How to Become Your Own Bestfriend (5 Helpful Tips + My Experiences)

Just to begin with a disclaimer… I’m not a therapist. This post is simply sharing my own experiences and personal tips as to how to become your own bestfriend.

Before we get into the tips, I would like to share some of my experiences in order to explain how I came to this point of befriending myself. I would like to offer a mild trigger warning as I will discuss briefly about depression and self-harm without romanticizing, glorifying, or going into any specific details.

Watch the video instead:

My Experiences

At this moment in time, I would affirm that I don’t have any bestfriends. I am on the journey of becoming my own bestfriend. But this thought of not having any bestfriends, a few months ago, or even a month ago, would have really frightened me and would have really made me feel super depressed, anxious, and sad.

Why?

I believe it’s because we are grown in a society that makes you believe that you must have X amount of friends and X amount of close friends. If not, you’ll never survive this world.

Now if you don’t have best friends, this does not mean you don’t have connections to other people nor does it mean that you cannot develop and build strong, meaningful connections and relationships with other people.

However, I do believe that it’s wrong to mislead children, teenagers, and adults into thinking that they need those external friendships in order to develop themselves and to be happy and less depressed.

I believe that your number one friendship and your number one priority should always be yourself first. You’re going to take you everywhere you go, anywhere you go, and for as long as you can. If you’re not friends with yourself, you’re going to go through a lot of hardship and a lot of heartaches.

Save Yourself the Heartache

The reason why I’m saying this is because for 24 years of my life, I’ve been through these heartaches constantly and I could not figure it out. I kept thinking to myself, it must be me. I must be doing something wrong in the friendship. Yes, I am definitely not 100% perfect in all my friendships and my relationships.

However, there is one thing that really makes it my fault and I’m not trying to put the blame on anyone or play the victim card in any regard. What I’m trying to do is to actually take responsibility. My number one problem in these relationships is that I didn’t value the friendship within myself first and foremost, which is what you’re supposed to do if you want to harness healthy relationships and friendships.

That’s why as it currently stands, I’m only bestfriends with myself. Whenever I am fulfilled and developed in that relationship with myself, then I will have room to share myself and develop further deeper friendships with other people as long as they do not counteract this friendship that I have with myself.

As we go along, you’ll understand more and more what I mean by that.

Severe Depression & Fractured Relationships

For many years I have been severely depressed. I had some thoughts of harming myself and basically not being alive. Not only have I had those thoughts but I’ve also acted on these thoughts in the past.

Throughout my teenagehood and early adulthood and that is in itself a scary thing to go through. The only person that I had trusted to talk to about these thoughts was myself and sometimes friends if I felt really close to them. I took a wager and said, “Alright, I can trust them maybe they’ll help or understand.” Obviously, you want to talk to people that are the closest to you, that support you, etc.

Especially in the last year, it was my goal to be super honest, to communicate, and seek the help that I need whenever I feel terrible and whenever I had these thoughts.

So in the past year or so, I feel like I opened up more and more. I was more and more open and vocal about my struggles. I don’t know if it’s the fact of being open that made people discredit me more versus when I was so quiet and secretive about it.

At the end of the day, these were issues I still struggle with and have been trying to work through by myself as my own friend. But I wanted that extra support. I wanted to be able to talk to a close friend and for them to say, “Okay what can I do to help,” or to talk to me or to try to find solutions with me.

I do acknowledge that when it comes to mental health it’s no one’s imperative to truly help you besides professionals. But if you struggle with monetary funds and you struggle with having that support, you might seek out that immediate support, then, you would hope that the people closest to you, such as family and friends, would try to understand and help.

Eventually, I decided to reach out. I was crying and I had tears in my eyes and I was saying things along the lines of “I have a hard time getting up in the morning. I have thoughts to hurt myself. I feel stuck, I do not know what to do. I have been hurting myself and I have been thinking of not ‘being alive.’

In retrospect, what was more frightening and what cannot be more frightening to a person going through these feelings is when those statements are being ignored by the people you trust the most, that you love the most, and that say they support you. Being ignored in your pain makes you feel even more lonely and depressed, and it actually diminishes your relationship with yourself and your self-worth even further. To the point where you might think to yourself, “These people do not care at all. I am better off dead. I am better off hurting myself and harming myself. There must be something wrong with me if no one cares what I’m talking about if no one cares that I’m suffering. That no one cares that I need help, that I want them to listen to me and be around me.”

Although these thoughts are not true, they felt true.

And so those were very scary thoughts to have and although I acknowledge it’s no one’s responsibility. I also acknowledge that it’s because of that fracture in the friendship that I have with myself that I’ve actually granted these friendships to replace that friendship that I’m supposed to have with myself.

Now that I’ve shared how I got to this point, I would briefly like to remind you that this post does not intend to do harm to your friendships. I am in no way trying to encourage you to go out and ruin all of your friendships.

At the end of the day, you should understand that your number one priority and your number one bestfriend is yourself. All I am trying to share in this post is how to work that relationship with yourself as much as you work on your other relationships.

And that is why I’m sharing 5 tips to help you become your own bestfriend (as someone who’s becoming her own bestfriend).

1. Reassess All Relationships

My first tip is to reassess all of your relationships.

When I say reassess all of your relationships, I mean all of them. Especially the ones that you have with yourself. And…we can have multiple relationships with ourselves!

As I’m sure you wouldn’t want your bestfriend to have toxic relationships with their friends, with their romantic partner, or with their family members, etc. you would warn them to be careful or to reassess their relationship with a certain person, to reassess their boundaries. Essentially, you want them to protect themselves and to lead a happier life, right?

Well similarly, you might need to sit down and actually reassess the friendships that you have, the relationships that you have with other people. Are these relationships harmful to you, your mental health, and your well-being? Or are they growing relationships? Are they loving relationships? Are there things that you can actually work on together? Sometimes you have these blunders in relationships but you can work through them as long as both parties are willing.

However, the most important part is to reassess your relationship with yourself!

How is your relationship with your body?

How is your relationship with your mental health?

How’s your relationship with your routine? Your work? Your goals?

You need to truly reassess those relationships that you have towards yourself so that you can be able to work on them, strengthen them, better them, and understand what is causing you that harm.

What is causing you that disconnect with being your own bestfriend?

Is it your relationship with your body? Do you hate your body? What can you do? Which steps can you take in order to love your body? Do you have to look in the mirror every day and say, “I love you body, thank you for carrying me through these days”? Do you need to do affirmations? Do you need to make changes to your dietary plan? Do you need to move more?

It can be all these things when you become your own best friend. You wouldn’t want your bestfriend to feel shitty in their mind and body. You wouldn’t want your bestfriend to starve their bodies, hate their bodies, put themselves down, etc.

This conviction should be the same for yourself.

2. Respect Your Commitments

Similarly, my second tip is to respect your commitments.

Every relationship has its commitments. You have commitments such as time commitments, energy spent commitments, loyalty commitments, etc.

You wouldn’t betray your best friend. You wouldn’t come late to their birthday party. There are so many things that you do and don’t do in order to respect your commitments and allow the relationship to flourish.

Once again, this is the same principle to apply to yourself.

You need to respect the commitments that you have with yourself whether it’s setting goals and time for yourself, taking yourself out on dates, and so much more. Whether it’s taking care of your skin, taking care of your health, taking care of your business, and every other commitment you may have to yourself.

You should practice sticking to these commitments first.

Then you’ll see. If you’re able to practice this act of sticking to your commitments with yourself, it will be much easier to stick to commitments with other people (given you’ve agreed upon them together.)

However, don’t forget that you need to be reasonable and honest with yourself when working on these self-commitments. It is the same thing with goals. If you set yourself these crazy lucrative goals but you cannot work towards them, then you demolish the commitment to yourself. You put your relationship with yourself at risk.

You are risking your bestfriend relationship within yourself.

3. Give Yourself Permission

My third tip is to give yourself permission.

What do I mean by that? Keep in mind that you’re supposed to be honest with yourself and reasonable with yourself.

What does this mean?

I mean you wouldn’t tell your bestfriends to go and commit crimes or to do shitty things to other people. You’d want them to have permission to maybe take themselves out on a date and give them permission to you know feel down when they need to.

This is the same concept towards yourself. If you want to do something, you shouldn’t be waiting and relying on other people to do them.

I’ll give you an example:

I’ve always wanted to start a book club and writing groups with my friends. For us to read and discuss books as well as share our work. It came to the point where I was waiting for them in order to take that initiative and do those things.

It’s good to have accountable friends. It’s good to have shared interests with friends. But at the end of the day, if your friends don’t want to do it and they don’t want to commit to it, then it’s your responsibility to do it for yourself and commit to it yourself.

As mentioned, I’ve always wanted to have a book club but all of my friends never respected the book club. I chose the book, I read the book, etc. and they did not. In the end, everyone has their own lives and their own schedules to follow.

Since I am my own bestfriend, I started a Booktube channel. (You can watch it here.) I started a channel where I talk about books and in the future, I’m going to have book clubs with the people that are watching my channel.

I get to have what I want and do what I want. I don’t need permission. I will just do it as I’ve harvested this relationship myself, which made me happier and more confident in myself.

Hence, it’s given me a lot of permission to do so many things that I’ve always wanted to do but I’ve never done because I was always waiting for the right conditions, the right friends, and the right motivation.

I don’t wait for anyone anymore. I will go on dates with myself. I will go do fun activities that I’ve always wanted to do… by myself. Such as going on picnics at the park. Anything that I wish to do, I’m going go to do it because I am my own bestfriend and I enjoy my company.

This is your reminder that you don’t need X amount of friends or X amount of support to do things.

Give yourself permission and do them.

4. Learn to Forgive Yourself

My fourth tip is to learn how to forgive yourself.

You would forgive your friend for missing your party or for not answering you back for a few days (obviously within reason) because you love them.

Despite it all, you love your friends and you forgive them.

Therefore, you should be able to forgive yourself too. Learn to forgive yourself when you make mistakes and when you know you’re not feeling it some days.

There’s this idea that radical self-compassion is what actually allows you to become your own bestfriend. It’s what actually allows you to develop this relationship with yourself.

A few days ago, I watched a Ted Talk by psychotherapist Carissa Karner. In this talk, she explains that in order to harness this relationship with yourself, you need to forgive all of yourself.

You need to forgive the nastiness.

You need to forgive the self-critic.

You need to forgive the trauma.

You need to forgive all of it.

You need to forgive what she calls the wounded parts of yourself in order to be able to develop this relationship. If you want learn more on how to become your own bestfriend through self-compassion, you can watch her Ted Talk here.

5. Listen To Yourself

My fifth tip is to listen to yourself.

You really need to listen to yourself as you would listen to a friend that’s going through hardship.

You need to listen to what you’re saying.

You need to listen to your emotions.

You need to truly listen with all intent, without judgment, and without criticism and just let your friend (which is yourself) talk.

When people actually listen and do not discredit your worries and your fears; then, your pain actually alleviates as do some symptoms of depression.

Being listened to makes you feel more connected and frees you from the thoughts and feelings you’ve been carrying.

(If you feel like you can’t share with your friends and family, I would highly suggest journaling your emotions. You can read my post on the mental health benefits of journaling here.)

Thus, you absolutely need to listen to yourself without judgment. You need to be able to separate judgment from your thoughts.

Once you do that, you will feel much more supported and you will slowly start to find all the answers that you need within yourself but first, you need to take all these steps by truly listening to yourself without judgment and criticism.

Maybe you need to write it out. Maybe you need to record it to yourself and just sit with it first. Only then you can try to find solutions and try to help yourself. Listening to yourself and your needs is a crucial step in helping you become your own best friend.

These were my 5 tips on how to become your own bestfriend. I hope you found these tips helpful.

As I said, these are mostly tips that I’ve come up with myself as I’m going through this journey, as I’m learning and as I’m growing,

Additionally, please do not discredit your friendships. Friendships that work and that are healthy and good for you, actually also help strengthen your bond with yourself, your bestfriendship with yourself.

And thus, when you learn how to be a very good friend to yourself, you’re also able to be good friends to other people because it’s exactly how you should be treating yourself and how you should treat other people.