Connecting with yourself is essential to personal growth and well-being. Reflecting on your personal experiences in the world can help unlock aspects of resilience and self-efficacy.

Connecting with yourself is a simple way to describe efforts that help increase awareness of your inner world — the thoughts, feelings, values, emotions, and goals that make you, you. It often involves practices of introspection, self-reflection, and self-compassion to build your understanding of yourself.

The more you understand yourself, the better equipped you become to:

  • build empathy
  • manage your emotions
  • create healthy boundaries
  • communicate effectively with others

Connecting with yourself helps you understand both you and the world around you on a level that promotes self-acceptance and inner peace.

Learning to recognize your emotions and how they occur across a spectrum can help you build emotion regulation and empathy, the ability to identify and understand the emotions of others.

You can hone this skill by reflecting on what you’re feeling in the moment throughout your day. Acknowledge the variety of emotions and their varying intensities.

During moments of intense distress, you can practice what’s known as “affect labeling” or the naming of your feelings. Affect labeling is a psychological regulatory tool that puts names on emotions so you can shift from a reactive response to a controlled response.

While affect labeling is a common recommendation from experts to help build emotion regulation, some research suggests it may be most beneficial during high intensity moments.

Identifying an emotion helps you pause and examine it objectively. For instance, you may start by questioning why you’re experiencing a specific emotion. You can then explore its intensity and the length of time this emotion stays with you.

Because you’ve identified the emotion, you’re able to follow the trail behind why you’re feeling it. For example, you might feel irritated all day and realize it stems from several back-to-back hiccups in your morning routine or is due to background anxiety about a big project.

When you know you’re feeling irritated and know why, it may help prevent that emotion from affecting unrelated parts of your day.

Writing out your feelings in a daily journal can be an effective way to explore what you’ve been feeling and why.

It’s OK to experience emotions — and many of them. Even negative feelings have a place in the complete human experience. When there’s a challenging moment or day, accept it. You’re allowed to not be positive all the time.

Accepting what you’re feeling doesn’t mean becoming complacent with feeling poorly, though. Accepting feelings means being kind to yourself about their presence. You’re not less of a person or “bad” because you’re angry, sad, or upset.

Many people find practicing mindfulness is an effective way to develop acceptance of thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness is a state of in-the-moment awareness that allows all thoughts (positive and negative) to pass through without judgment and without rumination.

Exploring emotions plays a big part in building a connection with yourself, but embracing who you are as an individual involves more than just what you’re feeling in a given moment.

Your inner self includes who you feel the most comfortable being. It’s your authenticity, the “true” you. It’s the part of you that likes what it likes, regardless of social stigmas or constructs.

Authenticity is related to overall well-being in various ways. It can promote self-acceptance, build empowerment, and help you find and build meaningful relationships. When you live authentically, it can create a sense of fulfillment because your actions hold meaning in your life.

Being authentic can start with allowing yourself to wear the clothes you like, engaging in activities you find joyful, and expressing yourself creatively.

As you gain insight and connection with yourself, you set the stage for personal growth. If you’ve realized that your job is contributing to feelings of depression, for example, recognizing that allows you to work toward a better tomorrow.

Self-awareness allows you to see areas in your life where there is an opportunity — or a need — for change.

The more changes you make to support your authentic self, the more fulfilling life can become. Learning new skills and working on other aspects of self, like your physical health, can also create opportunities and new experiences where there were none before.

Autonomy is the ability to govern your actions and decisions freely. It’s being able to act as you see fit, without significant external pressures or influence.

Building autonomy can help you feel empowered and in control of your life. It promotes independence, self-discovery, and motivation. When you act because you’ve made the decision based on your personal beliefs and preferences, it allows you to take responsibility and learn from your decision-making processes.

You can build autonomy by setting personal goals that aren’t significantly affected by the influence of others. An example might be a physical goal, like running a footrace, or a skill-based goal, like learning to cook a specific dish.

Learning how to connect with yourself means learning how to build your inner awareness of everything that makes you, you.

Exploring your emotions and their causes and focusing on living authentically are just a few examples of how you can connect with yourself and improve your overall well-being and self-efficacy.