If we don’t love ourselves, then how is anyone else ever going to love us, right? Well, Dr. Emily says that’s bullshit. In this Emotional Push-Up, she is joined by Morning Brew cofounder Alex Lieberman to talk about this well known but questionable trope about self-love and a healthier way to approach the journey that is learning to love ourselves.

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Monday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

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The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Ready to break an emotional sweat? Welcome to Emotionally Fit with me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. As a therapist, I know that staying mentally healthy takes work and repetition. That's why I'll share emotional push-ups, short, actionable exercises to help you strengthen your mental fitness. From improving your friendships to managing stress, let's flex those feels and do some reps together.

Hey there, fit fans. I am so excited to be here today with Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Alex, thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me, pumped to be here.

So Alex, the idea of self-love is kind of having a moment right now. Can you share a Twitter version of what self-love means to you these days like a quick summary?

I got it. So a Twitter version of self-love, to me it is the feeling of having a house with a solid foundation, not a house built on stilts at the edge of the ocean. It is this feeling that no matter what happens in life, no matter what rocks you, you feel like you have a center of gravity and know who you truly are and feel proud of who you truly are.

Wow. I really love that metaphor, that is perfect because today I want to talk about a pop psychology bullshit trope that I really hate about self-love and that is this very commonly shared idea that no one is going to love you until you learn to love yourself. I just hate this advice because what I know from the work that I do is that the way we learn to love ourselves is through the love we receive from others, ideally starting with our caregivers when we're young.

There's a quote I love that speaks to this actually by Bruce D. Perry who wrote a book called The Boy who was Raised By a Dog and the quote goes like this. He says, "For years, mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support. That unless you love yourself, no one will love you. The truth is you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation."

So I love this quote because our society really pushes this idea that we should be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and manifest things for ourselves even if we were never taught how to do those things, but that's not really how love works. I think if we're lucky enough to be able to, we should surround ourselves with people who love us while we learn to love ourself.

And yes, of course, we have to do the work on ourselves if we want things to improve around us, I'm the first person to say that we need to take responsibility for our well-being and do the work if we want our life to look different, but finding people who love us the way we already are is really important when we want to change the relationship we have with our own self. So Alex, I'm curious, what do you think about this idea?

Yeah. I mean, what you're basically saying is that kind of conventional wisdom or at least what's in kind of pop psychology today is the idea that to be loved, you must love yourself. And so it's kind of you must accomplish one in order to be worthy of the other. And I think basically what you're saying is someone loving you is actually kind of a means to an end, the end being loving yourself. And it's kind of part of this potpourri that is necessary to love yourself, and I completely agree.

It's one of the things that I think I feel so thankful for in having an amazing partner and fiancee who loves me so much and loves me unconditionally is as I would say, I'm continuing to work on loving myself. I actually think in a lot of ways, like through osmosis, through seeing how much she loves me, it accelerates me in that journey. And it would actually be way harder if I didn't see what that looks like on a daily basis.

Yes, that's so well said. And one kind of begets the other. Of course, yes, as we learn to love ourselves more, we are going to allow love from others and to our life in a different way. But the idea is we should not deny ourselves proximity to love while we're doing this journey on our own because we need both.

Yeah. And I think another thing, kind of like the other side of the coin of this is do you need to fully love yourself in order to fully love someone else? I think, of course. Even talking about me as the example, I think there's an opportunity for me to grow to fully love myself because I don't think I am fully there.

Of course, I have the ability to love my fiancee deeply, but I do think there's an opportunity to love even more when I end up loving myself. And I don't know if that's like a hot take or not, but that's my personal feeling.

No, that makes sense. I think really it's all part of a soup. and we should start wherever we can. If it feels accessible to work on your self-love, great. If it feels more accessible to work on just allowing the love that others have for you, wonderful. The idea is wherever we are, we're doing okay. And we have to give ourselves a little bit of credit while we're on that journey. And today's push-up is all about practicing the art of coming at this from both sides, allowing love and creating it for ourself.

So step one of this push-up is to make a list of the people in your life who love you. And I know this might sound a little trite, but let's all do it anyway because it's a really powerful exercise to see right in front of our eyes that we are not alone, and that there are people who have our back. And this can be any kind of love. This can be friendship love, romantic love, familial love, love from a community or a congregation. It can be the love we feel from our ancestors or from nature or any higher being that you believe in.

There are no wrong answers here. So for those listening in press pause and go ahead and make your list or keep listening to hear who is on Alex's. So Alex, whenever you're ready, I would love to hear about the list that you've made.

Okay. So I wrote down my list and if I'm counting it, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I probably have 12 people total. It's also, by the way, when I think about my close guy, friends, even the question I'm asked in my head of which of my close guy friends love me? It's such an interesting question because the way I think we've been cultured, none of my close guy friends have actually ever said to me, "I love you."

So did they get put on the list?

Yes, yes. I put a few of them on the list.

Okay. I love that.

Yeah. So I put like my friend, Justin, who has been one of my closest friends since we went to the University of Michigan together, we lived together for four years after Michigan, and we're extremely close, and he's someone I'd put on the list as someone who loves me. But it's interesting to also see that I probably only have three friends there and the remainder of the people eight or nine people, it's all family. It's my mom, my dad, my sister, my grandparents on both sides.

My nanny when I was growing up who she basically was like my second mom from when I was a year-old until I was 18, and she was deported on my first day of junior year of high school. And I just saw her for the first time in 15 years like three weeks ago. She's someone I know who loves me. And then, of course my fiancee. And so, again, even writing down this list, it's really powerful to even see like one. Of course, there's a lot of people that really love me and care for me, but two, just the importance of family at least from my perspective and my values.

And also how quality of friendship is just so paramount to even quantity of friendship. Because at the end of the day, I think when I look back on my life when I'm say 70 or 75, I'm going to think maybe there's like two or three friends who are kind of my like life friends. And so whenever I give myself a hard time about not having "enough friends," I think it's just important to realize that at the end of the day if I can have one amazing friend who truly loves me for the majority of my life, that is an amazing spot to be in.

It is. That's a beautiful gift that not everyone has. So it's a privilege and an honor to know that there's someone who's loved you for that long. So step two of this push-up then is to reach out to at least one of these people, though more is always encouraged and welcome. You can text or call or email or DM or carrier pigeon, whatever you want to do. And you're essentially going to ask them to help you feel a dose of the love that they have for you.

So here's a template you can use if you want. You might say something like, "Hi friend, I am working on my emotional fitness and my workout for the day is to let myself feel the love that others have for me. I'm so grateful to have you in my life and if you're up for it, it would mean a lot to me if you would share a few sentences about how and why you love me."

So listeners, feel free to press pause and send out those messages. And if you're thinking, "Oh, this is a little weird or lame or awkward." I want to invite you to consider that the part of you saying that it's lame or awkward is the part of you that is scared of being vulnerable, and of allowing yourself to feel that love. So push through it and send those messages, okay? Or keep listening to hear from Alex.

So Alex, who did you decide to send your message to?

So I decided to send a text to my fiancee Carly.

And did you get a response?

I did get a response and it made me feel really happy and valued. And to your point like it may feel cheesy, but feeling the love, it feels really good. And it just puts things into perspective. And so Carly said a few things to me. She said, "I love how playful you are. I love how good of a dog dad you are and how good of a parent you're going to be. And I love how you keep me level-headed when at times I can become a little bit of a volcano."

Oh, that's beautiful. How did it feel to see that?

It's awesome, it's awesome because I think at the end of the day, it makes me feel connected. It makes me feel like helpful and useful to someone I really care about. And I think it makes a lot of things in life that I do care about feel like noise relative to this.

Well, that's a perfect lead in to the final step of this push-up, which is that when you get responses back from your messages, you sit and really let yourself feel it. You imagine this person saying these things to you and meaning them, and you fold them into your idea about yourself.

Find a place in your body and mind where this love can take up space and borrow it when you're having trouble being kind to yourself, when you're having trouble with that self-love. And remember that on your journey to loving yourself, there are people who got there a long time ago and who can help you get there too.

So Alex, as you sit with that, what comes up for you?

There's I think a few things. One is I like feel in my chest, it's hard to describe what a full heart feels like, but almost like a good pressure, not a constricting pressure on my chest. And it also makes me realize how valuable of an exercise this is. It's actually something I've been speaking a lot about with my therapist, kind of my coping mechanisms to not feel my feelings in life is to either think or do to get my mind racing and intellectualize, or it's to do things that busy me. But I know my emotions are down there because some of my most vivid experiences in life, the reason I remember them is because of emotions I felt during those experiences.

And so I think it's like such a well approachable and necessary exercise that I just did here, but to do even more of just sitting with the feeling because I also think it's like a trained muscle in a lot of ways where if I can do this now and feeling the feeling of being loved by my fiancee, but do it more, I think it really is kind of a muscle that through practice can be built up.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. And it translates to other muscles like the ones that we use to give ourselves the support that we need. So thank you for flexing your feels and breaking an emotional sweat. For those who want more of Alex, lucky for you we will be releasing our Taboo Tuesday episode with him next week where we will be talking about the complicated side of coming into a large sum of money, and all of the feelings that can bring up, the ways in which we can sometimes question our motivation, our purpose, all of that.

Alex will talk more about his emotional life as well so we will see you all there. Alex, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New push-ups drop every Monday and Thursday. Did you do today's push-up alongside me and my guest? Tweet your experience with the #emotionallyfit and follow me @dremilyanhalt.

Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com. That's join C-O-A.com to learn more and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @joincoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.