Self-love is more than just bubble baths, it’s more than a cute slogan on a t-shirt or a snazzy present to yourself. It’s a slow journey filled with understanding who you are, who you were and who you will be - and like all relationships it’s a constant work in progress.

Unfortunately that isn’t the story we’ve been sold. Self-love in the digital age looks like marriage with kids, doctored selfies, jet-setter holidays, luxury apartments and a full bank account. What if I told you that where you are right now is enough, what you’re starting with right now is enough? You probably wouldn’t believe me, and that’s okay. However, by the end of this article, I hope to have changed your mind. Self-love is free to incorporate into your life, but it does take determination and perseverance to not go back to that old relationship with yourself.

It is not vain to love yourself and see all the pieces. It is not narcissistic either. It’s a necessary part to building a healthy life, and all the elements that go hand in hand with that.

What I want you to do with these practices is to see and make peace with all the parts of yourself, and then slowly - over time - fall in love with yourself. Because you’re worth it, and if anyone should end up feeling lucky enough to spend the rest of their life with you - it should be yourself x

CHANGE YOUR PRIMARY VOICE

What does the conversation in your head sound like? Often, your default primary voice is the voice of a critical figure in your childhood. You probably go about your day being told a string of sentences that featured heavily in your life when you were growing up, none of them were true then and none of them are true now.

Your primary voice should be a comforting support system, the one voice in your life that cheers you on when you succeed and helps you continue when things are tough. It doesn’t ask anything in return, but it does require you to constantly push that critical voice into silence and pull that kinder one forward. If you struggle thinking of someone who supported you as a child, imagine your older self talking to your younger self and think of the words you’d have liked to have heard. Then talk to yourself with those words, all day every day.

Have your primary tell you it’s going to be okay, even when it feels like it’s not. Have it tell you how amazing you look even when your nose is all bunged up with hayfever. Have it tell you you’re doing great, even when you just got the answer wrong. Have it tell you it loves you, even on the days you feel unlovable.

Change your primary voice, it will change your life.

DATE YOURSELF

We spend a lot of our lives focusing on getting into, cultivating and continuing romantic relationships. They’re all over the media we consume, from the films we grew up on as children to the stories we now read, the adverts that sell us cars/perfume/sofas, and it’s usually the first question we get asked when we meet up with our closest friends.

Dating is the first step in the game of love, and you’re considered lucky if you can still say that you feel like you’re dating your partner a year on, let alone twenty years on. I’m going to argue that other people aren’t the only individuals we need to date, cultivate and continue the romance with. We need to do that with ourselves too.

So much of the time we spend in a relationship is wasted expecting someone else to be able to know how to love us. In fact most of us will often use other relationships as a crutch for the one we have with ourselves; dating yourself is the first step away from that crutch.

Walk out into the world and treat yourself to your favourite thing once a week that you would want a partner to treat you to. Watch a show, take a trip somewhere new, dress up and dance in your kitchen, eat in your favourite cafe. Whatever you look for someone else to do for you in a relationship, do it for yourself first so that you know how to love yourself and you know what to ask for when someone else asks how love you too.

SMILE

Every day you see yourself in the mirror. When you clean your teeth, when you stand in the changing room, when you go to the toilet at work, when you pass the bakery at lunch, when you fix your hair in your phone camera.

You’re everywhere you go, and unfortunately most people, (especially women) feel uncomfortable with their reflection. So every day I want you to wake up and the first thing I want you to do when you see yourself in a mirror, is to smile at yourself. Every day when you wake up, that’s the first thing you do. Smile even if you don’t want to, even if it feels silly.

We always smile when we see people we love; be they friends, family, pets, partners. And we think they’re beautiful when they smile back; we feel happy to see them, and we know that they are also happy to see us. So smile at yourself, because somewhere inside of you is a kid who’s a little bit hurt, a little bit unsure and all they want is to see you smile - so they know that you’re happy to see them too.

You can find Alexandra on Instagram @solemniko and every other week on her podcast Notes From A Small Room (having the self-love conversations they won’t put on a t-shirt). Alexandra is a writer, artist, coach and creator of the How We Came To Be Project initiaitve. You can find resources on her website for journaling and building a healthy, loving relationship with yourself; as well as business and creative services.

Image: tobetold (for heiter)

You may have heard of the latest viral trend to hit TikTok #luckygirlsyndrome, which currently has over 836 millions views.

But what is it and does it actually work?

The hashtag originally started with women recording themselves saying positive affirmations, with ‘everything is always working out for me’, being the predominant one. The idea behind this is that if you affirm these positive affirmations they will in fact impact your life and bring about experiences to match them.

Based on the law of assumption, which states that what you assume will happen, will in fact come into your life, is the basis of the lucky girl syndrome. Although this trend has caught mainly women's attention, the method itself can be used by anyone.

But is it all too easy? Just saying a few positive words and all your desires come to fruition?

Well for the last 7 days I have been putting the principles of this TikTok sensation into practice in my own life and can contest as to how the ‘lucky girl syndrome’ really works.

The experiment

Quite simply for 7 days I repeated, at various times throughout the day, the affirmation ‘everything is always working out for me’. ‘I trust in the process’ and ‘the universe knows what I desire and is sending things my way’, were also variations I used throughout the week.

In the last 7 days, the most significant manifestations I attracted into my reality were:

A 34% reach increase, 16% engagement increase and 41% follower increase across my businesses Instagram account

A near miss accident in a car park, which I believe was a blessing

A plethora of gifts including; the latest iphone, brand new headphones and several unexpected lunch dates

Increased positive interactions across all my relationships

As well as these manifestations, I also seemed to be more naturally drawn to Heiterkeit throughout the 7 days. Almost as if repeating the phrase encouraged me to look for those heiter moments. The smell of the dried lavender on my mantle piece, observing the beautiful interaction between my children whilst they read books, finding a new life theme song and dancing my heart out on repeat, all of these little moments seemed amplified.

The affirmation itself also gave me an opening to question my own beliefs, particularly when it seemed things weren’t working out for me. At that point, repeating the phrase, ‘everything is working out for me’, turned into more of a question rather than a statement and it encouraged me to look for evidence that everything was working out for me, such as in the near miss example.

If I hadn't had this affirmation at the forefront of my mind, it is very likely that I would have just convinced myself that things weren’t working out. However, because I was repeating this phrase often, it allowed me an opportunity to take a different perspective and step into a place of curiosity about my situation, rather than damnation.

So how did this all happen? How did repeating a few affirmations create such a joyous week in my life?

Method behind the approach

Let’s break down why the ‘lucky girl syndrome’ is an actual method which anyone can use to manifest their desires into reality.

Firstly, repeating this style of affirmation encourages you to look for evidence in your life to support the statements you are saying. It is similar to the phenomena that happens when you buy or go to buy a new car, all of a sudden you notice that particular model of car everywhere you go. This isn’t because the manufacturer has increased its output, it is because you have chosen to place this car as your object of attention. The same effect occurs with repeating affirmations.

By using this method you are actively interacting and influencing the Law of Attraction which, as Abraham Hicks describes it, simply means ‘like unto itself is drawn’. It takes 16 seconds for a thought similar to the one you just thought to be attracted. If we use the example of the ‘lucky girl syndrome’ affirmations, you can see why my week was filled with lots of heiter moments. Repeating the phrase ‘everything is working out for me’ was helping to attract similar thoughts, creating a snowball effect of other positively reinforcing thoughts. These thoughts then manifested into physical experiences in my life.

The basis for successfully manifesting what you want is simple; choose to place your focus on a subject which attracts good feeling thoughts. Which is exactly what these affirmations did. If you can find and repeat affirmations that make you feel good, you will influence the Law of Attraction process, attract similar good feeling thoughts and if repeated often enough, those thoughts will turn into beliefs. Once a collection of thoughts become beliefs, they can be much more easily accessed and will start to work on an unconscious level and influence the experiences you attract into your life. The thousands of TikTok and Instagram success stories can also attest to this.

How to amplify the approach

Focus on how you feel when you repeat your chosen affirmations, does it fill you with a sense of possibility? With excitement or a feeling of freedom? If it does then this will work in your favour, because it is positive emotions (high vibrations) like these that will attract what you want to experience in your life.

If however you feel doubtful or the affirmation causes you to focus on the absence of what you want, because it isn’t yet visible in your life, then this will work against you because the Law of Attraction will provide you with evidence of this lack. Remember it isn’t so much the words that are influencing the Law of Attraction but the emotion these words are inducing.

So if you find yourself feeling less than convinced when saying your chosen affirmations, you can try changing the affirmation to something which does feel better, noticing how each new affirmation makes you feel or simply park the process and return to it when those emotions are felt from repeating positive phrases.

If you are feeling strong negative emotions of anger, grief or even fear, then it will be very difficult to repeat positive affirmations and they have any effect on your state of being. This is because you are trying to make too big a jump from a negative emotion to a positive one. In this case you can still use affirmations but choose statements which are more neutral, such as ‘I am where I am and that's ok’ or ‘it is ok to feel [insert your emotion] and this feeling will pass’. Continue with these kinds of neutral statements until you feel your emotional state improving, then you can return to your positive affirmations.

In conclusion

The ‘lucky girl syndrome’ may have been coined just another social media trend but as you have read, the method behind this viral sensation is a very achievable way to influence your life and consciously interact with the Law of Attraction. As I myself and thousands of others have evidenced.

So save this method in your memory banks and have fun using it to enjoy not only attracting what you want but to experience more of those wonderful heiter moments in your life.

Josephine Snowling is a writer, teacher and entrepreneur who shares her own personal truth, understanding and insight of how this reality works and how you can learn to come home to yourself so that you may consciously manifest the life you desire.

Building self-love: 3 daily practices

What is the ‘Lucky Girl Syndrome’ and how does it work?