A Better World Begins with Self-Compassion. Dr. Kristin Neff Shares How Loving Ourselves Can Lead to More Resilience

Dr. Kristin Neff first began researching self-compassion while doing her postdoctoral work. A central construct of Buddhist psychology, self-compassion played a role in Neff’s personal life when after her divorce she started saying kind things to herself like, “You did the best you could,” “Everyone’s imperfect,” and “I’m here for you.”

It may sound strange to say such things to yourself, Neff recognizes. “Many of us never consider being intentionally warm, supportive, and kind to ourselves in the same way we would be to a friend,” she says. But we can learn to do it. And Neff, who is the author of the books Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive, strives to show people how. As the pioneer in education and research around self-compassion, this is the crux of her work.

Because when we show ourselves self-compassion, it emboldens our resilience. As Neff says, “It makes a remarkable difference in our ability to cope with difficulty.”

A Conversation with Dr. Kristin Neff

How do you define self-compassion?

Self-compassion is treating yourself with the same warmth, concern, and support you would show to a friend when you struggle, fail, or feel bad about yourself. It is compassion turned inward. It’s about: How are we with tough situations or feelings of inadequacy or difficult emotions or physical pain?

So it’s a humble agenda simply including ourselves in the circle of compassion, whereas most people tend to be much more compassionate to others than they are to themselves, especially their friends.

What’s behind that? Why do we fail to show ourselves self-compassion?

Evolutionarily, we're designed to respond to negative information and to any threat with the fight, flight, or freeze response. We’re designed to run away from lions, for instance. But what happens is when we're in pain, especially if we blame ourselves for it or feel that this pain is caused by something we did, we turn the fight-flight-or-freeze response inward. We fight ourselves, we criticize ourselves, we judge ourselves thinking somehow that's going to keep us safe. We feel it won't hurt so bad if we beat ourselves up before others do. We kind of flee into shame and end up feeling isolated from others. Now say your friend loses their job or makes a mistake—you don't feel so personally threatened, so you’re able to use another evolved system, which is the care response, toward them. We evolved to care for others—our children, and others in our group—and to be warm and supportive. This care is designed for others. That’s why it might feel a little weird when we turn it on ourselves.

The other reason is cultural. Different cultures vary in terms of the messages they give about self-compassion. But certainly, most cultures give messages that self-compassion may not be such a good thing. We confuse it with self-pity. Self-pity is poor me. Self-compassion is wow, it's tough for all human beings. But we either don’t know that or we think self-compassion is going to make us weak or it means we’re self-indulgent. But that is not true.

How can we start to show ourselves more self-compassion?

Here's the good news: It's not rocket science and it's not foreign because most of us, especially women, have developed a skill to care for others. We know how to be compassionate, how to be understanding, how to be there, and how to listen to other people.

There are three ways you can do this: self to self, self to other, and other to self.

#1 Self to self, which means to start giving yourself compassion. Show yourself kindness and warmth. This can be a little challenging, at least at first. If this is the case, try:

#2 Self to other, which means think of what you would say to a really good friend who's in the exact same situation you’re in. I bet if you imagined someone struggling, you could think of a lot of ways to support your friend. Think of this, then you could say something similar, in a similar tone, to yourself.

#3 Then, other to self. This means imagining what a compassionate friend or coach or teacher or grandparent would say to you right now and how they would act toward you.

We have all that knowledge inside of us, so it's really whatever works.

You’ve said there are three components of self-compassion. What are those?

#1 Mindfulness. This means we must turn toward our discomfort, even though we'd rather pretend it’s not there.

#2 Kindness. This is showing kindness, warmth, and support.

#3 Common humanity. If you don't bring in the common humanity aspect, there is some danger you might flip into self-pity, which is when you start isolating yourself and perhaps get stuck in this downward spiral. We need the perspective given by remembering that this is human and it's not just you going through this. That sense of connectedness gives us a sense of stability.

These are important because it’s almost like a recipe. Those are the three components and then they can take either a tender or a fierce form.

Talk to us about that: tender self-compassion and fierce self-compassion.

Tender self-compassion is like metaphorical parenting energy. It’s very nurturing and warm. It’s really aimed at accepting ourselves as we are and accepting the fact that life's not perfect.

Fierce self-compassion means providing for ourselves, taking action, speaking up, saying no, drawing boundaries, spending some of our resources to meet our own needs, and motivating change. We don’t want to accept all our behaviors or all our situations, say if we’re doing something harmful to ourselves or others, or if we’re in a toxic work environment. So fierce self-compassion means taking action to alleviate our suffering. As women, it might mean knowing our values and needs in the face of the patriarchy. We're socialized to meet needs all the time. Sometimes we need to say, ‘I must put myself first.

With self-compassion, we motivate change from a sense of care. I want to change because I want to be healthy, reach my goals, and be happy. It’s encouragement as opposed to criticism to motivate change. And it’s a lot more effective.

And inspiring.

Yes. It can be difficult for women. We may think: What about our kids? Well, self-compassion often is modeled to others. So maybe in front of your kid, you don’t beat yourself up and say, ‘I'm an idiot,’ because you're modeling that way to be. Or maybe you don’t always sacrifice and belittle your own needs. Instead, we can model to our kids that ‘Yes, my needs do count, and I can acknowledge my mistakes and learn from them and grow from them and move forward.’

A pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, Dr. Kristin Neff is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, and Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive. In conjunction with her colleague Dr. Chris Germer, she’s developed an empirically supported training program called Mindful Self-Compassion. They co-authored The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook as well as Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program: A Guide for Professionals. She is also co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.