3 Signs You’re Happy with Yourself

Happy self,  happy life!

When you’re happy with yourself, you’re much more likely to be happy with your life circumstances. If you’re not happy with yourself, then you tend to take a darker view of your situation. Even if things around you are going extremely well and you can’t complain, if you don’t feel good about who you are, you are probably not going to be able to enjoy what’s going on in your life.

So what does it mean to be happy with yourself?

1. You think positively about yourself and the world

Negative thinking patterns make it pretty impossible to feel good about yourself or just about anything else. Negative patterns include putting yourself down, judging and criticizing yourself, hating yourself, beating yourself up, and otherwise treating yourself badly in your head. In contrast, when you’re happy with yourself, your mind is free of repetitive negative thoughts, and instead you think positively about yourself. You know your strengths and weaknesses, but you neither elevate nor put yourself down for them. In fact, you don’t think much about yourself at all, rather you focus on living in the moment.

2. You understand and can appropriately manage your feelings

Most of us don’t learn to identify and manage our feelings. We stuff them down, we express them inappropriately, we overreact and don’t know why. Managing feelings is just not a skill that we typically learn. So when you can actually identify your feelings, you’re a step ahead. And if you can go beyond that and actually learn how to process those feelings, you are much more likely to feel good about yourself overall. You can express feelings in socially acceptable ways, and you can handle them without causing damage to yourself or your relationships. According to neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, it takes 90 seconds for an emotion to physically move through our bodies. If we hang on to the feelings, we’ll stay in an endless loop. If we’re healthy, we feel the feelings and let them pass. This approach leads to feeling happy with ourselves because we’re not stuck in old, unprocessed feelings.

3. You like your behavior and actions in most situations

When we feel good about our thinking and our feelings, we’re more likely to feel good about our behavior and actions. Our actions will be in alignment with our best thinking and feeling. We’ll act only when we’ve processed thoughts and feelings beforehand. We think before we act. We know how our actions will affect our feelings. Our actions will lead to good feelings, not regret. When we act impulsively or in contrast to our values, it usually leads to feeling badly inside.

Can you relate?

I used to be unable to say yes to these three signs of feeling good about myself. My thinking was endlessly negative, I bottled up my feelings, and I often behaved impulsively and regretted my actions. It was a miserable way to live. Finding my way to clean thinking, feeling, and behavior has been a long road with a lot of hard work, but the rewards are immeasurable. I feel at peace with me. I like myself. I love who I am. And I’m much more present in my relationships.

Feeling happy with myself allows me to put my ego aside and be of service to others, which contributes to more joy in my life. And the better I feel about myself, the more positively I see the circumstances of my life. I am grateful for everything and can see things in a neutral way. The “bad” things that happen are opportunities to learn about myself and grow. They just “are.” It’s not life happening to me, it’s me living a life of meaning and contribution. Every life circumstance can be seen through the lens of gratitude and meaning.

How do you feel about these three signs of a happy self? Do you agree? How do you define feeling good about who you are?