Treat you as you would others
Move over mindfulness, self-compassion is here, writes
Lee Suckling.
Mindfulness – the act of noticing your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations without judgment – has received its fair share of publicity in the past few years.
An extremely popular form of meditation thanks to apps like Headspace, it’s a valuable tool, but isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of selfhelp.
Enter self-compassion: the new, more evolved form of mindfulness.
You can think of self-compassion as applying the same emotional responses you would to a friend in need, except you apply them to yourself.
In essence, it’s about finding ways to stop giving yourself such a hard time about your failures and inadequacies (real or perceived), your worries, and your insecurities.
As human beings, we are highly critical, mostly of ourselves. Selfcriticism is a form of self-harm, even though it often feels natural.
But think about it this way: you’d never criticise a friend like you do yourself. It’s unreasonable, subjective, and clearly going to cause pain.
For example, say your best friend screwed up during a job interview, or a sibling got into a car accident (and it was their fault).
You don’t place any form of criticism upon them when they tell you about what happened. You don’t tell them they are failures, nor try to point out what they could have done differently (or better) in retrospect.
Now think about the same situations if you were personally in them.
You’d beat yourself up about flubbing your words in front of a potential new employer. You’d recount the moment you failed to look in your car mirror, and instead just pulled out and crashed into another vehicle.
You would think on the moments you wish you could go back to, and obsess over them. As if, somehow, criticising faults can somehow take them back.
Learning self-compassion is the process of taking that approach you use with others, and internalising it.
It’s not about boosting your selfesteem; self-compassion isn’t there to bolster yourself up or pursue an artificially-positive belief about your worth. Nor is it about self-pity.
It’s about accepting that personal failures happen. Rather than saying to yourself, ‘‘this shouldn’t have happened to me’’, or even ‘‘I’m so screwed up’’ or ‘‘poor me’’, selfcompassion is the realisation that everybody fails. Bad things happen to everyone, and everybody’s screwed up.
A three-pronged method of thinking about self-compassion is helpful in putting it into practice.
Firstly, there’s self-kindness. That’s where you don’t criticise yourself about your failures, nor do you ignore them and pretend they didn’t happen.
You’re ‘‘warm’’ to yourself, like you are to your friends when they need it. You’re a metaphorical fuzzy blanket or hot chicken soup: not there to judge, or to make yourself feel worse with over-analysis, just open to being gentle when you know you’re feeling fragile.
Secondly, there’s common humanity. This is perhaps the most important part of self-compassion.
Common humanity means recognising that the suffering you’re going through is part of the human condition. Everybody feels it. It’s not about you; you’re not weaker than others.
Pain, anxiety, worry, fear ... they are all shared human experiences.
Lastly, a form of mindfulness is used in the self-compassionate approach.
This means being in a receptive state of mind to accept how you’re feeling. We have a tendency to suppress or deny our feelings, but the mindfulness approach encourages you to observe them, non-judgmentally, without resistance.
Paradoxically, this process of resisting the urge to fight (or tell yourself you shouldn’t be feeling a particular way) actually reduces the potency of that feeling. By letting yourself feel pain, you reduce the pain.
According to the academic journals Self and Identity, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, and a half-dozen others, people who are selfcompassionate have far greater psychological health than those who are ‘‘hard on themselves’’ all the time.
With self-compassion, research points to increased life satisfaction and optimism, social connectivity, personal responsibility, and emotional resilience.
It also lowers risk of depression, anxiety, thought suppression (or, conversely, thought rumination), and perfectionism.
Self-compassion is easier said than done, of course. It involves practice, and you’ll never be flawless at it. But that, of course, is exactly the point.