Self-Improvement Ideas That Don't Suck: 10 Enjoyable Ways to Practice Self-Love
Enjoyable self-improvement practices and healthy self-care habits that make personal growth feel less like a chore and more like the fun it should be.
Throughout my life I have engaged with a lot of self help content. Books, tapes, classes, treatments, readings, healings…Everything from a medium seeking out advice from my guardian angels to audiobooks written in the 80’s about how to heal your inner child to yoga teacher trainings. I have done it all.
I think I am a really good self help customer. I have both an obsessive compulsion with achievement and the bettering of my capabilities. I also have a lot of delight experimenting with positive change via self-care activities and personal growth content. It’s just very fun to me in some manners, and very freeing. The idea I can just change my life, become whoever I want to be. Be the person who wakes up with the sun and journals to bird song. Be the person who is so zen they can meditate into ecstasy. Be the person who has done a handstand on the summit of Kilimanjaro (I have only succeeded in the first one of these things and not very consistently might I add.) Some of it is a desire to be more, to feel worthy and some of it is just that being a human can be really surprising and delightful, the body like the ultimate playground.
I do think I have sought out most of these personal quests, without even really admitting it to myself most of the time, in the pursuit of love. That’s why so much of this newsletter is about self love practices and rituals, done mostly with oneself. I have spent a lot of my life lonely. I have never been a girl with suitors banging down the door. I was a strange, oftentimes caustic young girl in a sea of boys that were taught by osmosis that to desire me was taboo until I went to college. At that point I was so lonely, I was convinced there was something wrong with me certainly. Thus, the devil of self improvement on my shoulder was born.
I feel lucky now to have experienced romantic love, the kind that subsumes you, at all. And while I really don’t believe you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you (because both in experience and observation, I just haven’t found that to be true), we will all look up one day and realize there is our self and then another self inside that we spend all of our time with that can behave vastly different than we expect it to. And if we are lucky enough to love someone else, we realize that relationship with our acting selves and our feeling selves affects the love of another immensely. Rather than saying you must love yourself before anyone else can, I would tell younger me, it is very difficult to love another person without first practicing love towards yourself. If you don’t learn on your own, you will have to learn how to love two people at the same time when you do meet someone you want to share life with, a herculean effort for even the best among us.
I would also like to tell her to have a bit more fun with it all. Now that I am in love, I spend a lot less time bettering myself, as is a cliché the world over for a reason. Once we have daily, physical proof that we are lovable, we care a little bit less about how well our pants fit and how wise we sound. And now I feel license to just have fun. It is fun to get to know people. It is fun to spend time with people with little aim. It is fun to try new things and play and learn and watch people grow. (Hint: you’re people too.)
In all of those years of trying to improve myself, I went through the motions but didn’t really get the point until I truly loved another person. Love is very fun. And it should be. It challenges us but it is still so, so fun. If I had just realized the hard truth that being better does not make you more lovable, I might have enjoyed a lot more in my youth and actually gotten a lot better at a great many things. I would have looked up and realized I had the thing I was scrambling and scraping for. It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife, ya know?
Thus, an angel of self improvement has been born on my other shoulder. Being better does not make you lovable because you already are lovable. Ugh! I know! It’s so annoying! Deal with it! What self improvement does do is give us the skills, healthy habits, and knowledge to expand the enjoyment of our lives and all of the love in them.
Now unless a pursuit is good for me or fun, I do not pursue it. And I try to bring fun to what is good for me and vice versa.
Of course, the wellness activities we have immediate access to that both improve ourselves and are not begrudging can seem…limited. Especially in the age of excess and overstimulation. So I wrote this post to be an easy list to reference when you need inspiration for loving self care that is not so, so boring and annoying.
This is my list. I encourage you to make yours.
Self-Improvement Ideas That Don’t Suck: 10 Self-Care Activities That Are Actually Enjoyable
1. Call a friend while sitting outside in the sun.
Nothing, and I repeat nothing, has taught me more about myself, the person I want to be, and how to love another human than my friends. You may only love one person romantically in a lifetime but you will likely have many, many friends.
We’re all so busy under our roofs and in front of our light bulbs. Take a moment, get some sun, call a friend and chat. I find at the end of that call, there is usually not a lot left to improve for the day. If this simple wellness activity is the only one you ever consistently adopt on hard days, then I think you’d still be in good shape.
2. Make invisible veggie pasta.
I am a recovered vegetable hater. Unfortunately eating vegetables has made me happier and more beautiful as all of the healthy adults in my life have insisted for some time now.
I have found the best motivation to eating food that makes you happier and beautiful without hating your life is putting it in pasta. Here are some of my fave recipes for that:
3. Learn how to do a craft via YouTube.
I think there’s something so primally relaxing about doing something with your hands that is currently keeping us all yoked to our phones. But actually touching anything real and fashioning it into something else is so, so nourishing. Throw up a free YouTube video and learn literally ANYTHING. Crocheting, knitting, embroidery, sewing, watercolors, book-binding, flower arranging, wood-cutting, stamp-making, who cares, just pick one easy sounding thing.
I personally loved book-binding for a while and even made some hand-bound books for presents! Great for Christmas coming up soon.
4. Watch an old movie with popcorn.
I tend to get into this rut where I just put on the same thing in the background over and over again that I’m never really watching (ahem, Twilight.) Both my fiancé and I are recovered film majors so we love a brain off watch but occasionally he will encourage me to step out of my comfort zone and we’ll have a cozy evening with an old movie that makes us think and talk about the meaning of it all (although I did fall asleep in the first half of The Mirror and Twilight does make me think about the meaning of it all.)
5. Read a magazine before bed.
We need to be talking about magazines. They are so, so fun and they’re also super educational and easy to read. I am increasingly reaching an age where I have nostalgia for an experience that young people no longer get and one of those experiences is chilling on your bed with a magazine. If you’re not a reader or just need a brain break, having some magazines is a great way to relax and unwind before bed time as part of an easy mental health self-care routine.
6. Play a video game instead of doom scrolling.
We are all in a knock down drag out with our phones. The main advantage our phones have though, is that they’re really fun. But there’s some evil, hypnotic magic that keeps us tethered to it past the point of fun like a faerie party that makes you dance until your feet are broken.
But I find video games don’t really have that same evil hypnosis effect. A cute, cozy video game like Stardew gives me that relaxing brain off feeling but I tire of it after about 30 mins and feel refreshed. I love Cozy K for cozy gaming recs.
7. Ask your grandma for advice (or just any older person in your life.)
I have never had a particularly close relationship with my grandparents because half of them lived in Korea and all of them are passed on now. But! I do have some lovely older people in my life that have bestowed infinitely more wisdom than any self help course I’ve taken (of which I’ve taken a lot.)
I find like, 90% of my problems are pretty universal and someone who has already lived through them usually has a straightforward, helpful answer. And you get to have a fun chat with another human who knows a lot more than you do cause they’ve simply been doing the life thing longer. I think age difference friendships are one of life’s most wonderful gifts. Call your grandma! Take your boss to lunch!
8. Do a shop for a donation or food bank.
This one is naturally not accessible for everyone but there’s always multiple running collections at my church (and most churches even if you’re not a churchgoer) for food/basic needs items. If you have time and some spare cash, it’s a really nice feeling to pay it forward and lend a helping hand. You can go on any local church’s website for their bulletin to see what they’re organizing or just your local food bank/shelter.
9. Take a class on something you find genuinely interesting.
Again, I have taken a lot of weird self improvement classes. But I think learning anything new can be a fun hobby and one of the most rewarding self improvement ideas. You could learn a language, a sport, a craft, a game…This one’s also great if you’re lookin for a sweetheart 😏.
10. Go for a walk at night (safely).
My favorite part of living in a more rural area after living in a city for so long is being in nature at night. New York really is the city that never sleeps. I was outside in the dark all the time but it never really captured the peace of moonlit strolls that I was aiming for. Nevertheless (where it is safe for you) I find there is magic on an evening walk. I always get the best ideas, the most sought after revelations, and such surprising healing from a simple walk at night.
And if you’d like some aesthetic, cozy self-care activities and reflection time, I have a couple very gentle digital download workbooks on Etsy and a lot in the free downloads on the “What I Write Here and Why” page of my Substack.
That’s all for now folks! Thank you for reading! 💌
and for updates on more posts like this with special extras and more of my experience experimenting with small, gentle ways to build a life full of love, you can subscribe (for free) to my Substack below.
