In part inspired by this post, I did one hour a day of loving-kindness meditation for ten days and the results were phenomenal. It's too soon to tell if it'll stick, but I think it's fixed about 80% of my impostor syndrome and anxiety around impact, which have been a major source of stress for me for years.

I've tried everything before, like CBT, ACT, concentration practice, IFS, exercise, therapy, etc etc. Nothing had worked. And this has been by far the most successful thing I've tried.

Will be writing about it in more detail on LessWrong when I write the review about the Finder's Course in a few weeks. Thank you so much for writing this article that gave me the extra push and framework I needed.

Thanks for this! I found this much more approachable than other writing on this topic, which I've generally had trouble engaging with because it's felt like it's (implicitly or explicitly) claiming that: 1) this mindset is right for ~everyone; and 2) there are ~no tradeoffs (at least in the medium-term) for (almost?) anyone.

Had a few questions:

Your goals and strategies might change, even if your values remain the same.

Have your values in fact remained the same?

For example, as I walked down the self-love path I felt my external obligations start to drop away. 

What is your current relationship to external obligations? Do they feel like they exist for you now (whatever that means)?

While things are clearly better now, I’m still figuring out how to be internally motivated and also get shit done, and for a while I got less shit done than when I was able to coerce myself.

Do you now feel as able to get things done as you did when you were able to coerce yourself? What do you expect will be the medium-to-long run effect on your ability to get things done? How confident do you feel in that?

***

More broadly, I'm curious whether this has felt like an unamibiguously positive change by the lights of Charlie from 1-3 years ago (whatever seems like the relevant time period)? In the long-run do you expect it to be a Pareto improvement by past Charlie's lights?

I have some advice on the "how": 
It is unfortunately common to learn self-injurious patterns. And if you do, it will not necessarily seem odd or extreme to you. Take a few minutes to seriously consider if you regularly do something that hurts or harms you- Do you do exercises that hurt? Do you deny yourself food when hungry? Do you force yourself to work past the point of exhaustion? Do you call yourself names?

How would you naturally feel about someone that did those things to you? Probably not great. If you're finding it hard to feel positively about yourself, you may need to stop hurting yourself, or at least commit to trying to stop, and apologize first.

It may feel silly to apologize to yourself, but it can help immensely. Make it a real apology, too: "I'm sorry I hurt you by ________. That was not kind. In the future I will _______, because you deserve to be treated kindly."

Like any other relationship, the apology won't immediately fix it, but it is a first step. The next step is following through on your commitment and consciously choosing to treat yourself like a beloved friend. Every time you slip up or "have to" hurt yourself in the future, apologize to yourself again, like you would to a friend "hey, I'm sorry I took on more than we can handle. Thanks for working overtime to get it done. In the future, I'll be more careful with our time."

To further repair the relationship, "give yourself" your daily self-maintenance as acts of kindness. For example, instead of mindlessly making food because you have to, consciously make it "for your friend(you)". Say something along the lines of "Here, I made this for you, because I like you :)" like you would to a friend. Try to notice something you do well and acknowledge it. Give yourself a compliment. Give yourself little gifts.

Even in the case of a truly unavoidable hurt, like getting a painful medical procedure, acknowledge the pain and show yourself sympathy: "Oof, yeah, it really sucks that this hurts. Thank you for doing this to keep us safe." It is unfortunately common to instead say to yourself something like "Suck it up! Everyone hurts sometimes- that's life!", despite this being extremely dysfunctional. Imagine saying something like that out loud to a friend, and it becomes immediately obvious: if you talk to yourself like this, maybe you hate yourself because you are being kind of an a-hole

 

First of all - thank you for sharing this. 

It resonates a lot and I have recently also wrote about my process of developing self-love over the past year. What I found interesting was that the act of loving myself was actually not that hard when I intentionally put my head and heart to it. What was much harder (both intellectually and emotionally) was understanding why I stopped loving myself in the first place - and what role it played in my life until then. Why it felt like such an alien skill, why no one ever talked to me about it before. Current take: hating myself was a good mechanism to push forward and achieve goals, but it runs out as fuel. That's when self-love emerges as a new strategy. and a source of energy. Also, society does not provide better strategies, so it perpetuates self-hate being the default.

Some very real outcomes I can attribute to my experiments with self-love is feeling more resilient, confident, relaxed and understanding how to work with the feeling of loneliness better (the better the relationship with myself, the less I need others to validate me). 

Regarding the initial skepticism, I remember my biggest worry was that it will make me go too easy on myself. I think you did a great job explaining how both that gets a bit true, but also that it does not feel like a drawback within the self-loving frame. What helped me was checking out some studies where they found that increased self-compassion made people more productive, not less. The basic mechanism goes like this: inject self-compassion > reduce cortisol > increase oxytocin> feel safe/comforted > achieve optimal mind state to do your best. 

I just heard about Core Transformation (book) and it seems really cool but I don’t know how cool.

I've had a chance to do some peer-to-peer CT sessions last year and it's pretty amazing the first couple of times. I also found that on its own it has a certain shelf life. I then started doing much more parts work and I discovered these two modalities compliment each other very well. 

You could try to find an IFS therapist but I expect the average therapist to bad.

This might be true, although I think you don't really need a therapist to get a lot of initial value. I recommend this audiobook which is basically like a guided meditation with mini-lectures. You can basically do self-therapy with it and get familiar with the method. I also recommend people this podcast where Tim Ferriss is guided into a live IFS session by the 'father' of the method, Richard Schwartz (around 40th minute). It will give you a sense of the potential of this approach, which is non-pathologising (unlike traditional therapy that assumes you are broken and need help). 

Based on my experiences, IFS is great for discovering the landscape of your parts and understanding what role they play for the system, what they fear would happen without them and teaches you how to re-negotiate their roles. It's also really cool to work on relationships between parts, not just between you and the parts.  I found that CT focuses more on going deep into one part and what it wants, ultimately. And then realising that the desired core state (e.g. love, safety, compassion, peace) is already available and trying to just 'step into it and have it'. In many cases it reduces the sense of 'trying' or 'desperation' that some agitated parts create in the system.

Kaj Sotala says he got significant value from guided Ideal Parent Figure practice (guided meditation, course, book--see chapter 8). The idea is that a lot of our emotional conditioning around self-worth comes from childhood, where we learn what kinds of behaviours get us love and acceptance from our caregivers.

I found this specifically useful in places where it's genuinely hard to love myself, i.e. when I think of something stupid I've done in the past, was not aware of/did not understand my needs, received negative feedback from people whose opinion I care about,  etc. In those places, imagining someone like an ideal older sister (or even just my current, wiser self) supporting myself from the past creates the necessary distance to be able to see more ways in which I was just trying my best and did not know better. It's like a proxy to be able to experience some compassionate, caring feelings where the first reaction is self-hate or resentment. 

Just stumbled on this, wanted to give an upvote and add that for people who weren't brought up with warmth or acceptance, even the concept of what "love" is, is challenging. For me, I would read a lot of these books that talked about healing by loving your inner child or sending beams of white light and whatnot and it went right over my head. I had to break things down into simpler contexts, e.g.:

• Love is lighting up when you see someone
• Love is being on someone's side, standing between them and danger
• Love is being happy they're happy, sad they're sad -- their emotions and well-being have weight in your utility function
• Love is wanting someone to grow into their potential
• Love is telling the truth (vs. lying, concealment, and emotional blackmail)
• Love is the absence of disapproval towards a person's being

etc. etc. in order to reconstruct the moves in my head, to be able to give aspects of myself some semblance of love.

I guess what I'm saying is that for a lot of people, learning not to self-hate is kind of a prerequisite for self-love, because a huge amount of what I was taught was "love" as a child was actually hate, manipulation, emotional blackmail, one-sided bargaining, and exploitation.

I'm glad to see others are talking about this! I've had an exceptionally effective experience healing severe early childhood emotional neglect through around 10 MDMA/psilocybin combo trips over the past 2 years. I started with a trusted guide and then transitioned to solo once I got the hang of things. It saved my life and made me much more compassionate, rational, and effective. I'm also less attached to my identities. I feel whole and alive for the first time in my life.

I also used to view my value as largely instrumental. My mental health was bad enough that I couldn't work and as a utilitarian, I acknowledged my intrinsic value but thought in our world of extreme resource scarcity (from an individual viewpoint, not a public policy viewpoint) that should donate all my savings and then die. It would help people living in poor places more than it would help me. It wasn't that bad of logic, but it was a horrible way to live and I discounted the probability of future healing. It was largely driven by suppressed feelings from childhood.

There is some skill and risks in using MDMA for healing. People with severe childhood trauma often get destabilized for a while as they heal because previously repressed feelings are coming to the surface. It's also somewhat common to dissociate on MDMA, which prevents memory reconsolidation. Adding 0.5g dried mushrooms to the trip can help with this, as can deep breathing or having a guide. It's a little woo but this book is a decent guide to using psychedelics in healing https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Psychotherapy-User-friendly-Guide-Drug-assisted/dp/0963009656. There's a reddit for it too at www.reddit.com/r/mdmatherapy.

Partly I just want to signal-boost this kind of message.

But I also just really like the way this post covers the topic. I didn't have words for some of these effects before, like how your goals and strategies might change even if your values stay the same.

The whole post feels like a great invitation to the topic IMO.

I didn't reread it in detail just now. I might have more thoughts were I to do so. I just want this to have a shot at inclusion in final voting. Getting unconfused about self-love is, IMO, way more important than most models people discuss on this site.

I think this was a pretty interesting post, articulating a way of relating to yourself that I think many people aspire to, and indeed, some live this way. I think it was written more concretely than most others who attempt to say such things, which I appreciate (and I think concreteness is a virtue). At the same time I find myself having some pretty negative feelings reading a lot of these paragraphs, and this is very different to how I relate to myself. I'll point to a few differences.

When states of the world directly impact your perceived self-worth, it can be really scary to see the world as it is. Some examples: a kid [LW · GW] who wants to be a writer and cannot admit that she made a spelling mistake; my aversion to studying AI safety because doing that puts me in contact with the fact that I don’t know that much and hence that I’m worthless.

It seems to me that the state of the world should directly impact your self-worth. How much your self is worth is a fact about the world, and certainly not a free variable you just get to pick as-convenient. When someone won't admit that they're failing at a key writing skill because it would clash with their identity as a writer, insofar as that was their identity, the correct answer is not that it's okay because you can love yourself whoever you are. In this framework, I think it is closer to (if the skill is actually necessary) that you risk losing the person you love. You'll get to be a different person later, but you still grieve the loss.

Take a second to imagine the love you might feel towards a newborn child or a cute animal. They probably haven't done anything to ‘earn’ your love; they might even be acting unskillfully (admittedly, I don't know what a skilful baby looks like). But you might love them anyway. Self-love feels quite like that for me: unconditional, newborn love.

Neither of us are newborns, and we both should hold ourselves to higher standards than that. We're both adults, and I do not have unconditional love for adults.

I think it's an interesting corrective, to check how you'd relate to yourself if you saw everyone as children (and in some respects perhaps we all are — e.g. from the perspective of people who may live 10,000 years from now who are wiser and stronger), and notice if there are ways you're being unnecessarily harsh or disrespectful to yourself. Still; I strive to be more than that.

a heuristic for self-love is that you feel like you're walking around with someone you have a crush on

...I would rather walk around as though I am with a person capable of great things, who is currently blundering his way through life, but if he manages to get on track then (perhaps later on in the story) he will be able to substantially change the course of history for the better. I would rather walk around with such a person than a person who I have a crush on!

I think whether I view this attitude toward oneself as healthy depends a lot on whether it motivates people who have it to strive to accomplish very difficult and strenuous things, or whether it supports them taking it easy and being satisfied with themselves the way they currently are. I suspect it leans far too far toward the latter for my taste; I do not remotely have a crush on myself, and wish I were stronger in many ways and not so weak in others.

Energy: Part of this is fighting myself less, which includes less suffering-based motivation and internal conflict. Freeing up those resources has been astonishingly powerful for me. Part is not needing to invest emotional resources into trying and needing to feel loved, because I have a wellspring within.

I think that insofar as this gives you more energy that is a broadly pretty positive sign to me.

I’m reminded of Nate Soares’ writings on Replacing Guilt. He writes that it's you that cares about your goals, that wants to become stronger or save the world. Those things that you actually care about won’t go away with more self-love; what changes is your strategy for pursuing them. You no longer pursue things in order to feel worthwhile, but simply because you want to.

I think this is a pretty strong reason. But I don't think you have to think that you're so brilliant that you've formed a romantic crush on yourself in order to do things simply because you want to.

You can just do things because you want to.

Perhaps this is a big enough problem that people should focus on not having terribly low self-worth first, but I resonate more with Eliezer Yudkowsky's line on when to solve your personal issues before getting on with the things you want.

Your annual reminder that you don't need to resolve your issues, you don't need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don't need to process your trauma, you don't need to confront your past, you don't need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.

Thank you Charlie for this inspiring post! I found the encouragement to explicitly aim for self-love very helpful. 

After a bad year of responding to chronic stress with a lot of self-judgment, I realized that I need to reset my relationship with myself, and I have an intention for this year to get better at self-love and practice every day. I found some self-love meditations on Insight Timer and have been doing them daily for a few weeks. I'm definitely feeling better but it's too early to tell if this is a stable change.

I found that meditation that specifically aims at self-love works better for me than loving-kindness meditation. The loving-kindness meditation recordings I have encountered usually focus on "wishing well" to yourself or others, which feels different and somehow more neutral than "sending love" or something like that. Connecting the intention with the breath and imagining that I'm breathing in love for myself and breathing out love for others also makes the meditation more powerful for me.

Cross-posting this from the EA forum, in case somebody here finds it useful:

I enjoyed this post and really appreciate all the great resources! Recently I have also been thinking about this and just posted a short article on how to make metta meditation a bit easier for people who struggle with it. Maybe it will be useful to some of you, I would love to hear your feedback.

Here is an excerpt:

Instead of beginning with yourself, you first picture someone with whom you have a really uncomplicated and positive relationship. Wishing them well is much easier. Not only does this help with getting into the groove of building up the feeling of metta, but a certain framing can help you transition the focus to yourself more easily. Personally, I find this works best with a pet.

For example, I may start with thinking of my dog and wishing him well using my preferred metta phrases. Then I try to imagine viewing myself through the eyes of my dog and also silently saying phrases like "May You be well." To me, it comes very natural to imagine that my dog loves me a lot and is really happy to see me. Because of that, it isn't hard to put myself into the position of my dog, imagining him e.g. being petted by me and wishing me all the best.

Now comes the interesting part. Mirghafori gives the instruction of "joining voices" with, in this case, my dog. That means switching the phrasing to "May I be well" instead of You. Instead of viewing myself from the outside perspective of a friend, I now try to have a loving awareness of the body and mind which I experience from the inside.

Thank you so much for writing this!

Some books that have really helped in my understanding of this topic are Self Compassion, Good Morning I love you, and The Gifts of Imperfection. 

I remember when my therapist first suggested practicing self compassion, I felt like I had discovered something that would benefit me in any situation for the rest of my life. In practice, I often lapse into old self critical habits fairly easily, but when I find myself returning to my practice of self-love consistently, things quickly turn around. I think developing a consistent practice of self-love that you feel on an emotional level, rather than just an intellectual level is the key.

The analogy that really helps motivate me to stick with the practice is that of learning a new piano piece. At first, your fingers feel awkward and you use enormous energy to not make mistakes and still you often do, but as you keep with it, you will soon find yourself intuitively and effortlessly playing the piece. I think that this is the ideal level for self love to reside and benefit your life. Practicing it at first feels awkward and forced, but over time, it becomes an intuitive response that arises in moments that you most need it, moments where self-love is often the opposite response to your default one.

I am actually attempting to develop a meditation/mental health app with this philosophy at the center: daily mindful/emotional practice of self love. I think that it's one thing to engage the material intellectually in the form of books and audiobooks, but another entirely to soak in it day after day, mindfully and slowly. It's still in it's early phases but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks so much for this!

1. Curious about

For example, I was aiming to pursue a PhD in machine learning, partly because I thought it would make me worthwhile. When I felt worthwhile I stopped that; I was able to think more freely about which strategy looked best according to my values.

If you have a chance I’d love to hear more about what this process looked like. What did thinking something would make you worthwhile feel like? Do you think that self love helped you care less about the status of a PhD? Or was it some other mechanisms? In general, how self-love stuff intersects with career planning sounds like an important sub-topic.

2. Kendrick Lamar loves himself.