Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #233 BITESIZE | How to Silence Your Inner Critic for a Happier, Healthier Life | Dr Kristin Neff

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 163 of the podcast with one of the world's leading experts in self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff. In this clip, she explains why self-compassion is important for our physical and mental well-being and gives some great advice to help us silence our inner critic. Something I've observed over the years, particularly as I've got more and more experienced, is when you look at the patients who really transform and change their lives, not just in the short term, but also in the medium term and long term, I'm seeing

Starting point is 00:02:07 that it actually is because of self-compassion. It's those ones who start to quieten down and then ultimately eliminate that inner voice, that nasty inner voice in their heads that actually starts to change things. So I feel that self-compassion is really important for health outcomes as well as our day-to-day well-being. Well, self-compassion is really the antidote to our more habitual way of being, which is harshly self-critical, right? Or really cold to ourselves. And talk about health, right? There's just a new meta-analysis that came out showing that self-compassion is linked to physical as well as emotional health. Because of course, I'm sure as you know, our state of mind impacts our body, right? And how healthy and how well

Starting point is 00:02:55 it's functioning. So when you're harshly self-critical or cold to yourself, and by the way, believe it or not, we don't want to judge ourselves for judging ourselves. We don't want to beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up. Because really what's happening when we're really hard on ourselves is we're just trying to stay safe, right? We feel threatened in some way when we feel we're inadequate or we've made a mistake. We feel like, oh gosh, I better need to change this because it's going to cause problems in my life. And so we go into the threat defense mode. You know, we attack ourselves thinking that somehow if we attack ourselves, that's going to, we're going to whip ourselves into shape and we'll be better and therefore we'll be safe. So it kind of comes underlying motive of self-criticism is a good one.

Starting point is 00:03:40 The problem is, is it's really counterproductive, right? So first of all, when we're really hard on ourselves or harsh with ourselves, it activates the sympathetic nervous system response, which is associated with things like high cortisol levels, inflammation, high heart rate, eventually high blood pressure and heart attacks, things like that. So when we're constantly in, you might call it the freak out mode, the threat defense, where we feel really threatened, you know, our body's on very high alert to deal with the danger. But if the danger is really like, does the stress make me look fat? You know, I'm sorry, but you know, things like that, we just, the things we criticize ourself for constantly means we feel like a lion is chasing us. And that constant activation actually is bad for our physical health. How would you describe self-compassion? The agreed upon scientific definition is concerned with the alleviation of suffering and the motivation to do something about it, right?

Starting point is 00:04:43 And so at the simplest level, you might think that self-compassion is just compassion turned inward. We're concerned with our own suffering. We care about ourselves and we try to help ourselves so that we are healthier and don't suffer so much. In my model, there are actually three main ingredients of self-compassion. The first one is something that people have heard

Starting point is 00:05:03 a lot about these days, and that is mindfulness. Mindfulness and self-compassion, they're actually very closely related. So mindfulness is the ability to turn toward what is, to be aware of what is, to not run from it or dive into it too much, especially when things are painful. And if you think about it, most of us, when things are painful, or especially if that pain is caused by feelings of inadequacy or making a mistake, either we avoid it, we don't want to think about it, you know, we just go into problem-solving mode, or we blame other people, or we do the opposite, and we kind of get consumed by it. We get so lost in our pain and our suffering that there's no perspective. And so in order to

Starting point is 00:05:46 give compassion to ourselves, it takes a little bit of perspective taking. We kind of have to step outside of ourselves and say, hey, you're really having a hard time. Is there anything I can do to help? And that perspective is actually mindfulness. We're aware of what's happening and we also have some perspective about what's happening. So you might say that's the first step. And then of course, when we're aware of what's happening, we also have to respond with kindness. I mean, we may be aware of our pain and just say, you know, suck it up, or it's all your fault. That's actually not compassionate. Compassionate means there's some sort of sense of warmth, some sense of care, some sense of understanding. It's a kind response as opposed to a harsh response. And then finally, what's really important, what differentiates self-compassion

Starting point is 00:06:33 from self-pity. And a lot of people get these two confused and they're very, very different. Self-pity is woe is me. Compassion and pity are different. If I had compassion for you, you'd probably like it. I'd say, maybe you're telling me about a problem you had. And I said, oh yeah, I've been there. You know, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help? Whereas if I pitied you, you wouldn't like it because I'd be looking down on you. I'm like, well, you really got a bad, poor thing, you know? So the difference between pity and compassion is the sense of interconnectedness, right? If you look at the word compassion in the Latin, come means with, passion means to suffer. There's a sense of suffering with, suffering together. And so with self-compassion, instead of poor me, it's just recognizing that, you know, hey,

Starting point is 00:07:22 life is difficult for everyone. Everyone's imperfect. There's nothing to do with me personally, right? You know, we all make mistakes. We're all imperfect. We're all flawed. We all go through difficult times. And the reason that's so important is because more often our irrational reaction is something has gone wrong. This isn't supposed to be happening. You know, and again, it's not a logical reaction, but emotionally we feel like what's supposed to be happening is perfection. And maybe everyone else in the world is living a problem-free life. And it's just me who's made this big mistake, or it's just me who's struggling with this personal issue. And it's kind of just a fallacy

Starting point is 00:08:01 of the mind. And so with self-compassion, we remember, oh, wait a second. This is the human condition. You know, being human isn't about being perfect. Being human is about being flawed and struggling and doing the best we can, you know, falling down and getting ourselves up again. And so these elements together, the sense of mindfulness of our difficulty and pain, a kind reaction to it, and then feeling connected in that experience. All these three things have to be there, according to my model, in order to be self-compassionate.

Starting point is 00:08:32 As I become more compassionate to myself, I feel happier. I feel calmer. I feel I'm less likely to engage in behaviors I'm trying not to engage in because I just don't feel the need to plug that gap anymore. Yeah, no, absolutely. The research shows not only are you happier and you're more satisfied with your life, you're also able to give more to others in relationships. Some people think that self-compassion is selfish, but in fact, people who have self-compassionate romantic partners, they say that, you know, their partners are, they're kinder, they're more intimate, they're more loving, they're less controlling, they get less angry, you know, people are more satisfied with partners who are self-compassionate.

Starting point is 00:09:20 And that's because when you aren't beating yourself up and you're kind of filling your own reserves with these feelings of kindness and support and connectedness, you actually have more available to give others. Can you fake it? And what I mean by that is, can you start saying nice things to yourself that maybe part of you doesn't really believe and you feel a bit uncomfortable, but yeah, can you fake it until you actually make it? Yeah. So first it does feel weird at first. I'm going to be straight up. It feels weird at first, especially if your habitual way of relating to

Starting point is 00:09:55 yourself is, um, uh, you know, just really harsh. Um, often, you know, I tell people that to think about what you would say to a good friend in a similar situation. But what we also encourage people to do is to try to use language that feels comfortable. Because if you're super syrupy sweet and you don't believe it, you're going to be creating conflict in your mind. So you might just say, you know, may start to be kinder to myself. You know, what I wish for myself is that I can begin to be a little more supportive toward myself. And that's kind of a lower bar to jump over. You can also maybe start trying, maybe it feels a little more comfortable.

Starting point is 00:10:35 You don't want to just shut down your self-critic. You can say something like, thank you, self-critic. I know you're trying to help. And so instead of just saying, you know, get out of here because actually you can stick around, but maybe, maybe I, you know, and I want to hear what you have to say. Maybe you've got some useful information, but would you mind saying it in slightly more constructive terms? Right. So there's a lot of ways you can work with yourself that feel comfortable for you. It's really all about changing your intention. You know, in a way, it doesn't even so much, this is the amazing thing, it doesn't even matter so much what you say to yourself or what you

Starting point is 00:11:13 actually do, as that you're intending to help yourself. When we kind of embrace ourselves like a friend with kindness, with support, with care, even though we're suffering, compassion itself is a positive emotion and activates the reward centers of the brain, right? We all want kindness. We want to feel connected. We want to feel that peace of mindfulness. These are positive states of mind. So what we're doing is we're holding a negative experience with this positive state of mind. But not in a way, it's not like sugarcoating. You don't have to pretend things are other than they are. In fact, if you do that, it's going to backfire.

Starting point is 00:11:54 It's not going to work. You embrace the fact that this sucks. This hurts. I feel horrible. You know, I'm stressed, whatever it is. You don't deny it, but you feel concerned about it. This is hard. How can I help myself deal with this? And so the warmth and the kindness and the feeling of connection, you know, everyone struggles. That actually gives us the strength

Starting point is 00:12:17 and sense of support as we're coping with the negative emotions simultaneously. So it's like generating good feelings alongside of recognizing the bad feelings. And this is really the power of it because it allows us to more productively deal with the problems we have. Being supportive to yourself is going to make you stronger rather than shaming or slamming yourself. It's kind of an idea that once you break it down, it's like, oh yeah, I never thought of it that way. But our culture has a lot of myths about things like compassion. I think it's like just soft and sweet and sugarcoating. And that is why the hard science helps because it shows people that, hey, this stuff really works. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week

Starting point is 00:13:07 with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #233 BITESIZE | How to Silence Your Inner Critic for a Happier, Healthier Life | Dr Kristin Neff

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