Self Love Challenge 2023
For Valentine's Day 2023, I want to practise self love. I'm doing a two week self-love Challenge in the lead up to Valentine's Day and I would love it for you to join me.
I’d initially planned to post daily little challenges and prompts for this two week challenge, but it’s February and I’m struggling quite a bit with my mental health and although the idea for this challenge was to trick my brain to be kinder to myself and find creative ways of self-caring, it turns out that the pressure to compose and post daily is too much for me right now.
So, change of plan!
I’m compiling the first week of daily challenges in one post and I will do the same for the second week.
Day 1/14
My jumping off point for the whole two week challenge was: self care is self love, so self love is self care.
So the first day, the challenge was to simply take (at least) ten minutes to ourselves. Go for a walk in nature, if you’re lucky enough to be in the countryside or near a park or, if this is not an option for you, find somewhere quiet to sit and just breathe. (Don’t worry about knowing how to meditate. There’s not right or wrong, just try not to think about things you should be doing and just focus on your own breaths!)
Day 2/14 - What makes you happy?
To get into the head space of caring for ourselves, I want us to challenge ourselves to daily introspection for the next few days, starting with the concept of happiness. Simple and small. Not the big passions, or the loves and the dreams and the purposes. Not the family members and wholesome gratitudes. Just plain happiness derived from small everyday things that brings a smile to your face or makes you feel just a little bit lighter and warmer for a moment. It could be anything. Guilty pleasures. Favourite songs on repeat. Cat cuddles. Baking bread. Gardening.
I challenge you to think about any and all small things in your life that makes you feel this way, and the smaller and simpler the better. It can be recurring things or just how you feel today. Write a list or make a moodboard or montage. Or you can pick just one thing, if you want. One good example of something seemingly insignificant that is making you happy today or that is your usual go to pick-me-up because, for whatever reason, it always brings you joy and makes you feel better at the end of a long day.
And then I want you to reflect on that and try pinpoint why listening to this particular song, or doing this particular activity, or rewatching this particular episode of your guilty pleasure TV show makes you feel this way. Write down your thoughts in a notebook or on a piece of paper. Reflect as you scribble and keep your pen moving for at least five minutes (set a timer!)
Day 3/14 - What do you love?
Yesterday we were reflecting on the small things in life that makes us happy; today I want to think about what we love, and yes, I know there could easily be overlaps between things that make us happy and things we love, that those two things logically go hand in hand, could even be the same thing - but are they?
What does it mean to love? Whether it’s a person, a thing or an activity, how does loving something differ from liking it, and is it different from the things that simply make us happy? Is love a permanent sensation or does it fluctuate like all other emotions, and if it does, are there things in your life that you only love sometimes and others that you love constantly?
People that we are close to, for example, such as family members and partners, best friends, children, these are people we probably love all the time even when we’re in a fight with them, or they’re being particularly annoying, or we don’t really like them very much, we still have love for them.
Certain things from our childhoods or other formative periods of our lives, good “core memory” moments, get a special place in our hearts: certain songs, or activities, or books, or films… that we feel so strongly about that they’ve taken up permanent residence in our hearts, not necessarily because of their own nature in isolation, but because of a special subjective meaning they hold for us. Unlike a song that always makes us smile, like we might have listed as one of our happy things yesterday, a song that we love might actually make us cry every time we listen to it…
Today, I’m going to list five things I love and I’m going to reflect on what I love about them and why.
Day 4/14 - What are you passionate about?
On this third and penultimate day of introspection, I want to reflect on passion. (Not the sexual kind, but you can if you want!)
We started small by thinking of simple everyday things that bring us fleeting joy, then segued into the stronger emotion of love by reflecting on core things in our lives or minds that hold a permanent place in our hearts. Passion is an even stronger emotion than love; It’s a surge of temporary but strong conviction, as physiological as it is emotional, like a sudden storm, powerful and all-consuming, but not permanent.
You might have political or moral convictions that you feel passionate about, but even if you hold those convictions all your life, you’re not constantly passionate. Going to a salsa night with a crush might invoke a stronger passion in you, even if just for a song or two, than a cause you spend most of your spare time advocating for.
So what are your passions? What gets the blood pumping in your veins? What makes you feel more alive than anything else? If you close your eyes and picture it, does your heart beat faster?
Day 5/14 - What do you love about yourself?
Pick one thing or list five. Write a paragraph, paint a picture or make a collage. The important thing is to find one or several things about yourself that you love (and try not to make it about physical appearance!)
Day 6/14 - Let’s get out of our heads now!
I think introspection can be a really useful tool, especially if you have a tendency to avoid, dismiss, ignore or outright sabotage your own needs. Sometimes we get into a place of just going along with the current, stuck in a destructive routine with unhealthy habits, or we don’t allow ourselves to take time for ourselves or our creative practice for whatever reason.
So I do think it’s healthy for us as human beings and creatives to take a moment every once in a while and reflect on things, on ourselves, our needs and our thought patterns. But I also know from experience that it’s easy to veer towards negative thoughts and get stuck in an endless loop in your head, so I think exercises like the past few days can be helpful where you give yourself a time limit and you use your creative outlet of choice to channel your introspection (writing, doodling, collage-making, painting, you name it.)
Interestingly, just as much as creativity and inspiration are interconnected with mood and wellbeing, the things that help one also helps the other. When I was really struggling with stress and insomnia (and as-of-yet undiagnosed bipolar disorder) in my twenties, the one thing that got me out of my downward spiral and helped me get a good night’s sleep for the first time in weeks and weeks, was when a friend dragged me along to the gym and I spent an hour chugging along on the treadmill. I was (and still am) very unfit, so my heart rate was through the roof within minutes, but the more I ran, and wheezed and sweated, the better I felt. I imagined I could feel the endorphins flooding my brain, once I got what runners call “second wind” I felt euphoric. (In fact, my friend told me afterwards that I was beaming the whole time whilst I was running!)
If I’m stuck creatively, if I have writer’s block or I’m just not feeling very inspired, as soon as I move my mind gets flooded with ideas. It doesn’t have to be running, I just need to go for a short walk and the same thing happens. The same things that help me with depression, stress and anxiety are the things that get my creative juices flowing, gives me lots of new ideas or inspiration for ideas and projects I’m already working on.
So, for the sixth day, we’re just picking a physical activity that will get our heart rate up and we’re just doing that — let’s get release those endorphins!
Day 7/14 - Indulge your inner child
Remember when you were little and you really enjoyed exploring and playing around with colours and shapes, making it up as you went, abstract art turning into imaginative storytelling on a piece A4 paper and there was no right or wrong, just colour and story? Before adults started questioning or explaining or showing the right way of doing things? When the process of creation was valuable in itself, not the finished drawing?
If, like me, you lost that creative freedom and sense of playfulness around art at some point in your childhood, because you were told you were either bad at drawing (so you stopped) or good at it (so you started working hard at it to improve technique and “get it right”) you will have either discovered other interests or got quite good at drawing, but you will have forgotten the simplest, most playful and exciting way of generating genuine inspiration. I rediscovered it in my late teens or early twenties, although it was a process that took me several years. But abstract painting and collage making was really helpful in letting go of those restraints (correct technique and perfect end result)
Now I know that a silly, playful art exercise can be just the activity needed to tap into that inner child’s perspective, joy and playfulness and how that in itself can be immensely therapeutic but also be channelled into other creative practises when you’re stuck.
So, whether art is in any way part of your creative practice or not, it doesn’t matter. Find some crayons, or colouring pencils, or watercolours, or whatever you have available to you (the more colours the better!) a piece of paper, canvas or cardboard, and do this simple exercise:
Pick a colour.
Start doodling. Don’t think about drawing something figurative, just let your hand move randomly, see what shapes come out. Pick another colour if you want. Look at the shapes on the paper as you keep moving your hand and see what associations you get.
If you start to see something (“Oh that looks kind of like a snout…”) then go with it and start adding to your shape more consciously (“I’ll add ears to it - now it looks like a fox! I should draw tail too!” or “Kind of looks like a fox head, but that looks like a tiger tail… maybe it’s a fantasy creature, or an alien…”)
If you haven’t already, start to consciously look at the colours and shapes on your paper and see if you can find a character in there. Now consciously add details to it (eyes, nose, hands, feet, tails, shell, etc…)
Repeat the process, or go straight to point 4 and consciously draw your character a friend but using your other hand. So if you’re right-handed, I want you to now draw with your left hand.
I would love to see the result of any of these, especially the last one, so if you do do some or all of these, please share on social media and tag me!