to then reflect that “I’m thankful for this cup of coffee” to increase your appreciation for those little things that keep life going. Once you’re practiced in neutral and positive environments, it’s a lot easier to express that gratitude during the tough moments in life so you can hold yourself up from the bottom of the barrel you might find yourself in.
If you want to read more about finding the meaning in mundane, check out my blog post about it here:
Party Like It’s 2044 and Finding Meaning in the Mundane | Review — Maddie Gudenkauf
You Have to Love Yourself Before You Can Love Others
As someone who is perpetually single, this has been the WORST self-care mantra repeated back at me in my pursuit for a partner. There is literally never any additional context or insight offered into it. I’ve always thought I had a good amount of self-esteem and self-respect for myself, but clearly my perpetual singlehood meant that I clearly didn’t love myself enough to love others or be loved by them in return. But then what was the metric for how much I should love myself? Do I really need to be capable of going to dinner by myself to prove that I love myself enough to love others? Why would I ever want to go to dinner by myself anyways? I already eat alone in my own home, which is the whole point of pursuing a partner in the first place is to stop doing that. Stop telling me to go to dinner by myself.
The truth is that establishing a solid sense of security and trust in yourself is actually incredibly beneficial for any relationship you might have. If you don’t know yourself or love yourself before you get into a relationship (platonic or romantic), then you might lose your identity to the relationship. If you can’t identify if you prefer tater tots or french fries prior to the relationship, then when the other person tells you that you like tater tots, you’ll likely just accept that you like tater tots without actually exploring that part of your identity. You’ll also have an incredibly difficult time accepting that someone might actually love you for you if you yourself can’t love yourself the way that you are. From a personal note, while I believed I had an incredibly high self-esteem for myself, my respect for myself was actually based on the persona I built to appease other people (what’s good, YouTube days) and not on my actual self. I really only enjoyed the persona I created and presented to the world more than my authentic self.
Now that I’m actually getting to know and celebrating my authentic self, I’m finding my relationships are allowed to become more fulfilling and I’m allowing others to love me like I love my authentic self. So now this advice makes sense to me, but it’s incredibly frustrating in the meantime if you think you already love yourself enough to be loved by others. Loving yourself is an ongoing process and practice, but if you can establish a solid self-identity and self-trust in yourself prior to engaging in a relationship then that will just allow that relationship to be so much more fulfilling and engaging than if you allowed yourself to get lost in the sole identity of being so-and-so’s partner or best friend or co-worker, etc.
Also it turns out going to dinner by yourself actually does kind of help with this process. It’s 10/10 and one of my favorite ways to treat myself for short term self-care relief these days.
You can read more about my thoughts on codependency in relationships with my review of Maureen Johnson’s “Nine Liars”:
Nine Liars and Codependency in Friendship — Maddie Gudenkauf
Throw Out Anything That Doesn't Spark Joy (and Use the Stuff That Does)
On a more practical note, the easiest self-care step I’ve ever taken for my life is decluttering all of the unnecessary physical things from it. Netflix’s “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” was a bit of a meme for a while with folks teasing her “does it spark joy” mindset, but to say this ideology changed my life would be an understatement. I’ve literally re-organized my entire life around the idea that if it doesn’t spark joy, I don’t need it.
The amount of emotional weight that has been lifted from my mental state from decluttering my physical items is incredible. There’s no need to get frustrated over a disorganized Tupperware cabinet if everything is set in place to be easily found. I’m not stressing over finding new space on my bookshelf for my latest haul if I’m getting rid of the books I didn’t enjoy or using the library instead. I’m saving money if I deliberate each purchase and what its place would be in my home, which reduces my stress over my finances. I don’t waste time with binge shopping trips and find more fulfilling ways to reduce my emotional state than through retail therapy.
I highly encourage decluttering when possible and truly only keeping the items that actively spark joy. Chances are that if the object finds its way to a storage unit, you probably don’t need it and won’t even remember it once you get rid of it. You’ll save money, time, and mental space if you clear your physical spaces and ensure that everything within it only provides positive feedback for you in your life.
If you need ideas on where to donate your old books while decluttering, here’s one of my blog posts to give you a couple ideas for where to offload the extra weight: