The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Dump Your Inner Drill Sergeant

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

We often start a new year hoping to make big changes in how we look, feel or act. This can involve a lot of self-criticism and adopting things like tough diets and brutal exercise regimes. But being hard on ourselves doesn't deliver results.Dr Laurie Santos examines why being a nasty drill sergeant to ourselves is less effective than being a kind coach; and hears from researcher and author Kristin Neff about why developing self-compassion is vital to helping us achieve our new year goals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. will be a lot better than the year we just had. You may even be considering changes you can make in your own life. And of course, you're not alone. Lots of people will be adopting New Year's resolutions this January to alter the way they look, think, and behave. Now, don't get me wrong. I think making changes in our lives, especially at fresh start moments like the new year, is a great idea.

The problem is, if we're not careful, our lying minds may wind up leading us off in the wrong direction, telling us to do things that will make us less happy than we think, or picking strategies that will make us lose morale and give up before we even get started. The big temptation at this time of year

is to be really hard on yourself, to ruthlessly identify all the faults of your past, to set the bar super high for what you want to achieve, and to set out on some surprisingly punishing regimes in order to reach your goals. I know this temptation well. I fall for it all the time. But the science just doesn't back it up.

Strict diets, brutal exercise plans, and going cold turkey on the personal habits you want to shed, these strategies just don't work. But there is good news. Because the psychological research points to a more effective path. Over the next four episodes of this special season, I'll explain why the secret to fulfilling all your New Year's goals is simply to be nicer to ourselves. If you're ready to learn more and kick those bad habits through kindness, then join me, Dr. Laurie Santos, as the Happiness Lab presents our mini-season on smarter strategies for achieving your New Year's goals.

If I constantly told you that you were lazy, stupid, and unfit, that you weren't really good at your job, and that your house was a terrible mess, you'd probably switch off this podcast. But when the new year comes around, many of us create even worse mental lists, cataloging how much we suck. It's as though our inner monologues get taken over by some cruel drill sergeant who yells at us about our faults and past mistakes. We call ourselves names and start hurling these awful insults.

You're dumb, you're greedy, you're weak. We all know this boot camp brutality doesn't feel good, but we think that it's what we need to do in order to break our bad habits and get motivated. But we're wrong. All this self-flagellation is just self-defeating. That's the big message that comes from the lovely work of today's guest, author and psychologist, Kristen Neff. Okay, is that good? Yep, I can hear you fine. And the sound quality sounds great.

Wait, that's not working. Let's see. Kristen, who's also an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has identified a more effective way for people to meet their goals, and one that makes us happier in the process. But like a lot of us, she still had to overcome the harsh drill sergeant inside her head. My life was a mess. I had just gotten through a divorce, and it was a very messy divorce, and I was feeling a lot of shame. Because of the way that the marriage ended. I was really beating myself up, hoping that I would make me a better person, that I would never make the same types of mistakes again. Talk about what that was doing to you. You mentioned this side, sort of the shame that

you were going through, kind of what it can do from a personal sense. Right. So self-criticism and shame, and they're slightly different, but they're very related. So self-criticism is when we actively harangue ourselves or say cruel things or unkind to ourselves. And shame is kind of the end result of that self-criticism. Shame is a very hollowed out feeling where we identify as being a bad person. And so criticism can be aimed at our behavior or ourselves. Criticism of our behavior isn't actually necessarily a bad thing. So guilt, they find in psychological research, isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you feel guilty about something you've done, if you've harmed someone, being critical of what you did is actually healthy, right? We don't want to pretend that everything we do is okay, because often it's not and it needs to change. But criticism aimed at ourselves. So belief that

just because I made a mistake, you know, I am a mistake. I am bad. That's really not healthy at all. Because first of all, it shuts down our awareness. When we feel shame, we kind of feel hollow. Sometimes we even dissociate from our bodies, we cut ourselves off from other people, makes it a lot harder to apologize to others, because we feel so full of people. It makes it a lot harder to apologize to others because we feel so full of shame. It makes it much more difficult to see the truth about what we've done because, you know, we're just blinded by our shame. We can't even take it in. And it also takes away our energy and motivation to try to do better next time. It's like pulling the rug out from underneath you when you feel shame. It's not a motivating mindset. It's actually a debilitating

mindset. What's so shocking about that, though, is that that kind of self-criticism isn't uncommon, right? Especially at this time of the year, in the new year. I feel like there's so many people who think that motivating themselves to gain positive habits in the new year requires being this awful self-critical drill sergeant. It almost like institutes shame rather than avoids it. Right, right. And I think there are some reasons for this. I actually think some of it is physiological. So when we feel threatened, and every time we make a mistake or we fail at something, we actually feel threatened. And so when we feel threatened, we go into fight, flight, or freeze response. When the problem is ourselves, and then we've done some mistake we've

made, we fight ourselves, we attack ourselves. We don't think logically about what went wrong, what happened. We just think, danger, I'm the danger, I'm a problem. And we attack ourselves and somehow we think that's going to keep ourselves safe. We're going to beat ourselves up so that we won't make mistakes anymore. We'll be able to control ourselves and our behavior through this harshness. And actually the flee response that goes along with shame, that feeling of wanting to isolate yourself from all of the people, that's actually what happens with shame. It's a safety behavior. When we hang our heads in shame, we're actually feeling safe because we're protecting ourselves from the perceived judgments of the group. And the freeze response is also related to this. When we

get stuck and we just ruminate and all we can think about is I'm so bad, I'm so group. And the freeze response is also related to this. When we get stuck and we just ruminate and all we can think about is I'm so bad, I'm so bad. And we kind of feel stuck and we can't do anything about it. That's the freeze response. It's part of us thinking that, well, maybe if I just play dead, the danger will go away. And so it's actually all a natural response to threat. And by the way, I don't feel as threatened when my best friend makes a mistake, which is why I'm actually more able to be kind and caring and supportive to my best friend than I am to myself. And so it's a natural behavior. It makes sense. The problem is it's actually totally counterproductive. It doesn't make you safe at all. It actually makes

you less safe because it inhibits your ability to make productive change. So on the Happiness Lab, we talk a lot about the fact that, you know, our mind lies to us. You know, we have these strong intuitions about how we can build better habits and those intuitions tend to be wrong. And self-criticism seems to be a really strong one. You know, people don't want to hate themselves or beat themselves up. They just think that that's the only way to motivate themselves. And so talk about the research showing why this is so wrong. Right. Just before I get into the research, just as a really useful thought experiment you can do is think about if your child came to you who had made a mistake. Maybe they got a really poor grade on the test. And imagine the effect on your child if you shamed them. If you said, I hate you, I don't love you anymore,

you're horrible, you better do better next time. Or else, you know, what we say to our children is, hey, I love you regardless. It's okay, everyone fails. But how can I help you? How can I help you to get better grades next time? Or how can I help you to learn from this? And we do that because we love our children. And so we naturally use more constructive approaches, but it also has to be acknowledged, not always, right? So some parents are actually not only self-critical, but they're also very critical of their children. They tell them, you know, just buck up, stop complaining. Maybe our parents weren't always supportive. Maybe they didn't always meet our needs, right? And maybe we've got some wounds because of that. But as adults, we have the ability to be good parents to ourselves. We can

meet our own needs. We can support ourselves. We can be warm and accepting and encouraging to ourselves, even if our parents didn't happen to model that for us. And the research absolutely supports this, right? And the research is done a few different ways. One is by just seeing people who naturally have higher levels of self-compassion, you know, as measured through a self-compassion scale. Or if you help people after a failure, just relate to themselves more compassionately about that failure. What we know is, first of all, people are much more motivated to try again. They try harder. They persist longer. They're more likely to pick themselves up after a failure again and try again.

They have more grit. They have more determination. So just to give you an example, there was a great study that came out of UC Berkeley. The study was they gave all the Berkeley students an incredibly hard vocabulary test from the SAT that everyone failed. Right. And so they had three groups after the failure. One group, they told the students to be self-compassionate about it. You know, try not to beat yourself up. It happens to everyone. You know, it's OK. Another group, they tried boosting their self-esteem. Don't worry about it. You got into Berkeley. You must be smart.

And the third group, they told nothing, which meant that the students were probably beating themselves up because that's what most of us do. And what they found is the group that were told to be self-compassionate about the failure, when given the chance, kind of unobserved to see how long would they study for the next exam so they could actually improve their grade on the test, the people who were told to be self-compassionate studied longer and tried harder to succeed on the next exam than the people who are told to be self-compassionate studied longer and tried harder to succeed on the next exam than the people who were told nothing or who their self-esteem was boosted. That's just the type of research we do to show that actually this caring, supportive stance toward ourselves actually gives us the emotional resources we need as an alternative to self-esteem.

And this is really critical because I think sometimes it's really easy if you don't know the literature to confuse self-compassion and self-esteem. So talk about how these two concepts are different and why self-esteem might not measure up to this approach of self-compassion. Yeah. So self-esteem is basically a positive judgment of self-worth. I'm a good person. I'm a success. I'm beautiful. Whatever, you know, whatever your positive judgment is, that you think positively of yourself. And we know for mental health, it's important to have high self-esteem as opposed to hating yourself. Because if you hate yourself, you're going to be depressed and anxious. You might even think about suicide if it's really bad. Because of that, a lot of people have tried to boost the self-esteem of children,

for instance, in school, thinking it's going to give them better mental health. You know, and it's not a problem to have high self-esteem. The problem is how do you get it? So there's a lot of unhealthy ways to get high self-esteem, right? So for instance, you have to feel special and above average. You got to feel better than other people, which leads to constant social comparison. It leads to things like bullying others. We know that's why little kids start to bully others because they're trying to boost their self-esteem. They're trying to feel good about themselves in comparison to others. But the biggest problem with self-esteem is that it's contingent. It's contingent on success. So we have self-esteem when other people like us or when we feel that we're attractive or when we succeed, whether it's at school or business,

you know, athletics, whatever is important to you, then we have high self-esteem. But what happens when we fail? When we fail, the self-esteem deserts us. It's contingent on success as opposed to failure. And that's a problem because as human beings, we're constantly going to fail, right? And so self-compassion is the perfect alternative because self-compassion isn't dependent on success or failure. Self-compassion is simply a process of being kind, supportive, and warm to yourself. And also remembering that failure is part of the shared human condition. It's actually not self-focused at all. It's not like self-pity, like woe is me. Self-compassion is just saying, hey, part of being human is being imperfect. We're all in the same boat. Can I be kind and warm

and supportive to myself in the midst of my feelings of failure, in the midst of my unhappiness or my struggle? So self-compassion kicks in precisely when self-esteem deserves us. And that is when we fail or make a mistake. And, you know, it's also, it's not like positive thinking. You aren't telling yourself lies. You aren't saying, you know, I'm great. It's actually just the opposite. What it is, is opening to the truth of your imperfection and saying, yes, I'm imperfect. Yes, I'm a human being who is flawed. I can accept that. We talked about the sort of the bad divorce part of the story and things. Talk about how you snapped out of that form of self-criticism, what you learned. Right. Well, so I learned about it when practicing mindfulness meditation to help me deal with my

stress. But much to my surprise, a woman leading the class talked a lot about self-compassion, about the difference it can make when you're kind and warm and supportive to yourself, especially when you're going through a hard time, which I was. And what I found was when I gave myself warmth and support for what had happened, I was more able to kind of take responsibility for how things went wrong. I was more able to apologize to my ex-husband. But I was really more able to commit to doing things a better way. And what I found over and over again, whenever I make mistakes, that the more I'm able to respond to my mistakes with compassion, actually, the more able I am to make changes. It's kind of the interplay of acceptance and change. Carl Rogers actually said, the curious paradox is that when I accept interplay of acceptance and change. Carl Rogers actually said the curious

paradox is that when I accept myself, then I can change. And that's what self-compassion does. It gives us the warmth to accept the fact that we're imperfect, but it also gives us the feeling of care to want to do better next time. I hope this conversation has helped you notice how harsh and self-critical your mental drill sergeant can be. But the good news is that we don't need a nasty inner voice to make positive changes in our lives. This is a message that can be hard to accept at first. But after the break, Kristen will share all the research that backs this up. She'll explain what self-compassion actually consists of and how you can bring it to bear in your everyday life to more effectively reach your goals. The Happiness Lab will return in a moment.

Most of us dream of a world in which our friends, colleagues, and even total strangers consistently treat us with kindness, understanding, and compassion. It is kind of puzzling, then, that so many of us have such a hard time treating ourselves with the same kind of respect. True self-compassion seems amazingly rare. Before Kristin Neff began her research back in 2006, it was a really poorly understood virtue.

So what even is self-compassion? Most scientists define compassion as the desire to alleviate suffering. And so self-compassion is the desire to alleviate our own suffering. And there are three parts to it. So part is being kind, warm, and supportive. And that's more the emotional tenor of self-compassion, treating ourselves like we'd treat a good friend. There's also two other elements, though, that are really important. One is actually mindfulness. And not everyone defines self-compassion or compassion for others as necessarily having to include mindfulness, but I think it has to. Because without being mindful of suffering, without being able to

turn toward and be with pain to actually face our mistakes or actually recognize how hard it is for us in the moment, we actually can't be self-compassionate, right? And so if we just try to avoid our pain and stiff up our lips, shove it down, I'm not going to acknowledge it, we can't be self-compassionate. Alternatively, if we're lost in our drama, like, oh, this is so terrible. It's the worst thing that ever happened. I'm such a terrible person. Like if we're fused with our pain, we have no space that mindfulness gives us. We have no perspective. If we have no perspective, then we can't step outside of ourselves to say, wow, I'm having a really hard time. I need some warmth and support right now. And you mean mindfulness in a particular way, right? You mean accepting your suffering without

trying to change it non-judgmentally, right? Mindfulness, especially in the context of self-compassion, really just means that we are present and aware of whatever painful feelings we're having or difficult thoughts or emotions. And it also means that we accept that they're there. So mindfulness is really kind of the foundation of self-compassion. And then there's that warm, supportive response. But really important, because we don't want self-compassion to be self-pity, self-focused self-pity is not helpful to anyone. It needs recognition of common humanity, a recognition of interconnection. What differentiates compassion from pity, if someone pities you, it doesn't feel good because they're looking down on you. There's a sense of separateness.

But we like when people give us compassion when they say, hey, I've been there. You know, so compassion in the Latin actually means to suffer with. There's an inherent connectedness and compassion. There but for fortune go I. So with self-compassion, it's not really self-focused at all. Even though the word self is there. It's just saying, hey, it's not really self-focused at all, even though the word self is there. It's just saying, hey, life's difficult for everyone.

All human beings make mistakes. I'm not alone. And that ability not to feel alone is one of the most powerful aspects of self-compassion. I mean, loneliness is a huge problem in our society. And when you remember that actually we're never alone, not like everyone suffers the same amount that's certainly not true i mean people with privilege suffer less than people who are oppressed so there are differences that need to be honored but it's also true that no one escapes

suffering you know we all struggle and i know you've talked about your personal experience with self-compassion and this part of it in particular this idea of a a recognition of common humanity being really important. I know you talked about that with your son and going through a really stressful diagnosis with him too, right? Yeah. Yeah. So my son's autistic and the ability to have self-compassion just absolutely saved me. I'd already had about seven years of solid self-compassion practice at that point. And when he got the diagnosis, it's easy to feel self-pity. Why me? Why can't I have like a normal child like everyone else? But what self-compassion helped me to do? First, the mindfulness helped me just to accept all my feelings. Because, you know, when your son's diagnosed with special needs, you have

feelings you think you aren't supposed to have, like disappointment. How can I be disappointed? I love him more than anything else in the world. I'm feeling disappointed. What do I do with that? But with mindfulness, I just allowed myself to have all the feelings of fear, anxiety, disappointment. I just really opened to it all. And then I was, again, kind and supportive to myself. But what really helped me was instead of feeling isolated, I remember, you know, okay, most kids

aren't autistic. Well, a lot of them are, so I'm not alone in that. But also, even though it's not autism, all parents struggle with their children. Instead of thinking like this isn't supposed to be happening, I remembered, well, wait a second, who said so? You know, who said parenting was supposed to be perfect? Every single parent has struggles and challenges with their children. Maybe it's not autism, but it could be other mental health issues or physical challenges. Or at the very least, all parents like have conflicts and difficulties while raising their children, because that's actually what it means to be a parent. And so making that reframe really allowed me to avoid feeling self-pity with the autism diagnosis. It helped me feel more connected to other people, other parents.

It really gave me the emotional resources to be there for myself. Like for instance, he's doing great now, but when he was younger, his autism was pretty severe. He would have these horrible tantrums, these horrific tantrums. And he wasn't toilet trained until he was five. It was a rough time. But what I found is the more I could give myself compassion for the difficulties of parenting him, you know, this is so horrible. I can't believe I have to change his pants again.

And, you know, I can't believe he's tantruming. And I would just, it's okay, Kristen. You know, I'm here for you. It's okay. It'll be okay. You know, I'm so sorry. This is so hard. I found that the more I could give myself warmth and support and acceptance for my situation, the more I could give my son warmth and support and acceptance for who he was. And so some people think that self-compassion is selfish. They get self-focused. And it's kind of a shame that the word self is in there. If I had to redo it, maybe I would call it just inner compassion. Because compassion is compassion. All we're doing is we're including ourselves in the circle of compassion. And actually, the more compassion can flow inward,

the more it can flow outward. It's not like if you've got five units, and if I give three to myself, I only have two left over for someone else. It's additive. And so the more we give ourselves compassion, the more resources we have actually to give to others. And I absolutely found that with my son to be true. And it's funny that we often think about mindfulness and kind of just kindness in general is so tough because evolutionarily speaking, we're really built to be kind and to help others when they're going through suffering, right? Yeah. So the reason mindfulness is so difficult evolutionarily is because our brains actually aren't designed to be mindful. You know, the default mode of our brain is to be mind wandering.

You probably know that. And so to create a sense of self and think about the past and the future and look for problems. And so in some ways, believe it or not, compassion is easier than mindfulness because mindfulness is we need to kind of get quiet. We need to fight against the fact that our brain wants us to worry. But kindness is something that we developed evolutionarily. You know, Charles Darwin, much more than talking about the survival of the fittest, he talked about survival of the kindest, because this capacity to bond with others, to feel warmth, to feel care, actually helped our species to survive. about, self-compassion taps into the mammalian care system. This system that's built in, we know when we feel close to others, when we feel connected, where our parasympathetic nervous system gets activated, our sympathetic response goes down, release oxytocin and opiates, you know,

we increase heart rate variability, we feel safe. And so what we're doing with self-compassion is we're actually tapping into that care system the only thing is again because when we feel threatened we more we more automatically go into fight flight or flee response what we're doing is we're actually switching our source of safety from the the defense system to the care system so you might say that it's not totally natural. All right. So we've got to do a little jiggling and treat ourselves like we would treat a good friend. But once we do that, once we do that, it's actually not difficult to be self-compassionate because it just, it goes along with all these skills that we have. You know, we know how to be warm to a friend who's having a hard time. We know what

to say. We know how to hold our bodies. We know how to use our voice. So these are skills that we already have inside of us. All we really need is to be able to speak to ourselves like we speak to a good friend. We already know how to do it. It's more about giving ourselves permission to do it and also remembering to do it because, again, our habitual immediate reaction is to go into fight, flight, or flee response. And my good friend Mark Leary said, you know, the research is becoming really boring because it all finds the same outcome, which is that self-compassion is really good for you. It's good for your mental health, right? So less depression, anxiety, and stress, greater happiness. It's good for your physical health.

It's more and more research showing it enhances immune function. People sleep better. They have fewer colds, aches and pains. It reduces physical pain, things like that. It increases learning. It promotes growth goals and learning goals as opposed to just like trying to look good. It's linked to greater motivation. People try harder.

They're more persistent. They're more likely to re-engage in their goals when they get knocked off balance. It's good for relationships. It increases your ability to be a good partner in a relationship and at least a more satisfying interpersonal relationships. There's one study that showed this linked to better sex.

You know, there we go. It links to more exercise, you know, going to the doctor more often, taking better care of yourself. Really, if you look at the range of behaviors that lead to being a happy, healthy human being, self-compassion really, really helps. It makes a huge difference. It's like we have the superpower in our back pocket, and we don't even know we have it. We've got this ability to support ourselves, to help us effectively create change, and we instead are still under the illusion that we think beating ourselves up is going to

be a better way to achieve our goals when it's really not. And I think that comes from some of the misconceptions we have. I mean, one of the misconceptions that I often get when I talk about self-compassion to my students, you know, my kind of type A, you know, Ivy League students is, you know, they think self-compassion is kind of weak, you know, it's like the weak thing to do, but your work has shown it's just the opposite. Just the opposite. So for instance, there's a lot of research on combat veterans, you know, veterans who saw action in Iraq or Afghanistan. And a lot of people, when they go through a trauma like that, a lot of soldiers, they develop post-traumatic stress syndrome. And what the research shows is that those soldiers were able to be compassionate to themselves about what

happened when they were overseas. They're less likely to develop PTSD. They function better in daily life when they come home. And they're less likely to turn to drugs or alcohol because they kind of support themselves with compassion as opposed to having to turn to alcohol. And they're less likely to commit suicide. You know, if you think about what makes you weak or what makes you strong when you go into battle, and you know, life's a battle. These soldiers actually had actual battle, but for all of us at some level, life's a battle. What's going to make you stronger when you go into battle? If the inner voice inside your head is an enemy who's cutting you down, who's shaming you, I hate you, you aren't good enough, is that going to make you stronger? Or is it going to be stronger if you're an ally? It's like, I got your back. I'm here for you. You can do it. How can I

help? Clearly, having an ally inside your head is going to make you stronger than having an enemy inside your head. And so it makes stronger than having an enemy inside your head. And so, you know, it makes sense, but yet people, for whatever reason, they don't think that. They think that self-compassion is just about like slacking off, easing up. So actually, there are two sides of self-compassion. I like to call it fierce and tender self-compassion. So tender self-compassion is just about self-acceptance. Sometimes what we do need to do is just accept ourselves as we are. Okay, we aren't perfect. That's okay. You don't want to just be with yourself in

a tender way. You want to like jump out the window if you need to. Sometimes we need to be brave and take action to alleviate our suffering, right? Sometimes we need to protect ourselves. We need to say no to others. We need to draw boundaries. Sometimes we need to make changes. You know, if we're stuck in a toxic relationship or an unhealthy job or we're engaging in behaviors that are really bad for us, it's not compassionate to just let those slide. It's compassionate to actually make a change. And also it's really important that we provide for our needs, right? We don't want to, sometimes if we just aren't being fulfilled, if we aren't happy, we don't want to just let that slide. We want to do something about it

to give ourselves what we need. So that's more the fierce side of compassion. We always need both at some level. And it's a balance between the yin and yang that's actually most effective. Let's talk a little bit more about how we can actually get self-compassion. I hope our listeners are convinced that it's a good thing, that we should embrace it, right? But how do we do this, right? Like, how do we really stop beating ourselves up? And you've kind of given your students a specific set of steps that they can

use to kind of experience this themselves. It's not rocket science, right? Because the reason it's not rocket science is because people already know how to be compassionate. That's the cool thing. It's not like learning a radically foreign skill. There's actually three doorways in. One is just being compassionate to yourself directly. After time, you can do that, although it's a little awkward at first. Another one is imagine, what would I say to a dear friend in the exact same situation? What would I say? How would I say it?

And then you can say that to yourself. And the other way is using your experience of when people have been compassionate to you. that to yourself. And the other way is using your experience of when people have been compassionate to you. Like what would a really compassionate friend or maybe grandparent, someone who's experienced has been very, very compassionate. What would they probably say to me right now? We can access that as a template. So that's easy. The other thing you can do is bring in the three components of self-compassion. And it's almost like a recipe. You know, the first is mindfulness. First of all, just being aware that this is really hard right now. If we're suppressing our pain, or if we're just too lost in problem solving, you know, we don't have the perspective needed to say, hey, this is really hard. So kind of validating our pain is the first step. And the second step

is remembering that we aren't alone. You know, sometimes we think like something has gone wrong when we make a mistake. Actually, whoever said that, you know, it's not like everyone else is being perfect. And just you, it may feel that way. But the reality is everyone is making mistakes. This is what we all do. This is actually part of being human. And then you actively give yourself kindness. And that can be again, through words, like you'd say to a friend. Also, touch is a really easy way to give yourself kindness because we are tapping into the mammalian care system. And as mammals, the first two years of life, at least for humans, we don't have language. So the primary way parents convey care and compassion to infants who are crying and need to be soothed and calmed

down is through touch. So you give yourself some touch to help you feel supported and cared for. And that's also very powerful. And my guess is that doing this the first couple of times, because I've now tried this myself a little bit, to be totally honest, it can feel a little bit weird and phony because you're really advocating to literally talk to yourself, literally hug yourself in some ways for the touch part, right? Yeah, yeah. Or put your hands on your heart or something. Yeah, it does. It does feel awkward at first, right? It doesn't feel awkward at all to beat ourselves up, you know, because we're just so used to that. It's funny that it feels phony to treat ourselves like a friend, but it feels perfectly natural to treat ourselves like an enemy. But over time,

it gets easier. And then what will happen is at some point, you'll let a little bit of it in. And you'll actually let your warmth in, you'll actually allow yourself to be moved by your own struggle, the way you might be moved by a friend you cared about, who was telling you something that was very difficult. And once you actually see the impact of, oh, I see, actually, I can be moved by my own struggle. I can be warm. I can be supportive. And once you see the immediate difference that makes in your ability to cope, then it's like, okay, I want to do this again. Someone once said the goal of practice is simply to become a compassionate mess. You know, you're still a mess, is simply to become a compassionate mess. You know, you're still a mess, but when you're a compassionate mess, everything changes.

So when you're a self-critical shaming mess, you're just hopeless, right? There's nothing you can do. You can't get out of bed. But when you're a compassionate mess, you're still a mess. You're pretending you aren't. But because you're caring, that care, you know, motivates you. Okay, well, because I care, is there anything I can do to help? That compassionate approach also allows us to get over something else that can be hard when we're starting new habits, which is sort of procrastination, or just this terrible fear that we're going to just fail. Right, absolutely.

There's actually a lot of research on self-compassion and procrastination and how it reduces it. Because what procrastination is, is fear of failure. And one thing that self-compassion gives you is it makes it safe to fail. When you know that if you fail, you won't desert yourself. You'll still be there for yourself. You'll still be kind and supportive to yourself. What it does is it makes it safe to fail. And really, really importantly, it allows you to learn from the failure. I mean, it's a truism. Failure is our best teacher. We all know it's true. We've all experienced that is true. And yet we're so afraid

of failing. But if we want to learn, how are we going to learn without failing if failure is our best teacher? You know, it really doesn't make any sense. Oh, it does. If we think about the fact that people feel ashamed by failing, and because of that, they don't want to fail. The motivation of self-criticism is a motivation of fear. You better do it right, or else I'm going to shame you. I'm going to hate you unless you get it right. And it kind of works. A lot of people have gotten through grad school based on, you know on this fear, but it creates so many unintended consequences. Like it creates fear of failure, it creates anxiety, it undermines your self-confidence, all things which work directly against your ability to achieve your best. to fail. And the motivation comes from love. You know, I want you to do better because I care about you. I don't want you to suffer. I care about you. I want you to reach your goals. How can I help? And that supportive attitude is actually so much more effective

in helping us actually reach our goals. And so for all of those folks who are starting this new year thinking that the drill sergeant approach is going to be their best way to, you know, get the perfect beach body or clutter less or whatever their new year's resolution is. Um, what's your final advice for them? Yeah. So I would say, um, imagine that you had the ultimate compassionate coach. First of all, who's very wise and you can't bullshit this coach. You know, this coach knows what needs to change. Not going to, you know, it's not a good coach if he or she's going to pretend that you're fine, just the way you are. Cause maybe, maybe you aren't feeling healthy or maybe you really should declutter a little less because you're, it's kind of causing problems

in your life. So that wise coach can help you decide what does need to change. And the good coach is going to help you get there as opposed to, you know, you may have had a coach in the past that just called you names and yelled at you all the time, but you were just so afraid of that coach. You probably just gave up whatever they were trying to get you to do altogether because who wants to be yelled at all the time? I hope Kristen's work on self-compassion has convinced you that a kinder approach is in order this new year. In the episodes that follow in this mini season, we'll turn to how we can apply this strategy to some of our most common New Year's goals. We'll tackle topics like food and dieting,

exercise and body image, and how to deal with our emotions. But for any of that to make sense, we all first need to accept that a bit more self-compassion is in order. It sounds so easy, just be a good friend to yourself. But I know from personal experience that our reflex is to be meaner to ourselves than any real-life enemy.

So I want you to take some self-compassion baby steps right away. Find the right words and use a nicer tone when you talk to yourself. It takes practice, but the research shows you can become a kind coach. And if you need more pointers, I highly recommend Kristen's awesome books and her step-by-step self-compassion meditations. I highly recommend Kristen's awesome books and her step-by-step self-compassion meditations. You should also be sure to check out her new book, Fierce Self-Compassion, which is hitting stores this June. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley.

The show was mastered by Evan Viola, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire Pushkin crew, including Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Sophie Crane-McKibben, Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.