Be good to yourself

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Imagine you just made a big mistake on a project at work, creating an added burden for yourself and your co-workers, or that you accidentally said something dumb at an important meeting or on a first date. How would you react?

Many of us react to situations like these by chastising ourselves for our mistakes. We figuratively (and sometimes literally) beat ourselves up. In small doses, self-criticism can be helpful - it encourages us to take responsibility for our actions and motivates us to improve ourselves - but excessive self-criticism can be debilitating and self-defeating.

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So what's the solution? Researchers have begun to examine the importance of self-compassion, which means treating yourself with kindness and understanding when you make a mistake or go through a difficult experience, just as you would treat another person you care about. Self-compassion is similar to self-esteem in some respects, but unlike self-esteem it's not about how you judge yourself but how you treat yourself. In other words, whether you think you're a great person or a not-so-great person in a given moment, you can still have compassion for yourself. For example, you might say to yourself, "You made a mistake, but it's okay - nobody's perfect. You'll try harder next time." 

Research suggests that this attitude is associated with many positive outcomes, such as increased resilience to stressful events (see this post for more details), greater psychological well-being, and a reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety. Although self-compassion might seem a bit too self-focused, research suggests that self-compassionate people are also more compassionate towards others, and an fMRI experiment showed that self-compassion activated similar brain regions to those involved in empathy towards others.

That's great, you might be thinking, but easier said than done. It's hard to change our chronic ways of relating to ourselves, just as it's hard to break patterns in dysfunctional relationships with other people. It's definitely not something that happens overnight. I first became interested in self-compassion when I learned about it in a meditation class in college, and since then it's been one of my primary research interests. Over the years I've come across many different approaches to building self-compassion - some based in empirical research, others more anecdotal. Here are some of my favorites.

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