Loving yourself is the greatest work you will do in this life. In a sense it is your only work. But as we have already seen, the roots of your incapacity to love yourself are deep. . . . Scientists tell us that habits make deep inroads in the circuitry of our brains, that it takes twenty-one days to start changing a habit and ninety days to engrain that change. It's difficult to reverse these complex brain patterns, and when it comes to redefining how we feel about ourselves, it can be especially difficult because many of these patterns have been encoded since infancy.
Because of the many ways we have learned how not to love ourselves, we have a good bit of work to do. We must learn to love ourselves in many places and many ways — in our relationships, in choosing our life's work, in doing our work, with our parents and our children, among our friends and strangers, inside our own hearts, in the midst of all our see-sawy emotions, with respect to our bodies, and in how we choose to think about ourselves.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, Loving Yourself