As you get older, it can be hard to maintain your friendships. Everyone is so busy with their lives and commitments. Therefore, it’s hard to schedule time to see each other as often as you may like. It’s common to feel like you have no friends and that you’re alone. However, you need to remember that you don’t need to rely on other people to validate you or to make you feel happy. I’ve learned that the key to happiness and feeling fulfilled in life is to learn to be your own best friend. Depend on yourself, love yourself, and make yourself happy. Regardless of how often you see your friends.
Being your own best friend may seem like a lonely concept. However, the opposite is true. You can be content and truly happy in your own company, without depending on other people to make you feel worthy. Moreover, you can be truly be happy within yourself and appreciate all that you have in your life.
Ensure that you make time to spend on your own and stop feeling bad about the friendships you’ve lost. Or, the ones that are drifting, or how you feel like you don’t belong in your friendship group setting anymore. This will help you to realise the truth that the only person you need to make you happy and validated is yourself.
Why You Should Be Your Own Best Friend
It’s great to have people around you who you can turn to and who make you feel happy. However, it’s important to remember that life always changes. Therefore, you’re the only constant person who’s always going to be there for you. So, it’s vital for your continuing happiness to be comfortable in your own company. You need to learn to be by yourself, and to be able to rely on yourself and not others.
It’s hard when you lose friends when you’re older because you’re always working and your busy schedules get in the way. It can often feel like you’re alone, that people don’t have time for you anymore. Or, that people don’t care enough about you to make you a priority in their lives anymore. Therefore, it can make you feel worthless, low, lonely, and depressed. You can feel like there’s something wrong with you or that you’re not valuable or fun enough.
When you’re younger, you’re surrounded by countless friends. However, people come and go from your life, and you can start to feel like you don’t fit in or you’re not worthy of their time and effort anymore. However, it’s important to remember that people come and go from your life for a reason. Less is more when it comes to friendships as you grow up. Therefore, start focusing on your relationship with yourself and appreciate the handful of friends you can truly rely on.
It’s depressing and can get you down when you feel like you’re not part of a group of friends or are not invited out anymore. However, learning to become your own best friend saves you disappointment and hurt. Furthermore, it strengthens the most important relationship you’ll ever have: the one with yourself.
You Need to Learn to Love Yourself
Be your own best friend; you only truly need yourself to make you happy. Remember, life changes, and you need to always be there for yourself, love yourself, and trust yourself. Start working on the relationship you have with yourself. When you solely rely on yourself to make you happy, other people are a bonus. They only add to your happiness, not create it for you.
If you’re constantly looking outside yourself to find happiness and fulfilment, you will never truly be happy or content with yourself or your life. It might sound cliché, but learning to love yourself is vital for you to create meaningful and lasting relationships with other people.
Learning to love yourself and becoming your own best friend, the person you turn to when things get tough, and looking inwards for answers and strength is the most empowering and amazing feeling in the world.
Loving yourself and being self-reliant will not only make you feel like you can take on the world, increase your happiness and confidence levels. It will also attract people into your life who are going to treat you with the same love and respect that you have created and accepted that you deserve for yourself.
When you learn to become your own best friend, you won’t let external friendships and relationships validate you. Learning to love yourself will ensure that you don’t need to rely on others to make you happy or support you. Moreover, you will start looking within and take time for yourself and what you truly want from your life.
How You Can Learn to Be Your Own Best Friend
If you’re used to constantly being around others, looking to other people for advice, support, approval, or happiness, then learning to love yourself and becoming your own best friend can be a challenge.
The most important step on your self-development journey is learning to accept, appreciate, and love yourself for who you are now. Whilst taking steps to improve, learn, and grow, but from a place of love and compassion towards yourself. Not out of self-doubt, self-hatred, or negativity towards yourself. Therefore, stop searching for happiness and fulfilment from other people. You need to become happy on your own and in yourself.
Don’t be afraid of being on your own and spending time with yourself. That’s where all your self-esteem, confidence, and happiness stem from. When you’re truly happy from within, you will be content with doing things on your own, relying on yourself, and being your own best friend.
You can start learning to become your own best friend by making time for yourself to be alone and learn to appreciate every part of you. Start doing things on your own, going places alone, and dedicating quality time for yourself frequently.
Work on Yourself
Here are just a few ways you can start to become your own best friend today…
- Turn to yourself in times of trouble (think of solutions yourself, journal, reflect on what you truly want, go on a long walk in nature)
- Book a lodge away by yourself for a weekend
- Start dedicating an hour a day to self-care/reflection, meditation, journaling, etc
- Prioritise activities and hobbies that you can do on your own and that make you feel happy. (Yoga, Pilates, hiking, swimming, cycling, drawing, reading, painting, etc.)
- Go to the cinema, theatre, or for lunch on your own
- Go to the event you want to go to on your own if no one will go with you. (Stop holding yourself back and take the leap and go alone)
- Read self-development books, take an online confidence course, go to a seminar, etc
- Pamper yourself frequently (book a massage, have a long hot bubble bath, light candles, paint your nails, etc.)
- Don’t run to other people to solve your problems. (Take time for self-reflection and learn to step away from situations and listen to the voice inside)
- Start focusing on yourself and making yourself happy. (Stop wishing things were different, don’t look to others to make you happy)
Remember
It’s important to remember that other people can let you down and disappear from your life at any time. Therefore, you need to learn to love yourself and remember that you’re the only person you can 100% rely on all the time. You’re the only constant thing in your life. Things change, people change, and you can lose friendships and relationships when you least expect it.
People can let you down or pressure you to be or act in ways that you don’t really want deep down. Therefore, it’s vital to focus on yourself, what you want to feel, how you want to be, and what you want to act like. It’s better to be alone than around people who don’t truly value you, care for you, or have your best interests at heart.
It’s true that you are a mixture of the people you spend the most time around in your life. So, it’s important to first love yourself and then surround yourself with people who enrich your life and push you to do and be better.
“When you are your own best friend, you don’t endlessly seek out relationships, friendships, and validation from the wrong sources because you realise that the only approval and validation you need is your own.”– Mandy Hale
Summary
You can have lots of people around you and still feel alone in life. Therefore, you need to learn how to fill the void of what you think you need from other people, but provide it for yourself. You can give yourself all the love and happiness that you need in life; you don’t need to get it from other people. Find what you’re missing and start working on providing it for yourself.
It’s empowering, uplifting, and calming to be able to be your own best friend and to be happy in your skin. Know that you can rely on yourself for your happiness and everything you need in life.
Once you’re content within yourself, you won’t settle for less than you deserve in any relationship in your life. Being your own best friend will remind you of how strong, confident, self-assured, and self-reliant you truly are.
“The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.”– Diane Von Furstenberg
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