Self-Compassion Isn't Settling: 5 Experts on the Real Science | Sarah Ann Macklin

0:00Today is a special episode, but it's self-compassion. In this mashup, I've brought some of the most brilliant minds together, and I've had the privilege of sitting with Dr. Kristen Neff, who is the godmother of self-compassion. What is self-compassion in the kind of scientific definition? So there's the kindness and also mindfulness, a sense of shared humanity. When we are personally threatened, we go on to fight, flight, or freeze. Alan de Bottin from the School of Life. The way we speak to ourselves is largely to do with having incorporated the voice of somebody else. Think of the number of books that don't get written because we are acutely sensitive to criticism.

0:39Best-selling author Oliver Berkman. It was about productivity, perfectionism, being okay with that. I had to sort of hold the rest of the world at bay. For me, it propelled the word let go. It's all wrapped up into the optimization, longevity, productivity, cultures. The UK's self-compassion expert, Professor Paul Gilbert. You talk a lot about the compassionate self versus the compassionate mind. You can train at it and you can get better at it. And Dr. William Bolsiewicz, who is a gastroenterologist but has such a deep connection with this topic. The health isn't just what you eat. My best healing was not just changing my diet.

1:15I had the healthiest diet in the world, but I was still hospitalized. And I've woven through moments that I think help tell the fullest story of self-compassion and what it really is and why we might even resist it. But what comes possible when we finally stop resisting it? I hope this episode gives you some empowerment and maybe just a different lens to look through. I've wanted to do this for a very long time. And actually, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so it feels like the perfect time to bring this to you. Now, I've had so many different, amazing, incredible people on the show, and it's always come back to a really interesting topic that has made me explore this myself so much more, especially within the last few years.

2:02Now this might resonate to some of you, it might feel really foreign to others of you, but it's self-compassion. Now I know what some of you might be thinking, self-compassion feels soft, feels like a nice idea, like what maybe could be on a motivational poster. But let me stop you there because sometimes trying to optimize our life is actually doing the opposite. It's not actually the health encouragement that we need. And what I've discovered and what's really blown my mind from research is that self-compassion is not soft at all. It's actually one of the most robust tools we have to support our mind and body and actually move us further into the goals that we want.

2:44Why is this even important? Well, we're living in a wellness industry that is predicted to be$8.5 trillion by next year, telling us all the things that we need to do to improve our health. But sitting silently underneath that is us. And that's the missing piece. And that is exactly what this episode is about. So whether you're brand new to this entire idea, which I hope you're not if you've been listening to me, I hope this episode gives you some empowerment and maybe just a different lens to look through. Let's go. For the last two years, I have kept a secret from you and it's this. It's my new book, Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard.

3:25And I think it is a problem that we are all feeling. And I was feeling it so much that I wrote a book on it. Now, if you've been a guest of this podcast for a while, you know that I am all about kindness, self-compassion. But when I dug into the research of this, my mind exploded. The connection between the mind and body is so integral, but we We completely miss out on all the conversations on health, on how we speak to ourselves. And that is such a driving factor on how our food responds to what we eat to, the choices that we make. And we are so overwhelmed right now in the$8.5 trillion industry that is the wellness industry, which is predicted to be by 2027.

4:05So if you need a helping hand, if you want a new way to live and be well, and buy my new book, Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard, out on May the 28th, but you can pre-order it now. I'll pop the link below in the show notes. And I would love if you could support me on this. And I honestly think it will support you too. Dr. Kirsten Neff is one of the world's leading researchers on self-compassion. She wrote a whole book on it and she's been studying it for years. I wanted to start here because before we get into the practice of what even self-compassion is, we really need to understand what self-compassion is and why it's so much harder than it sounds.

4:44What is self-compassion in the kind of scientific definition? Right. Okay. So if you just think from the Latin roots of the word compassion, passion means to suffer, come as with. So it's basically, how do we show up for suffering? And normally we think of that for other people's suffering, you know, when other people are going through a hard time or struggling in some way, can we be there for them are we supportive are we kind are we warm and so self-compassion is simply how do we show up for our own suffering again whether that's mental emotional or even physical are we warm are we supportive are we caring toward ourselves or which is actually often the case are we cold are we harsh are we judgmental um and so you know that's the easy way to think about what self-compassion is.

5:33There is a more scientific operational definition that I use because over 20 years ago, I wanted to do research on self-compassion and I knew I'd have to create a scale to measure it. And they knew just saying something like, how do you show up for yourself? It's not precise enough for science. And I realized there are actually three elements to self-compassion. So there's the kindness, which is kind of the most obvious. Also mindfulness. So mindfulness is the ability to be present with what is, kind of to make some space for it without just fighting it or ignoring it. And we can't show up for ourselves and our pain if we're either stiff up or lipping it.

6:14You know, it's not a problem. The Brits have a problem with that. Not a problem. I'll just soldier on. You know, you can't be self-compassionate if you ignore the fact that you're struggling and need help. on the other hand if you're lost in it if you're like you're drowning in it wallowing in you know your pain and you can't see anything else then you also can't help yourself so mindfulness gives you that ability to kind of be with yourself when you're struggling with some space and distance but also some connection and then third element really really important is a sense of humanity a sense of shared humanity this is what makes compassion different than pity so you know if i said to you um oh sarah i really pity you you're gonna be you're not gonna like that because that means i'm looking down on you but if i say hey i've been there i can really relate to what you're feeling you're gonna like that that's compassion because it's saying i'm a human being you're a human being this happens to human beings so it's the same thing with self-compassion what differentiates it from self-pity it's not woe is me poor me it's like hey, I'm a human being.

7:20I'm imperfect. I'm living an imperfect life. I'm doing the best I can. And so those three elements together is what we measure in the self-compassion scale, which is really the foundation of the research. I think hearing that, people go, yeah, that makes sense. But then I have this moment when I remember first coming across your research, and I thought, why am I finding it so hard to connect to self-compassion? What is it that is that I understand that being nicer to myself, I'm probably going to have a better outcome, but why am I struggling to connect? And I think we live in a society where this isn't the norm.

7:58And I wonder over all of these years, what have you found out on why people don't automatically go to this response on how they handle situations? Yeah. So there are actually two big reasons. So, we shouldn't beat ourselves up because we beat ourselves up. It's actually natural, believe it or not. So one is just how the nervous system works. So when we are personally threatened, and of course, if we make a mistake or fail or something difficult happens, we feel threatened. So we go into fight, flight, or freeze. It's the most instinctual response. It's linked to our sympathetic nervous system.

8:33And so what happens when we feel threatened, we try to fight the problem. But of course, if the problem is ourself, we try to fight ourself with criticism. It's kind of that like, you know, like this approach thinking somehow it'll keep us safe if we just fight the issue. Or we flee into a sense of shame and isolation, kind of like evolutionarily, if we pissed off the group, they might come after us. So it's that desire to kind of hang our head in shame is also natural. Or we freeze and we get stuck. It's kind of like we're deer in the headlights. Well, maybe if I just don't move, the problem will go away.

9:06Now, when your good friend fails or makes a mistake, you aren't so personally threatened. So instead of the fight, flight, or freeze system kicking in, another system which evolved to keep us safe, which is called the tend and befriend system, kicks in. This is also called the mammalian caregiving response. So evolutionarily, with our offspring or group members, it feels natural to care for them, to be there for them, to help and support them. But again, the system really evolved for other people. So we do have to do a little bit of a hack. We have to hack into the system that evolved to care for others and use it with ourselves.

9:44The good news is it can be done, but it's not our first instinct. So that's partly it. And then you add on to that culture. I mean, culture tells us we should be self-sacrificing. We should put other people first. We don't want to be like lazy or self-indulgent or selfish or narcissistic. We confuse all these really, there are a lot of negative self-focused states and we confuse them with self-compassion, which is the healthy way of being with ourself. So, you know, evolution and culture, it's not surprising that it's not the first instinct that we have. So that's really interesting. It's kind of a twofold because I find it, or I did find it much easier to be compassionate to others, but I would find that much harder to redirect into myself.

10:29So that's something that I really found. It's something that I've found that's helped me when I try to get to those stressful situations. As I say to myself, what would I say to a friend? Because that automatically puts me into a response of how would I treat somebody else in this position who I obviously seem to love and care very dearly and try to give that self, that love back to me. and I love that you mentioned about a bit of narcissism and selfishness because I think that's something that people can feel very scared of trying to connect to self-compassion that they're going to become very selfish that people are going to think they're very self-indulgent and it becomes kind of a nuanced area so for any of the self-critical people out there that are listening to this thinking well if I become self-compassionate I'm going to land that sofa and I'm going to do absolutely nothing what would you say to them because I'm sure you've had to say this a lot to convince people.

11:23Yeah. So, so there, there are about four or five really main myths. The thing about that, it being selfish. So this is why the common humanity element is so important for to self-compassion and why I don't call it self-love. I mean, self-love is important, but a narcissist may have self-love. So it's, it's really about framing yourself as an imperfect human being like all other imperfect human beings, not expecting yourself to be superhuman, you know, but also not seeing yourself as special and above average either, right? So we're all human beings, we're all imperfect, we're all doing the best we can.

12:00And so we're really just, it's a very humble agenda, we're just including ourselves in the circle of compassion. And when compassion flows inward, it actually means we have more resources to flow outward for other people. So it's not selfish at all, quite the opposite. For instance, it reduces burnout and, you know, it allows you to be a better friend or better partner or better parent. So that one's a myth. Another one is that it's self-indulgent, which basically means you're just going to give yourself pleasure. You know, give yourself a break. Be nice to yourself. Maybe, you know, eat whatever you want because if it tastes good, who cares if it's healthy for you?

12:39or, you know, just like take a break, don't go into work or don't get that degree because, you know, people think self-indulgence is just giving yourself pleasure. But of course, just like a parent, an indulgent parent is not a compassionate parent. A compassionate parent says to their kid, you got to do this. No, it's not fun and it's going to be hard, but it's important that you do this to learn and grow and be healthy. And it's because I care about you that I'm going to push you a little bit harder than maybe even you're comfortable with. So that's the exact same thing with ourselves. We aren't self-indulgent because that causes us harm.

13:14We do what's healthy for us, which is reflected in how we take care of our bodies, of how we spend our time. You know, sometimes it means doing something a little uncomfortable because it's good for us. And so that's related to, but not exactly the same as motivation. So motivation is actually, our research shows that's the number one block to self-compassion. And that's because self-criticism kind of works as a motivator. Let's face it, a lot of people have gotten through a graduate school or done something really hard just by being so hard on themselves that it's so uncomfortable not to reach their goal because they're going to slam themselves so much that they do it.

13:56So it's kind of like, imagine a really harsh teacher. It's really punitive to their kids. Yeah, those kids, because they're scared of the teacher, they probably will study a little bit more and it may help somewhat for them to work and achieve. But there's going to be a lot of negative consequences to being so harsh. For instance, those kids may lose faith in themselves. It may undermine their confidence. And our confidence is a real important predictor of success. It may create performance anxiety. So if you're so worried that someone's going to yell at you, whether it's your teacher or coach or yourself, it's going to create all this extra anxiety that's actually going to just detract from your ability to do your best.

14:34The most important reason why it's actually not so effective in the long run is it undermines our ability to learn from our failures. I mean, it's a truism that's true. Failure is our best teacher. That's how we learn. We fail. We say, oh, it didn't work so well. What can I do better next time? And that's how we learn and grow. What happens if you just shame yourself when you fail, you can't think about, hmm, how much, you know, why did I learn from this? Because you're just so full of shame and you want to hang your head and go off into a corner. So the research is very, very clear on this. So self-compassion is a more effective motivator than criticism.

15:12It enables, it reduces our performance anxiety. It gives us more self-confidence and it allows us to learn from our mistakes, which actually in the long run increases our ability to perform at our best. Oh, this man, Alan de Bossen brings something very different to this conversation. He brings a philosophical lens because one of the questions I kept coming back to is why are we so much kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves. And I think you're going to like his answer. How important do you think self-compassion is for our mental health? Look, I think what we mean by self-compassion is an ability to interpret one's own flaws, mistakes, weaker sides, with the kind of kindness that we would give to a friend, even, frankly, a stranger.

16:06And, you know, the always interesting thing is why we cannot be as kind to ourselves as we can to any random stranger. So a random stranger, if they said to us, you know, I've made a mistake at work, I've done something wrong in life, we'd go, oh, poor you. We'd immediately go, oh, poor you. That would be very natural. To us, we'd go, you blithering idiot, what are you doing? You know, we speak to ourselves with the harshest possible voice, which is often an internalized voice. You know, the way we speak to ourselves is largely to do with having incorporated the voice of somebody else who spoke to us normally when we were small.

16:41And some of us have had the misfortune to have inner voices that are not very helpful. What are you doing, you silly idiot? Why did you forget to tie your shoelaces? Don't touch the kitchen cabinet. Get out of my way. I'm busy. You silly little nonsense, etc. Unfortunately, there are childhoods in which those messages are being drawn in. And then that becomes, you see, people who have bad childhoods suffer twice. They suffer in the childhood, and then they suffer because the negativity has been incorporated in their own mind, and they then start to be the negative caregiver to themselves. And they take that out into relationships and the workplace, et cetera, so that they've got what Freud called the super-ego, the voice inside themselves that is the voice of an unkind person of authority.

17:30Sometimes people have good internal voices, but many of us have quite bad ones. So it's really interesting to ask oneself, how do I speak to myself when I mess up? Do I speak kindly to myself, or do I hate myself? And whose is that voice? It's not yours. It's a voice you've heard, and you've taken it inside yourself. And then you need to say to yourself, do I agree with that voice? And you might need to say it, do a little bit of a goodbye ceremony, and go, thank you, voice. I know I've taken you inside me. I don't want this voice. Life's too short. Get out. It's true. I sometimes find it really helpful to name that voice so I don't feel like it's part of me.

18:08Yeah, that's right. And it won't be. It'll be the voice of a great aunt, a parent. Usually it's a mother or father, but we don't need to point to that, make that point too hard. How important is that to recognize, though? Because a lot of people will say, well, that voice drives me, it motivates me, it connects me to being a better person in all ways and the way I work and the way I am. Yeah. Look, there's a lot of equivocation around the value of a whip. A whip could be a good thing. Gets people going. Whip yourself a little bit harder and off you go. And then there's the moment where the whip ceases to be very helpful at all.

18:42It's got to be a balance, isn't it? There's got to be motivation, and part of motivation has got to be moments of self-hatred, self-criticism, et cetera. But there are those of us who are suffering from an excess. it's become really unhelpful. Think of the number of books that don't get written because people are so worried they're going to be bad. Think of the number of businesses that don't get started because people think, oh, that's a silly idea. Think of a number of initiatives that are quashed at birth because somebody is ahead of their own more hopeful sides with that critical voice. So for every person who didn't bother to get up off bed because they were just too easy on themselves.

19:19There's a million fantastic things that have not happened because people were too critical of their projects and their dreams. How do you advise people to deal with criticism? First of all, don't be too stoic too quickly. It really hurts. Sometimes people go, I can't believe it. I heard somebody saying something bad about me last month, and it's just moving around my brain even now. And I'm just, I'm such an idiot. You want to go, So, don't worry, we're built like this. This is very normal. We are acutely sensitive to criticism. There are probably biological reasons for that. The view of the tribe mattered immensely.

19:57When we lived in a village of 15 people, if one of those people had a very bad opinion about you, you should probably know about it and worry about it. The irony, as in so many impulses that we have, physiologically almost, they outgrow their uses. So it was also tremendously useful to eat any sugary thing that came your way, because that way you would preserve your calories. Nowadays, disaster, right? You must not do that thing that you're impulsive. Same thing around gossip and criticism. It doesn't matter. If somebody 800 ,000 miles away, you know, posted something negative on a blog about you, forget it.

20:29Forget it. It doesn't matter. It's not anything that you need to worry about. But we bring to the conditions of the modern city and the modern internet world some of that sensitivity that was essentially honed in the savannah, and it doesn't belong, and it causes problems that are unnecessary. Most wellness products are built for someone with four hours sleep to spare and a cold plunge in their garden. Dion is built for the rest of us. It's a day-to-night system formulated by medical doctors designed around your body's natural rhythms. During the day, Grounded, a go-to convenient sachet supports calm and focus without making you drowsy.

21:05In a real life UK study, 90 % of people felt a benefit within 15 minutes. And I take mine after interviews to really help calm my nervous system. At night, Rested, a nightly capsule with botanicals, vitamins and magnesium helps you actually sleep. In their study, volunteers gained up to one hour of additional sleep on average within the first week. Over nine in 10 reported more restful sleep. Grounded is launching very soon and you can shop both at diome.co. That's D-I-O-M-E.co. Use code Sarah20 for 20 % off, whether you're buying once or subscribing. Oliver Berkman is someone I've spoken to on the show probably more than anyone.

21:45And he has a really interesting relationship with self-compassion. And it always comes up again and again. And what I love about this part in particular is that he's actually working through the answer in real time. Self-compassion isn't sometimes just a flip that you switch on. It's actually something that you connect to in the present moment. And I absolutely love his way of approaching self-compassion. how has your relationship with self-compassion changed from the last time I spoke to you till now because it's something that you fundamentally know that I'm very interested in but you also said to me really interestingly after we came off that original talk that we had which I didn't think was going to go into self-compassion like that wasn't it was about productivity it was about time management it was about looking at perfectionism and being an imperfectionist and being okay with that but it's really interesting when we left you said to me I'm really diving into I'm really to understand this a lot more.

22:39It's really piquing my interest, which is really interesting to me, because I just didn't think it was going to come up. Right. And I thought, if only I knew that, I would have had the whole conversation there. So I could not bring it up today, because, I mean, it's kind of instrumental now to all the work that I do. And obviously, I said to you earlier, the cringe part was really interesting to me when you said that. How cringe-aversed is it to you now? Like, when you think about the term self-compassion, or the things that you do in your life, like, what's your journey been with it in the last year?

23:11Well, I might end up recapping a bit from the last conversation, because I think it is a deepening of that same idea. But the cringe originally was this notion that like, there's something sort of self-indulgent or self-absorbed about like, or that you're a sort of, as if the invitation in the idea of self-compassion is to think of myself as like, very specially in need of being treated well, which just goes against everything that I've sort of been raised to think and to feel. And a big breakthrough, and this is a recap from last time, but a big breakthrough for me was encountering ways of expressing this idea that made it out as being that all I was being asked to do was not be more unkind mind to myself than I would ever dream of being to a friend, right?

24:09So, I think that realization of how easy it is to go through the day shouting at yourself, not just in ways that are mean, but in ways that you yourself would never do to the people you live and work with, because of course you wouldn't, right? That was a useful moment for me. Do you remember when that moment happened? Because I remember when that moment happened. Right. And there was a moment when something just flipped, but all of a sudden I was like, wow, that is what I've been doing. But I think I had to be in the right moment of my life to see it. Yeah. Because I think if someone would have said that 10 years ago, I'd be like, that's really nice.

24:50Totally unrelatable. Right, right. Yeah, I don't remember the specific moment. I think that I very often don't remember moments. It's like I look back and it turns out that I'm in a different place than I was a few weeks ago. And writing morning pages is a crucial part of this for me. So that's my one sort of... That's just anything that comes to your mind. Three sides of an A6 narrow ruled notebook. That's not part of the rules, by the way. That's just what I do, right? Yeah. Just wherever my head is at almost every morning really helps these sort of ideas and feelings take shape. I guess where I'm at with it now, and it's interesting because I feel like I've been on quite a psychological journey, but have maybe not recently been thinking of it in terms of self-compassion.

25:40But it is about self-compassion, because it is understanding, and I think we all go through this in one way or another, coming to understand the ways in which the difficulties that you encounter in life, or the difficulties you seem to cause yourself in life, are because of ways of being that made sense, that were reasonable ways of dealing with aspects of your childhood situation or experiences that you had. And again, not only in the context of people who experienced severe trauma or neglect, which I certainly did not, but that there's some aspect of however all of us are raised that's going to give us certain kind of schemas, you know, certain kinds of rules of thumb that we follow.

26:34And I think one of the ones that I developed for sure was this sense that I had to hold the rest of the world at bay, often by doing all my work and being really productive and staying on top of everything, so that I could get breathing space to be myself. So there was a sort of a zero-sum arrangement between all the stuff I had to do, and actually living. So I'm constantly like, can I just deal with it all so that I can finally... As opposed to somebody more psychologically integrated who might say, no, I can be myself through the things that I do and choose to do. So that's just one pattern, and people have a million different patterns and a million different random screw-ups and neuroses, right?

27:19But the self-compassion part, I think, for anyway, was seeing like, oh, yeah, you don't just do this because you're an idiot, or because you haven't figured out the truth, or because you haven't come across the right therapy modality or productivity technique. You do it because you can see the ways that it made sense as a way of managing anxiety and living in the specific context that you're living. And that's really powerful, because then it's like, okay, it's not a mystery, but somehow it also then gives me the agency to be like, I don't also maybe don't have to do that all the time for the rest of my life.