Self Compassion

For the cynical among you, these articles aren’t going well. The first one giving happiness advice is 5,000 words on gratitude. Now I’m talking about self compassion. If, like me, you were raised to avoid anything like self affirming language, these topics are not what you want to hear. But what can I do? I’ve learned that experiencing gratitude and practicing self compassion makes us much happier, so it’s my job to share that knowledge. If I can learn to use them in my life, so can you.

Now I’ll tell you something about your brain: you might not realize it, but you  have self referential thoughts going through your head just about all of the time. Thoughts about how you look, how well you’re doing whatever you’re doing (or badly you’re doing it), what people think of what you just said, how much you’ve accomplished in your day/week/year/life, how you compare to your friends, and just what kind of person you are. These thoughts—these voices in your head—are largely critical. And like I said, they’re largely unnoticed. Sometimes you clearly tell yourself, “That was stupid,” or “Why did you say that?”, but much of the time they don’t break into your consciousness. But they’re still there, affecting both your mood in the moment and your overall happiness with your life. Dan Harris says that his original title for 10% Happier was The Voice in My Head Is an A**hole. As he says in the preface: “Most of us are so entranced by the nonstop conversation that we’re having with ourselves that we aren’t even aware we have a voice in our head.”

Here’s one of the big problems about thoughts that go unnoticed: they seem to have the power of truth. It’s similar to music playing during a movie. If you notice music during a scene enough to have thoughts about it like, “I’m not sure I would choose this music,” then it’s not going to effect you very much. You’re consciousness of it reduces its power. On the other hand, if you don’t notice the music, your feelings will be guided by it to a remarkable extent: it will guide your entire perspective. Our thoughts go on and on—sometimes loud and clear “Why would you say that?!”, but mostly under without us noticing. Because they’re unquestioned, these thoughts create our view of the world. And because the thoughts are so often self critical, our emotions are often ones of anxiety, self blame, anger, etc. And therefore—to make an obvious point—they’re not making us happy. (And if you think they’re motivating you to work hard and be good at things, you’re misinformed. I’ll talk about that in Blame the Process, which is largely about using self compassion to be successful.) Now as I said in What Is Happiness, our path to making ourselves happier is to reduce the amount of time we spend in the grip of unhappy thoughts and feelings. So with self compassion we’re going to work on reducing the influences of our negative voices (which aren’t the only kind you can have).

We’re going to use three tactics to deal with these voices: notice them, label them, and introduce positive voices to contrast with them. It’s important to understand that I’m not asking you to treat yourself in some ridiculously positive, overly sweet manner. You’re allowed to criticize your own actions and you’re not required to tell yourself that you’re the greatest person in the world. I’m asking you to treat yourself with the fairness and kindness that you think other people deserve. If someone else deserves criticism for taking a certain action, then you surely deserve the same criticism. But you know that other person wouldn’t deserve for the criticism to go on endlessly. Well, the same applies to you. Realize that it’s more fair and useful to tell someone, “Okay, you could have done that better, but you do a lot of things right and can learn to do this right too,” rather than, “Well, you screwed that up as usual. Frankly, that’s what I expect when you do anything.” If you saw a manager talking to a coworker the second way, you would feel bad for the coworker and you would realize that this manager doesn’t know how to do the job. But we reproach ourselves with that kind of language all the time. While we don’t need to praise ourselves constantly, we do need to make it more likely that our inner voices talk to us like a reasonable boss, not a jerk boss.

So your first job is to notice your voices. This skill is actually tricky, especially if you’ve never done any mindfulness training. And remember that lots of the voices are under the radar: they’re affecting our feelings without making themselves heard clearly in our consciousness. Start by just doing check ins. As you go through your day, even in stressful moments, take a few seconds to ask, “Have I been reminding myself of how much I suck?” If you want to be particularly proactive, you can set an alarm to go off every couple of hours that reminds you to check in. In these check ins, you might indeed notice that you’ve been beating yourself up—maybe going on and on about a mistake you made this morning (or that you made ten years ago). You might also see other cycles: you’re supposed to be working, but you keep thinking about what you’ll have for dinner; or your thoughts keep being pulled into the conversation that two people are having ten feet away; or you might notice that your stomach feels a little upset and you can try to figure out what that’s about. Any bringing to your awareness what’s happening in your head is useful: you’re improving your skill.

The next step is to label the voices. So if you see that you’ve been going on for ten minutes about something stupid you said at work or to your partner, you can say simply, “I was a stupid thing to say, but it’s ridiculous to keep going on about it.” Or you can imagine that inside you you have a cast of characters fighting to grab the microphone and you can say, “Okay, there’s Crazy Bob again. He never has a nice thing to say.” You don’t need to do a ton of self analysis. You just need to see negative talk going on and put a label on it like “That’s a ridiculous exaggeration,” or “This has been going on for half an hour,” or “That’s something I did ten years ago, so I really don’t need to dwell on it now.”

Step three is to introduce a positive statement. As I’ve said, you don’t have to go over the top with self praise. You can say something like, “You know you don’t actually screw everything up. You do things right most of the time.” Or “The fact that you feel bad about saying that actually shows that you have some good qualities.” Or “You definitely screwed up, but you really can learn to do better.” Again, these are just the kind of fair, accurate, and supportive statements that you think other people in your situation would deserve.

Many people think that they’re never going to be the kind of people who can do positive self talk, but introducing positive statements is pretty natural once you notice that some inner voice is saying ridiculously things. It makes sense that, if you notice an inner voice saying “You’re the world’s biggest screw up,” you label the comment with “That’s obviously ridiculous,” and go on to say, “You messed that up, and you do make that mistake often, so you should work on doing it less.” This kind of statement makes sense when you’ve said something unpleasant to your kids, done poorly on a test, or made a mistake at work.

And remember: you’re only being fair in the way that you think other people deserve fairness. You need to get out of your head the idea that you’re some kind of special creature that particularly deserves harsh communication. You’re not being soft by realizing that you don’t thrive on negative comments: you’re being mature.

A couple of things to understand about this work: First, since noticing is the key to step one, mindfulness practice is very helpful. I’ll talk more about mindfulness and meditation in Be Here Now. Such a practice isn’t required to work on self compassion, and I certainly don’t want you going off for two years to become a skilled meditator before you start, but obviously doing training in observing your thoughts will help with seeing all of the times you give yourself ridiculous criticism. Second, you shouldn’t wait until you’re great at noticing before you begin to use labeling and introducing positive statements. You want to practice all three tactics at the same time and improve all three together. It may be that your ability to say constructive things to yourself moves ahead of your other abilities. That’s great, but never go only with introducing positive comments. You want to keep working on noticing and labeling because you’re not just trying to introduce a healthy voice to shout back at the unhealthy voices—you’re working on diminishing the violume of the unhealthy voices.

I’ve been talking about the voices that criticize us in a typical day—that talk about how foolish we look in this outfit or how stupid we sounded in that conversation at lunch. But realize that self compassion is at least as challenging and at least as important during times of big disappointments. Often life doesn’t go our way. That can be because we make big mistakes or it can be because other people do something to hurt us or it can be from larger forces in life. When we have large setbacks, it is very easy for negative voices to dominate our minds. In these times, we don’t just feel that we have failed in some way, but that we’ve revealed to the world the failure we’ve actually always been. The same ideas and the same practice we learned above applies in these large cases. If you deserve some criticism, be willing to face it, but also apply the same limits that would be fair if someone else were in your position. Introduce constructive voices that talk about improving your life (see Set Goals). As I’ll talk about in Blame the Process, your priority should be improving your situation—submersing yourself in self criticism will only get in the way.

Know as you get started that this work is a long term project. Yes, you can have benefits early on. You really can, later today, notice that you’ve been going on and on in your head about some mistake you made, realize that it’s ridiculous to do so, and feel better. But lifelong habits of mind that are natural to everyone are not changed in a couple of weeks or even six months. It will take years for you to internalize the idea that you don’t deserve to be called an idiot or a failure. Don’t let this fact put you off. You’re going to be alive for years (decades I hope), so you might as well spend that time putting in some effort each day to make yourself happier.

As usual, I’ll wrap up with a review of the mantra I introduced in What Is This Podcast: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. Remember that, whatever some of your voices may tell you, you really do have value just as you are and you do lots of things right. Because you have value, this work of making yourself happier by treating yourself better matters. And while this work can be challenging, both because it’s difficult to notice what’s going on in your head and because you might start off pretty bad at saying positive things to yourself, you can do this work and get better at it.