The Peter Attia Drive - #139 - Kristin Neff, Ph.D.: The power of self-compassion

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

Kristin Neff is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas, author, and a leading expert on mindful self-compassion. In this episode, she shares how developing a self-compassion and mindfulness practice was the most effective tool for relieving her own suffering, and provides strategies and tactics to improve self-compassion and well-being. We discuss: The life crisis that turned Kristin to mindfulness and self-compassion (3:30); How mindful self-compassion relieved Kristin’s feelings of self-judgement, and the psychology that says we all have the capacity for self-compassion (9:45); Peter’s history of self-criticism and his personal practice of self-compassion (17:15); The problem with prioritizing self-esteem over self-compassion, and how self-compassion produces a more stable version of self-worth (20:15); An argument for self-compassion over self-criticism for optimizing performance (26:15); How and when to introduce self-compassion to children (31:45); Learning her son had autism—a personal story of how Kristin used mindfulness and self-compassion (36:45); Self-compassion for cases of childhood trauma, PTSD, and overcoming a “fear of compassion” (44:00); The relationship between self-compassion and physical health (49:30); Distinguishing between self-compassion and self-pity, and the three necessary components self-compassion (52:30); Why self-criticism comes from a desire to be safe, the circular pattern of self-judgment, and self-compassion as the ultimate motivator (55:45); Potential role of a self-compassion practice for addiction and other maladaptive behaviors (58:45); Clinical applications and practical uses of self-compassion (1:01:30); Why you don’t need to meditate to learn mindfulness and self-compassion (1:04:45); Kristin’s personal meditation practice (1:08:40); Resources for learning self-compassion (1:11:45); and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode:  https://peterattiamd.com/kristinneff  Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn

more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Kristen Nath, Kristen's an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas here in Austin. She's the author of the book Self Compassion, the proven power of being kind to yourself. She's widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on self-compassion, being the first one to truly operationally define and measure this construct basically over the past decade.

Now, in addition to her research into self-compassion, she's also developed an eight-week program to teach self-compassion skills in daily life. She co-created this with her colleague, Dr. Chris Germer. It's called the Mindfulness Self-compassion, MSC. I stumbled upon Kristen's work in my own search for better understanding self-compassion. This is something that came up for me personally is an area that needed enormous improvement. And in doing so, I realized I wanted to speak with her, reached out to her, and obviously the rest is history. In this episode, we talk about her own journey

towards the discovery of self-compassion, which somewhat coincided with her discovery of mindfulness. And you'll see in this podcast, it's actually quite interesting. And it takes me until the very end of the podcast to truly appreciate the distinction between mindfulness and a practice of mindfulness and meditation. And so if you're listening to this and you're an astute listener of podcasts where either meditation has been discussed or the concepts of

mindfulness have been put forth, pay close attention and hopefully you won't make the same mistake I will. But basically, Kristen arrives at this conclusion that, you know, when she's going through a difficult time in her life, the best approach is to take a compassionate approach to herself and that experience personally then basically shapes the remainder of her professional career. And she does a great job here contrasting self-compassion from self-esteem and self-pity. I think this is a very important thing. We get into sort of some of the concerns that people have with self-compassion, you know, hey, will this reduce my output or my productivity or my competitiveness?

And I think you'll see that, frankly, by the end of this, this is a very nascent feel. Much of what we talk about here is not hard science. There are a lot of things here that we are speculating on, but I think what nobody will speculate on if they've put any of this into practice is that you feel better. And ultimately, that's probably the metric that matters more than anything else. So with that said, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kristen Neff. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ [♪ five months now since I started to become interested in your work and the broader topic of self-compassion. But I think to understand how you came to study it, we have to understand more about you

and what it is that sort of brought you on that journey. So I sort of know little bits of your story, but I kind of want to go back a little bit further, maybe even starting in college. What did you study in college, and what peaked your curiosity? Okay, so actually as an undergraduate, I was very much into issues of kind of culture and how culture impacts reasoning. I took a three-part series in cultural anthropology, and I just fell in love with the topic thinking of how culture and the larger cultural context may influence the way we think about the world and think about moral topics.

And so I went to UC Berkeley to study with moral developmental scholar, Elliot Torel, who was just amazing. And I was, again, researching. I was really interested in things like how people balance concerns with autonomy and connectedness. It was a theme actually that's run through my entire research career. Kind of if you think about how they balance concerns with self and other. And I started getting interested in that in terms of moral reasoning, how people resolve moral conflicts,

especially between self and other. I did my dissertation research in India looking at, I think it was called, reasoning about rights and responsibilities in the context of Indian family life. So basically, I became interested in how, especially out of gender, hierarchy, very traditional place like India impacted how people resolved conflicts between their personal needs and their others needs. Some people had said the India is a duty-based culture, and it's all about meeting the needs of others, whereas the United States is a rights-based culture, and it's all about meeting our own needs.

I thought, well, is that really true? I mean, what about gender? It seems like it, with a lot of gender hierarchy, that yes, women really need to do their duty, meet their husband's needs, but husbands have a lot of rights to do what they want. So you can't really separate out power and gender and culture from the way people think about things. And by the way, I did find that. I found that they emphasize duties for wives and rights for husband, but the Indian woman

were like, but that's not fair. We'll do it because we have to, but we don't like it. It's not fair. Kind of showing the kind of also that we aren't totally dictated to by our culture, or individuals who can reason and decide actually that's not fair, I think that should change. While I was in India, I started basically, I talk about it a lot in my book, but while I was in India, my life fell apart basically.

I had been married, and it was kind of a, I'll go ahead and say it right here because we were talking what had happened was, I left my husband for another man, which is something that I was a very moral person. I never ever thought I would be in that situation, but it happened. So I left my husband for another man

who was supposed to join me in India and he didn't. And basically so the whole thing fell apart and I came back to Berkeley. And actually when I came back, talk about trauma. He was, he had brain cancer and he died within a year. The man I left my husband for who didn't leave his partner for her. And so basically I was a mess. I was feeling a lot of shame. It was very traumatic. I consider myself a very moral, honest person and the fact that I got myself in that situation, kind of was just really upsetting to me that I had allowed myself to get in that situation. Plus the fact that it really didn't work out so well, right? So he didn't come and the guy left

my husband for ended up dying of cancer within a year. My husband who I'd been divorced when I got back hated me and I was just a basket case basically. And so I thought I would learn mindfulness meditation because I'd heard that mindfulness was good for stress and trauma and all this stuff which I was going through. So I started learning about Buddhism as a way to kind of help me through what I was going through. What kind of support network did you have at this time? So I'm trying to picture this. So how long were you in India? A year. I was in India for a year. And so you come back and you're in the process of writing your dissertation now, I assume?

Yes, I wrote up my dissertation. What type of interaction you're having with your girlfriends? Are they consoling you? Do you feel isolated and I had a very good support network and actually believe it or not I had actually met the man who was going to be my second husband when I was in India He came as well which helped it was a very soap opera-ish Peter Those like days of our lives right? It was kind of the script of a soap opera, all these elements that came together. I had support, but I knew I really needed something to help me deal

with everything I've been going through, and I was almost a spiritual person. My mother had books by like Indian gurus, Durandas's B here now was on my coffee table, which is partly what drew me to India to be totally honest, to ask a thought that I might find some spiritual awakening there. Didn't actually happen in India, it happened when I got back, but nonetheless I was always kind of drawn to those alternate ways of thinking about the world. So it was kind of a natural for me to start meditation.

And what drew you to a mindfulness form of meditation. There are other forms, of course, and especially being in India, certainly, the birthplace of transcendental meditation or other things. To be totally honest, it was because this meditation group, which was a Tick-Nah-Hong group, group to follow the teachings of a Zen master, Tick-Nah-Hong, it was right down the street for me.

So it was kind of happenstance. The one thing that I kind of liked about Buddhism, I didn't know a lot about it, but I knew enough to know that it was kind of happenstance. The one thing that I kind of liked about Buddhism. I didn't know a lot about it, but I knew enough to know that it was more scientifically grounded. The thing about Buddhism is it's more like a science of the mind. It's not a lot of belief systems. You don't have to believe in reincarnation. You don't have to believe in a god or gods. It's just basically a way of understanding the mind. And because I was a scientist, getting my PhD, that also drew me. And then plus I just been hearing good things

about mindfulness meditation. But really, thank goodness it was a Tick-N-Hon group because Tick-N-Hon is one of the Buddhist teachers that talks a lot about self-compassion. More than a lot of other teachers do. Others do, but that's like a big theme of Tick-N-Hon. And so the very first knot I went, the woman's like a big theme of Tiktok on. And so the very first knot I went, the woman leading the group, talked about self-compassion. If I

gone to a transcendental meditation group or some other group, it may have been, I don't know, Shambhala or some of this type of meditation, they might not have talked about self-compassion. It may have just been about quieting the mind, stilling the mind, observing the mind. Not the group I went to, she talked a lot about self-compassion and it had an immediate impact on me. I mean, literally, when I got home the first night, I thought, wow, I had never even thought about being actively kind and supportive to myself. I wasn't a particularly harsh self-critic.

You might think that I was. I actually wasn't. I was kind of like an average self-critic, but I was feeling a lot of shame about everything I'd gone through and the kind of soap opera that had become my life. When I just started being actively kind and supportive to myself, I started speaking to myself in a way like, hey, Kristen, I know you're hurting.

This is really hard. It's understandable. There's a lot of reasons for how things unfolded the way they did. I'm here for you. I started really, I didn't silently, but speaking to myself as if I was speaking to a friend. And it really was like finding a superpower. I didn't even know I had.

It was almost immediate. The impact it had on me. Now, mindfulness meditation took a lot longer to figure out. It's a more subtle practice than I did learn to meditate and I went on many retreats. But self-compassion and probably because I have fairly secure attachment with my parents, it wasn't very difficult for me to learn and I got it almost immediately, but I did have to practice applying it to my life.

Now, how do you go to the point where you are able to sort of say to yourself in compassionate ways the things that you're saying without first being aware of what the default voice is that's probably happening subconsciously? Is that necessary? Because to me, that's the harder part is, I think we'll discuss later, most of us have some level and some more than others of being incredibly critical. The real challenge is how subconscious that critical voice is and how we're not aware of it. So, were you even aware at that point of how degrading you could be to yourself or how demeaning you could be?

I think you're right that some of these things are less conscious than others. Like I say, I actually wasn't a particularly harsh self-critic. It was more that I was just lost in the, I mean, I was feeling shame. And so you might say there was self-criticism, but it wasn't an entrenched pattern for me. How were your behaviors? Because I guess that, to me, is one of the telltale signs. You come back from India. You're probably at that point,

mostly sitting in your apartment, and much of your work is analyzing data and writing. But how did that shame manifest itself as an outward manifestation of whatever the inner voice was saying? Were you in any way depressed or anxious or anything like that? I think I was feeling discombobulated. That's probably the best word I can use to describe it.

I didn't get into a deep depression. As I had a lot of stuff going on in my life at the same time, so again, I was also starting a new relationship, which kind of made it more complicated. It also gave me, you might say, some support, but I've always been psychologically oriented, kind of interested in my internal landscape. I could be aware of the feelings of guilt and shame. For me, the biggest shameful thing was, I've always identified as being a very honest person. And the fact that I did that was just, it was really hard for me because it just goes against my self-concept, the fact that I got myself in that situation. I understand it how it could happen, but it was really hard for me. I started noticing these thoughts about my self-concept.

What does this mean about the type of person I am? And that was really helped by starting Buddhism because Buddhism is all about understanding this sense of self that causes suffering, this sense of identification with the separate self, the kind of thoughts of, I am this type of person, I am that type of person. Did it take a long time to notice that? It certainly got better, it's got more deep into it, especially if you go deeper into meditation, you can start to see even more subtle layers of self-dudgment, but it wasn't necessary to get there before I could start seeing the benefits of self-compassion. So, at deep end over time,

a lot of people are just blown away by the simple thing of putting your hand on your heart and saying something kind and supportive to yourself. Here's the same Peter. I really believe in part psychology. I've used internal family systems therapy as I used that type of therapy for many years. That's Dick Schwartz, right? Dick Schwartz's model, we have different parts of ourselves. And I really do believe we have different parts of ourselves. Can you explain to folks a little bit about what Dick Schwartz is? So the idea is we have different parts of ourselves

that I'll kind of play a role in. It's a terrible name. You call it internal family systems. But basically the idea is we have different parts of ourselves that kind of form a family and it's a terrible name, you call it internal family systems. But basically, the idea is we have different parts of ourselves that kind of form a family and interact like a family, but it's on the inside and not just outside. And so we have a part of ourselves that may be self-critical,

maybe feel shame. We also have a part of our self that maybe wants to defend against the wounds of the shame that part of ourselves. And maybe it's really angry at others or it's really busy. We have different parts of them, a different function. The function of all the parts ultimately is safety. It's kind of survival. That's kind of how these operate. So there's a part that defends our egos, a form of survival, there's a part that defends against those feelings of shame, but there's also a compassionate part of ourselves. I really believe that all of us have.

And that compassionate part of ourselves typically gets exercised when we're relating to others. People we care about. Maybe our children, our good friends, or other people we're close to. We also have a compassionate part of ourselves. So I don't think it's the case that you need to totally uncover that all the self-critical parts of

ourselves before we can activate the self-compassion apart, it's there. We actually are already pretty familiar with it as it relates to other people. So I think what happened is I was able to activate that self-compassion apart, I was able to see while this really makes a difference, if you take that self-compassion apart and aim an inward as opposed to outward. It almost immediately changes the landscape, ask the physiological as well as the mental landscape. You're actually moving from the threat defense mode to the attachment system mode. You're kind of priming your own attachment security when you tap into the compassionate part of yourself.

So for me, it got better over time. It went more deep over time. I was able to uncover more layers, more hidden cells, full of shame, more inadequacy related to my father and all the stories that you unpack in therapy. But it was easier than I thought it was. And that's the thing that surprised me over my career. It's actually easier than you might think to help people get in touch with their compassionate self. Because for many, many people that

compassion itself is very, very well practiced as an expert just aimed at others. So you don't have to create something totally new that's not there. That's the useful thing about it. Yeah, I have a friend who in sort of helping me think about this. So unlike you, I'm probably naturally much more self-critical. You sort of describe yourself as probably in the middle, kind of normal. I would be an Olympic level self-critic, including actually audibly. I mean, I could literally, you'd think I was a crazy person at times, because I could literally speak and a voice like this to myself in an incredibly harsh and critical way. So a friend of mine, Rick Elias, who has been on this podcast

and who I consider not just a friend, but kind of a life mentor, said, I want you to practice something which is when you're in that moment and you're about to have that discussion with yourself, I want you to picture that the same events occurred that are upsetting you, but now it wasn't you that did it.

It was one of your close friends that did it. How would you console him? This is interesting. It was for me a process of five months of doing this. But for example, I'll give you, so there's two things I do almost every day. I either shoot my bow an arrow or drive my race car simulator. Now those are two seemingly nonsensical activities, but unfortunately they both have become barometers of self-worth. So when they don't go well, the inner self-directed hatred is enormous. And it results in anger and

tantrums and outbursts and feelings of total worthlessness when they don't go well. So instead, what I started doing, and I literally did this every single day for five months, is after every single episode of doing one of those activities which meant every single day, I would take my phone out and I would speak into the recorder as though it were my friend who had that bad experience. And I would

say, I would use my name. So I'd say, Hey, Peter, I know you just had a really bad day shooting, and you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if your life depended on it, but doesn't mean you're bad. It just means that you had a bad day at archery today, but you're still a great dad, and you're going to get another chance to come out here and do this tomorrow. And there are probably reasons for it today. You might not even know why you didn't shoot poorly, but I would send text that message to my therapist every single day as a form of accountability. It really was amazing how much it de-escalated me.

It was actually very quick. It used to be at the point where driving or shooting poorly could ruin my day. And it got to the point where within about three minutes, I had forgotten about it. Yeah, that's the power of self-compassion. And again, it's because you already had that part developed. It had been one thing if you hadn't had

any experience your whole life of how to be compassionate or supportive to someone. But you've been many, many years developing that skill probably with your kids or your friends. So you just needed to access that part of yourself, which you weren't accessing before. And that's why I found to get back to kind of

in terms of for myself. That's why I was blown away by how useful it was. And then, so I started getting an interest in Buddhism and the whole idea of self-concept, what is the thing we call a self-anyway? And it really made a lot of sense to be this way of understanding how the sense of separate self and ego and separation leads to suffering.

And so I thought, well, maybe I want to kind of pivot and I didn't pivot totally away, but pivot away from moral reasoning and get into understanding self-concept, how the development of our self-concept impacts things. So I did my post-doc with Susan Harder, the studying self-concept development. She was also studying autonomy and connectedness. So it was a natural fit. So I've been studying autonomy and connectedness. So it was a natural fit. So I've been studying autonomy and connectedness and moral reasoning. And she was studying autonomy and connectedness and relationships, your self-conceptor, your other focus, or your self-focustor, you both. So it was an absolutely natural fit for me to go work with her and do my post-doc. But she was also

one of the countries leading self-esteem researchers, and she had done research along with others showing that self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing. It's good that, like yourself, as opposed to hate yourself, but the ways we get our self-esteem can be very, very problematic. A lot of social comparison is contingent like for you. If you shoot the bull's eye, you feel good about yourself. If you miss it, you hate yourself. I mean, that's not very stable. It's very contingent, it's unstable.

So it's when I was finding out more about self-esteem, and I was just kind of questioning the whole self-esteem thing anyway through my Buddhist practice. And what is this thing we call an ego and that we invest so much in that we have to judge it positively and it can't be negative at all. And then it was just a natural to think, wow, I think self-compassion is a lot more helpful

than self-esteem. When I was working with Susan, I was developing all my ideas about that. And then eventually, I came to show that empirically and I got UT Austin. When you sort of take a broad lens at human psychology, when did this idea of self-esteem become something that was really pushed? I mean, certainly as long as I can remember as a kid, I mean, this is what was talked about

all day, every day the table was pounded. Kids that don't have high self-esteem do drugs and whatever sort of, but that couldn't have been the narrative forever. Was there somebody that was a champion for this school of thinking or? Well, it's interesting because if you actually look at the founding American psychology William James who was writing early 1900s 19th century he wrote about self-esteem and he actually identified contingent self-esteem. He defines self-esteem as

perceptions of competence in domains of importance in other words being good at those things in life that are important to you. Like, you could probably care less if you're bad at hockey, if you don't play hockey, but you do care if you're bad at archery because you care about archery. That's kind of the way self-esteem works. We need to be good at those things in life that we value. So he was actually talking about it way back then, but then it didn't really take off in psychology, then they started going into psychoanalysis and then into behaviorism. And it was probably people like Rosenberg, all blacked out his first thing who created the Rosenberg self-esteem scale.

That was probably one of the big factors, creation of good measures of self-esteem because people can say, wow, when people score higher on the self-esteem scale, they're less depressed, they're less depressed, they're less anxious, they're happier. And then that kind of started kicking the ball rolling and noticing, and it is true, people with higher self-esteem have better mental health than people with low self-esteem. But the problem is, it's all the unhealthy ways

they get to that high self-esteem. Like feeling better than others, bullying others. We know that the reason kids in middle school start to bully others is to have high self-esteem, because they want to feel good about themselves in comparison. How do we compare and contrast narcissism with self-esteem or other negative traits? Because self-esteem by itself doesn't really

sound to be negatively valanced, but a lot of those other traits do. There's nothing wrong with self-esteem, and in fact there's a pretty strong correlation between self-compassion and self-esteem. If you're self-compassionate, you all have higher self-esteem and you have less self-hate. So they're linked, but the healthy form of self-esteem is what they call unconditional self-esteem. You feel worthy, not because you're good at something, that you value, you feel worthy just because you're a human being, and then trends the sense of self-worth. And that's the type of self-esteem that self-compassion gives you. If you look at them head-to-head that compare it, my self-compassion measure against the self-esteem measure, you'll find that

it's self-compassion that explains stability of self-worth over time. In other words, it doesn't go up and down as much because it's less contingent on outcomes. On a good day and on a bad day. So, just to make sure I understand that there's some discordance between self-esteem and self-compassion. A person with self-compassion generally has self-esteem, but not everybody with self-esteem has self-compassion. Yes, exactly. It's hard to tease them apart, but for instance, if you have self-esteem because you're a narcissist, you probably won't have higher self-

compassion. You don't have lower self-compassion either because that would have to say that people who aren't compassionate, who hate themselves, have higher narcissism. So they completely orthogonal. When you put them all together in a regressive equation, you control for self-esteem and self-compassion and narcissism as the outcome. It actually came out as 0.0 correlation, totally orthogonal between self-compassion and narcissism, where self-esteem I forget what it was. I think it was a moderate correlation. I'd have to look again. It's not that self-esteem is bad. We want to feel worthy. It's really why we feel worthy, how we feel worthy.

It's important. I think viscerally it makes so much sense using, like I said, the trivial example of, do you shoot well or not? If your self-worth is dependent on performance, you're doomed to fail at some point. Right. And then when you do fail, what do you do? on performance, you're doomed to fail at some point. Right.

And then when you do fail, what do you do? And so people criticize themselves thinking it's going to improve their performance. And by the way, it does kind of work. It has to be admitted. Many people have gotten through med school or law school, through harsh self-criticism. So it's not like it doesn't work at all. But it works with a lot of negative side effects, like a performance anxiety is a big one.

So if you have a lot of anxiety because you're slamming yourself, you're beating yourself up, next time you have some big tasks or something you're really worried about doing well because you know if you don't, you've gotten the negative reinforcement of beating yourself up. So it makes you more anxious, which actually undermines your performance.

It can make you more disconnected from others if you really invested in doing better than other people and that can lead to like little interpersonal behaviors that actually aren't good at creating closeness and connection. It kind of works. There's a lot of problems with it and self-compassion works better.

What we know in the research is constructive criticism is more effective than harsh criticism. Only know that, of course we know that the research is constructive criticism is more effective than harsh criticism. Only know that. Of course, we know that. You still want criticism. You want to know where you went wrong and how you could improve. You said, like, oh, that's fine. If you're a professional archer saying, oh, well, just had a bad day, that's not going to help you. And that's not going to help you achieve your goals, which means it's actually not ultimately loving. If you're a professional archer, you want to do your best because that's related to your happiness and well-being.

But what's going to help you do your best? Constructive criticism says, okay, well, here's what didn't work. And you did it this way. This didn't work. Why don't we try it this way? I believe in you. We've got my support. I'm here for you.

That type of constructive voice is actually more effective. Yes, a coach that says you're craft. You better do better. It kind of works. It doesn't work as well as constructive criticism. And we know that. Because obviously that's one of the concerns that anybody would have going down this path of self-compassion. If somebody had spoken to me when I was in high school or college and said, look, we're going to work on you not beating yourself up I would have said no way. I'm not willing to give up my edge in exchange for Feeling better in the moment right which is ironic because it actually doesn't give you an edge It actually is not nearly as effective

It gives you more of an edge if you have constructive criticism than destructive criticism. And again, studying after study shows that. Yeah, so walk me through some of the social psychological experiments that can test that hypothesis. Research has come out of UC Berkeley, which shows a lot of research shows that self-compassion is not only more effective than self-criticism, which kind of occurs naturally, but also is more effective than self-esteem as a motivator. So just as an example of one type of study, they had UC Berkeley undergraduates. They had them all fail of vocabulary tests.

They took like the hardest items from the SAT. They had the students take the test, but everyone failed because it was a really hard test. They split up the students into three groups. One group, they gave instructions to be self-compassionate about the failure. It was a really hard test, trying not to beat yourself up about it, just trying to be kind and supportive to yourself

about failing this test. The other group, they gave a self-esteem instruction, they said, don't worry about it. You got into Berkeley, you know you're smart. You kind of give them a self-esteem instruction, they said, don't worry about it, you got into Berkeley, you know you're smart. You kind of give them a self-esteem boost. And the other group, they didn't give any instructions, which meant they were probably self-critical. They didn't encourage the students to be self-critical, that be kind of unethical. They just didn't say anything.

What they did is they said, you're going to take the test again. You've got some free time to study for the exam. They had materials they could study for the vocabulary test. Just kind of let us know when you're done and you're ready to take the exam. And what they found was that people who were told to be self-compassionate about the failure studied longer and harder than the other two groups. And how long people study was related to how well they get on the next exam. I mean, what would be another interesting group

as a fourth group would be a group that was berated and told. Your crap. Yeah, like you guys got into Berkeley and you still flunk this test, that's pathetic. I'd be curious to know if that was positive or negative in terms of reinforcing additional study. Yeah, I guess kind of unethical to do that. It'd be very hard to do a study like that.

You can't actually insult subjects in an experiment like that because it's considered psychological damaging. Let's pause for a moment on that. The IRB won't let you say to an undergraduate, something like that, whereas think about what was done 40 and 50 years ago with some of the famous psychology experiments down at Stanford. That's why they've changed the R.B. And actually Peter, do you know what you have to use as an insult? The feedback you use is you did average. That's considered an insult. If you tell people their score was average, it's considered an insult. There's lots of research like that. Basically, so what happens is when yourself compassionate about a failure, first of all, it allows you to learn more from the failure.

I mean, it's such a truism. Failures are our best teacher. But if you're full of shame and you're just really mad at yourself, you don't actually have the presence of mind to look objectively and say, huh, we're doing a good wrong. How can I do better next time? Self-compassion support actually does give you that presence of mind to be able to learn from your experiences. Self-compassion leads to what they call growth mindset, where you actually learn from

your mistakes as opposed to fixed mindset, which means you just think you're stupid or smart one or the other. How soon in a child's development can these patterns be set? We don't have a lot of data with kids. Partly, that's because we don't have a good way to measure self-compassion in children. There are a few scales actually just came out the scale for youth that can be used for younger kids at.

Brand new, it came out like last year, it hasn't been used much. We don't have a lot of data on this. But I suspect that about age seven or eight, once kids have learned about friendship, and they have a pre-J, we call two-way thinking, you can understand reciprocity, they understand concepts of fairness, they understand kind of that back and forth, they can take the perspective of another. To be self-compassionate, you have to take the perspective of another towards yourself. And also, by the way, self-criticism doesn't really kick in until later on in development, partly because of that, because children are just kind of like happy and they have a positivity bias, and they tend to think they're great unless their parents tell them

the exact opposite, kind of it's called one way thinking, all one or the other. I would assume two way thinking would have to kick in, which would be about age seven or eight. So there's some good books out there, and you can find them on my website if you want to get the reference. The kind of teach kids, when they learn about friendship, they should also be their own best friend. Learn about what it means to be a good friend, they should also learn to be a good friend

to themselves. And I suspect that's probably the best time to start introducing these concepts. And then, adolescents, when you start getting metacognition and you get more abstract thinking, it's even more appropriate because that's when really the self-concept formation starts kicking in what kind of person am I. And then you can start having conversations with teenagers. They actually do understand issues like, do you really want your sense of self-worth to be contingent on being pretty enough or having people like you or being smart enough?

They have enough abstract thinking skills to be able to understand something like self-compassion. Now some would argue that we're sort of in the midst of a social experiment for which the outcome might not be known for decades, which is a group of kids that are growing up in a world where comparison is at a level that you or I couldn't imagine. You and I grew up, so I'll speak for myself,

but I didn't have a clue outside of my neighborhood. There was nothing. I mean, even looking at the TV was very abstract. Not like I knew anybody that lived out of the burrow of the city that I lived in. And you barely watched TV. There was no way to sense what was happening. And of course today, that couldn't be further from the truth. So, you spoke earlier about ego being so entwined in self-compressory in comparison to others, that you would argue that we are in an environment today where the potential for that comparison, that ranking is so high. So, it seemed to me that self-compassion is more important today than potentially it ever has been. I hear what you're saying. I think it certainly is frightening. On the other hand, I don't know a lot about it. My son does it use social media.

I don't use social media. I'm like a dinosaur. My book has a Facebook account, but I don't. So it's a whole other world than I know I'm not really part of it. My son's not part of it either. But I do, from friends who have teenage kids, I do hear this. On the other hand, it seems like that the younger generation is more open-minded than past generations, that it may be because they've got the ability to know so many different stories. Like in some ways, when we were growing up, probably a little older than you, but still, it was like there was a few sick comes on and everyone watched all in the family or mash or whatever it was, probably dating myself, you're probably like several in those came out.

But nonetheless, there were certain sitcoms that everyone watched and that was kind of the unique frame of reference, shared frames of reference, at least in cultures like the United States. But now people think and get the point of view of like so many diverse points of view, depending on what they like, what they're interested in. I haven't seen any data. Well, that's not quite true. There is some data showing the suicide rates are up

and stresses up. I just don't know. I think the jury's out. I think the jury's out. I think in some way social media can be used. For instance, if you're part of the LBGTQ community, you have access to people like you in a way that you wouldn't have had 20 years ago. And in that sense, social media could be a positive thing. It could make you feel less isolated and more connected to others. On the other hand, if you're just looking at Instagram and followers, maybe not. So I think

I just don't know what to think about it. It's scary though. I admit it is really scary. We don't know. That's an interesting point. Now, you mentioned your son does not use social media. Your son has autism, correct? Yes. He's how old now. He is 18. And by the way, he just got his driver's license. I can't even tell you how proud he is and how proud I am of him that he just got his driver's license. I can't even tell you how proud he is and how proud I am of him that he just got his driver's license. It is like independence is just around the corner. He's the sophomore at high school.

He was delayed because we homeschooled him. We started him a little bit back so he catch up academically. But yeah, he's doing really well, really well. You probably start to figure out that something is not exactly, quote, unquote, normal when your son is two or three years old? I knew earlier because I was trained as a developmental psychologist. And I knew something was up, but there's a myth that autistic children don't make eye

contact. They make eye contact a little less frequently, but a lot of them make a lot of eye contact, especially with their parents. And I literally used to joke with his father, Ha, at least we know it's that autism. Look at that eye contact. But then it turned out it was autism. Well, he's actually an extroverted. There are extroverted autism. He's an extroverted autism. So, what did you notice? And when the diagnosis finally came, how did you

start to process that and how did your training and self-compassion serve you? I started noticing because he was delayed in language development. Actually delayed pointing is one of the biggest indicators of some sort of delay. And he was just using the echelalia, just repeating of the words, kind of the repetitive behaviors. But he was very social. I had the stereotype that autistic kids, they weren't loving, they weren't affectionate, they didn't make eye contact, which wasn't him at all. But then once I realized that a lot of autism, our extroverted and social, I realized, oh,

yeah, he's got it. And then we had the official diagnosis. It was devastating. It was devastating. The first feeling quite honestly is one of disappointment, which has to be kind of owned. This isn't what I imagined being a parent would be like. I imagined something different. These long, in-depth, philosophical conversations about life, and actually we're starting to finally have,

took a lot longer than I thought it would. He wasn't potty trained until he was five, which is really, really hard. He would tantrum a lot, well past the terrible twos. And so I was disappointed, I was overwhelmed, but it wasn't the plan I had signed up for. And so my self-compassion and my mindfulness practice both together and they really can't be separated. Mindfulness is a necessary ingredient to self-compassion.

The day after he got his diagnosis, I went on a meditation retreat and I just sat there on my cushion and I cried. What I did was I allowed every single emotion to come up. You're supposed to feel disappointed because I love my son more than anything else in the world. I didn't say, okay, this emotion's allowed

and that emotion isn't allowed. I just let any emotion I had to come up, feelings of grief, feelings of disappointment, feelings of fear, and not only was I allowed myself to be with them without suppressing them or fighting them, the thing that made the biggest difference for me is I actively gave myself support because of them. This is really hard, Kristen.

I know you're disappointed. I know you're frightened. It's gonna be okay. I'm here for you. I'm so sorry. This you're having struggling, but care about you. I treated myself just like a good friend who had a similar situation.

What I found, and over and over again, the more I could give myself compassion for my son's autism, the better parent I was to him, and the more I could accept him, the more I could accept my own difficult feelings about his autism, the more I could actually accept his autism, whereas if I had fought them and suppressed them or said, I'm not supposed to feel this way or like it alone myself to feel this way, I think it would have created attention that would have actually made it more difficult to accept him for who he was. And when you were going through this process, did your husband mirror you in that practice or did he sort of have his own way of doing this? So you were kind of in this

journey of you are supporting him. And he was maybe delayed. And what was that dynamic like? A bit of both. He had kind of his own way of dealing with things. He's much more of a doer and did both this book called The Horse Boy. And he thought of how can I make this into an adventure? That's kind of his way of dealing with things. If life throws you lemons, how am I going to make lemonade? Which is a little different than my way of doing it. And so he had this whole venture and we took our send of Mongolia and he wrote a bestselling book and a documentary about it.

And he really tried to look on the positive side of it. This really value to that as well, a different approach than what I took. Mine's kind of more like, how do I hold the pain with love? And he was like, yeah, I think he has a line in his book. And life gives you lemons. Why stop at lemonade? Make a margarita. Very much his way of dealing with things.

And by the way, we aren't together anymore just so you know, we split up about nine years ago. There was a point in that documentary, by the way. Oh, so you did see it? Yes, yes, I did. It's very powerful. It's at least represented in that documentary by the way. Oh, so you did see it? Yes, yes, I did. It's very powerful. It's at least represented in the documentary that Rowan basically didn't make a sound. Maybe I'm misremembering this, but it was only when he first encountered the horse that

he sort of came to life. Am I remembering that correctly? It was the first time he did a complete sentence. So we four could repeat words. It might be like food he liked back then. It might be bottle or water or muffin or something like that. He would repeat the words. But it's the first time when he got in Betsy.

And I actually wasn't there when it happened. So I'm assuming it's true. He said he's a nice horse. Betsy is actually a female. But he's a nice horse. First time he actually a female. He's a nice horse. First time he was on the back of the horse. And I did see a change. So there's some research to suggest on horses.

It's actually, they think it may have to do with the cerebellum. Because when you continually have to find and refine your balance, it influences the cerebellum, which helps brain integration. And one of the things that's happening with autism is a lack of brain integration because of the growth of white matter. You probably know all this about autism, lack of adequate pruning. It's hard to get cross brain communication

in autistic kids, which is one of the reasons you get kind of high for specialization and fixations. There's a really good scientific reason to think why things like being on a horse, finding the refinding and the balance would help cross-bain communication, which might allow why things like being on a horse, finding the refinding and the balance would help cross-bain communication, which might allow for things like language. And also, it was just a lot of fun. Basically, learn to speak on horseback.

It was pretty amazing. Remind me how old Rowan was when you guys did this trip to... About five, two and five and six. And you obviously alluded to kind of these outbursts, right? I mean, children with autism obviously can have remarkable outbursts. Yeah, because they get overwhelmed. My son likes to tell me, I test it to children. They don't tantrum because they're trying to get their way.

They do it just because they get overwhelmed. And it's just a natural reaction, but they don't do it to manipulate. So it's interesting, which I think is very true. So where does self-compassion come into trauma? You alluded to it very briefly up front, but there's also some literature for formal diagnoses of PTSD, isn't there? Oh, in terms of self-compassion? Yes. It's not so much that self-compassion aids in the diagnosis of PTSD. There's a lot of research actually on self-compassion and trauma. So this kind of two parts of that research. One, is it people with early childhood trauma,

so sexual, emotional, physical abuse, and actually hinders the ability to be self-compassion as an adult? And that's mainly because of the attachment system. So if you have secure attachment, it means you think you're kind of valuable, you're worthy and your needs are worth being met. If you had secure attachment with your parents and your parents treated you like you were worthy and they met your needs consistently,

then when you're an adult, it's easier to think that I'm worthy and I'm gonna meet my needs because I'm worthy of having my needs met. If you have insecure attachment, then you may not think that your needs are worthy of being met. And if your parents were actually harshly critical or actually abusive, what can happen is the system that's supposed to make you feel safe, the attachment system, gets fused with feelings of fear, because these people who are your only source of safety and comfort in life are also

terrifying you. And then so it happens is everything gets kind of jumbled up and mixed in. And for some people actually can be frightening to give themselves compassion. Paul Gilbert talks about this. He calls it fear of self-compassion because basically when you're activating the attachment system, it's just supposed to make you feel safe, it actually makes you unsafe. And so some people will may start opening their hearts with self-compassion. They have memories, traumatic memories come up, or like just this voice in their head saying, you're crap, you're worthless, or maybe some memories

of some sort of abuse. It's harder to be self-compassion if you have a trauma history. But having said that, self-compassion is one of the best ways to deal with the early childhood trauma, because what you're doing is you're like, reparenting yourself. So maybe the program is, okay, you're worthless, you aren't worthy of care. But if you actually intentionally give yourself compassion for those feelings, which you're so hard, well, it's really hard to feel that I'm worthless. These feelings are really difficult. How can I learn to relate to the pain of the trauma with some kindness? It's not like cognitive behavioral therapy

where you work directly with rewriting those negative schemas. I mean, that's also useful. It has this role for sure. What you're really doing is learning how to hold the pain, any pain, with this kind of supportive stance. And so when you do that, there's actually some research showing you can get what they call earned secure attachment as an adult.

You can actually learn to have a secure attachment schema through self-compassion. Maybe your parents didn't meet your needs consistently, but you can learn to meet your own needs consistently when you're frightened or you need help or you need support in some way. It is harder. The road's bumpy aren't it usually really helps have a good therapist help you unpack all of this. Once people can do it there's lots of research especially with compassion focused therapy, created by Paul Gilbert which is specifically designed for people with early trauma. The different ways you have to approach it and the way in is a little different and has to go slower and things are a little different.

But it actually is remarkably effective, and you can get people who are able to heal for early trauma through self-compassion. And so this research showed this, if you look at trauma that's not caused by early childhood, for instance, there's a lot of work with combat veterans. So combat veterans, we went to Iraq, or Afghanistan, who experienced a lot of combat trauma. What they

found is those veterans who are more self-compassionate toward themselves about what they'd experienced. They were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress syndrome. And so in a way, post-traumatic stress syndrome is when the trauma kind of almost gets locked in your body and you keep re-experiencing the trauma because you can't process it. And so self-compassion towards the trauma helps you process it so it doesn't get kind of locked into place to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Yeah, which really makes so much sense when you look at the incredible success

that the organization maps has had in testing MDMA in people with PTSD because MDMA is the ultimate compassion molecule. So it basically takes a slight amount of compassion you might have and it just amplifies it tremendously. And that's presumably why people in as few as two or three sessions can have otherwise debilitating PTSD rectified. I think there's only one study that did show that MDMA

increased self-compassion, but there isn't a lot. I think there's a huge, we'll see, starting to a huge boom already and looking at psychedelics, MDMA, mushrooms, because what they do is they give you an experience of basically love and connectedness. And I think, as you say, one of the reasons probably that it works is by increasing, although self-compassion and a sense of connectedness, the two are actually go hand in hand,

I wouldn't be surprised if we find that that's kind of the active ingredient of how it works, is through increased self-compassion. Increased mindfulness and increased connectors. The three components of self-compassion are self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity, or kind of the essence of connectedness. And the three really do go hand in hand, they operate this system. What's the relationship between those and physical health? So there is an emerging literature that shows that self-compassion is linked to better physical

health. It's kind of a small to medium correlation, maybe I think there was a meta-analysis that found point 2A, point 3O. So significant, not mind-blowing, but still there with physical symptoms, at least cell reports of like colds, aches, pains, physical symptoms. A lot of research actually fuchsia steer was one of the big research in this area. She finds that it's linked to better physical health. A lot of research actually fuchsia seer was one of the big research in this area. She finds that it's linked to better physical health.

It's also research showing this is probably why it's linked to physical health, is it operates through the nervous system. It's a self-compassion and this is done either looking at self-reported, self-compassion or by enhancing the self-compassion at mood. You can have people think of something they're dealing with and write to themselves that a paragraph being mindful, kind of accepting of what's happening, remembering that they aren't alone, common humanity, and being kind to themselves like they would be to a friend. If you induce the three components of self-compassion, what we find is, first of all, it reduces sympathetic activity, things like inflammation, things

like cortisol levels, and also increases heart rate variability, which is the main marker we have of parasympathetic activity. And it's probably by changing the nervous system reaction that it influences physical health because of course what your body's doing, how reactive it is, is linked to how healthy you are. Also immune function is linked to better immune function. It actually seems to me like, I wouldn't be surprised if a greater body of literature emerges from this, because I think it sounds so cliche to say that the mind and the body are related.

But they are. They clearly are, and I think anybody who's tried to help people in one of those dimensions and not been able to help the other is pretty aware of that focus. And certainly, I interviewed Bob Sapolsky some time ago, and I think his work in stress is just so interesting. And stress is really, to me, kind of just one other piece of this vector. So I'm excited to hear that we're becoming more aware of this,

because obviously the lens, I kind of come at all these things through as longevity, and longevity isn't just living longer, it's living better. And that, for me, I think, was the turning point in coming to accept the value of this, was even if figuring out a way to become more self-compassionate didn't make you live one day longer. It increases teleware length, though, so it's not this. But even if it didn't, the impact it would have on the quality of your life alone would be worth it.

And I think in the final analysis, quality of life matters more than length of life. And there's no reason you can't strive for both. The old joke about lifelong caloric restriction is matters more than length of life. And there's no reason you can't strive for both. The old joke about lifelong caloric restriction is it will increase your lifespan and you'll know it or something to that effect. It'll feel like it.

You'll live longer and it'll sure feel like it because you're so miserable. So to me, that's kind of a big part of it. I wanna kind of go back to tease out a little bit more of the nuance in this because one could easily misconstrues self-compassion for self-pity. How do you distinguish these? We need the three components of self-compassion. Just self-kindness or self-love, it could be a self-focused state that I'm just poor me and I feel

sorry for myself. What's the difference between pity and compassion? How do you know and what's the difference between when someone pities you or someone has compassion for you? Do you think about it? We like one and we don't like the other. Well, let's look at question. I mean, pity feels condescending, I suppose. Exactly. This separation, you're looking down, it's a separation.

Compassion is, hey, I've been there, man. It's shared. And that is the whole difference between compassion and pity. And that's why in my measurement and my concert to self-compassion, we need to include the sense of common humanity. I know you at common humanity, I actually wanted to call it interdependence or interbeing. It's kind of like going beyond the separate self, but I knew that that'd be kind of a hard term for most people to get their head around, but that's really what it's pointing to. When you have self-compassion, you recognize that everyone's imperfect. Everyone needs an imperfect life,

suffering, failure, hardship. This is part of the shared human condition. And also, if you're really good deeply enough with it, you also realize that what I experience is not separated from what you experience. It's all part of these interdependent causes and conditions, coerizing in the idea that you can really separate yourself out of the larger hole. And in some ways, it's an illusion.

You don't have to go that deeply with it, but that's ultimately worth pointing. But if you didn't have that sense of connectedness in the experience of suffering, it may turn into self-pity. That's why that part has to be there. Also, mindfulness. So self-pity isn't very mindful. Self-pity tends to exaggerate, it tends to catastrophize, pour me, this is like the worst thing ever, and a very self-focused. Mindfulness kind of has more equanimity. It's more of a balance-sated mind and ceasing as it is. Just the little things are reducing importance. Just like, carry on, that type of thing. I'm not going to focus on the fact that it's as hard and just going to pretend it's not there. That doesn't help. But in the other hand,

catastrophizing doesn't help either. And the mindfulness component partly comes from the inherent perspective that comes from self-compassion. Ironically, it's interesting to think about this, but because we are used to giving compassion to others, whenever we give ourselves compassion, it's like an inherent sense of perspective there, because we're treating ourselves as we would treat another. We are lost in our drama, we're stepping outside of ourselves, and that perspective, which actually leads, it's done exactly the same as mindfulness,

but they're very related. It actually gives us more perspective and balance in terms of how we relate to our own situation. From my point of view, all three need to be there to be self-compassionate, and actually psychometrically, if you look at psychometric analyses at the self-compassion scale, they all operate as a system.

And all three change simultaneously. So they really do operate as a system. Now, one of the things that anybody who starts to practice this becomes aware of is when you fall short of it, depending on how harsh a critic you are in the first place, you can easily fall into a pattern of self-judgment. Right. Beating yourself up for beating yourself up. It's the double bang. Yeah.

So, what advice do you have for folks who want to begin this practice to pull themselves out of that spiral? Well, I think it's really helpful to know why we criticize ourselves. We criticize ourselves because we care. The reason we criticize ourselves is because we want to be well, we want to do our best, we want to be safe, we want people to love us, to support us, because we're afraid that if we don't do well, maybe we're going to harm other people, we're going to harm ourselves, bad things are going to happen to us if we don't do well, maybe we're going to harm other people, or we're going to harm ourselves. Bad things are going to happen to us if we don't do well. And good things are going to happen to us, we believe, if we do do well.

So it all comes from the basic sense of safety. We don't need to beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up. We need to have compassion for the reasons who beat ourselves up, which comes to the very natural desire to be safe. And once you recognize that, it's like, okay, that a very natural desire to be safe. And once you recognize that, it's like, oh, okay, that's just me trying to be safe. Well, actually, there's a more effective way to help myself feel safe. And that is by giving myself compassion for what's just happened. When we teach people, especially self-compassion at motivation, if you want to help people

move from motivating themselves with criticism, to a more kind of constructive criticism or compassionate motivation. If you leave out that step of having compassion and even gratitude to our inner critic, you're trying to keep ourselves safe, it actually doesn't work. And I think why that is is because that part of ourselves, the self-critical part, is really scared for its life. In many ways, it's like from that point of view, it's like life will end if I fail, or life will end if I make this mistake, or life will end if I'm not a good archer, or whatever. It's not a really rational part of ourselves. It's just like an emotional yatch. And so if we just skip over that part and say, hey, shut up, I don't

want to listen to you. I want to listen to my compassionate part. That part of us gets even more scared. Life's going to end and you aren't listening to me. Listen, listen, listen. Life's going to end. It's like it's shout even louder if we don't listen to it. But if we listen to it and say, Hey, okay, I see you worried. You worried about my safety. Thank you so much. I hear you. Trust me. I'll do everything I can to keep myself safe. When she do that, then it's much easier for the more compassionate part of ourselves to try to motivate a change. Get also wants to keep us safe, also wants to do our best, also wants us to change on

healthy behaviors, but does it not because it's afraid that we'll be inadequate, but just because it cares. It's a much more effective and sustainable voice of motivation. I think that's a really interesting point. I'm glad you brought it up because I don't think I've appreciated that nuance. You do have to acknowledge, again, this maybe comes back to maybe not so much Dick Schwartz's model, but other models of essentially us having wounded children within us, adaptive children within us, functional adults, etc. You can't ignore anyone's voice inside. That's right.

And the idea is just integration. We want integration. And we want to learn part of what your inner critic is telling you may be useful, but you just want to clean what's useful and what's useful is probably about where did you go wrong? What could you do better next time? It's not useful to say you're worthless or you're bad person. What are you going to do with that? It's not helpful, but you don't want to shut down that voice at all. But you don't want to dominate things either because it's a very

one-sided, very kind of immature, not very wise part of yourself that just is freaking out, basically. I have no doubt that there is a very strong correlation between, and it would really be a reciprocal correlation or an inverse correlation between high levels of self-compassion and low levels of maladaptive behaviors such as addictions. I wouldn't dispute that for a second. What I'm curious about is how much is causative. In other words, is there any evidence that we could use self-compassion as an intervention to treat at least partially maladaptive behaviors, gambling, substance addiction, things like that? I wish there were more research on self-compassion and addiction. There is a little bit of intervention research, I believe.

Actually, trying to think, is there a randomized controlled trial of addiction as the outcome of the intervention? There may not be, I think, as more cross-sectional research that shows they're negatively correlated, and of course, we don't know causality in that case. There is some research showing that one of the things when AA is successful, it appears that one of the reasons it may be successful is because it increases self-compassion. By the way, I think it depends what group you belong to. I've had people who've gone to AA that said it was all about shame. Another say it was all about self-compassion, so I think it varies depending on what group

you go to. I would be willing to bet money that you would find that. I don't think we're quite there yet. And in terms of the two-way causality, for instance, if you really addicted, it may make it harder for you to be self-compassionate. When you come off the substance, it may be easier to be more self-compassionate. So all these things are always kind of bidirectional. And how easy is this? I mean, I think, is we sort of think and look to the future of using self-compassion as an intervention. So if you think about the easiest interventions or drugs, here's a pill.

The treatment group gets a placebo pill. The intervention group gets an active pill. All you have to do is take this one pill once a day and we'll figure out if it lowered your blood pressure or your cholesterol. Well, when you start to get into, now we're going to test whether mindfulness-based meditation is beneficial or self-compassion is beneficial, it becomes more complicated. How challenging is it from a clinical research standpoint to package the practice that you've spent the better part of 20 years refining in yourself, writing about, but then taking it into a clinical setting with

a group of subjects and being able to blind them, being able to randomize them and then blind researchers who are going to measure outcomes based on obviously the differences in behaviors. We have developed the Mindful Self Compassion Training Program, which actually isn't designed for clinical populations, but can be adapted for clinical populations. There's also compassion-focused therapy, which is similar, that is designed for clinical populations. There have been randomized controlled trials of both, with a weightless control, which

isn't as good as an active control where you put people in pure support, you might get similar findings, and actually expect you might get similar findings from a pure support group. It's actually not that difficult. I think we definitely have the tools in place right now to do the research. I'm not doing that research because I'm more focused on developing the interventions. I really hope people do. Also, I don't think it has to be reinventing the wheel.

I think adding some explicit self-compassion to pre-existing interventions that we know work is probably the way to go. There's more than just self-compassion. Self-compassion isn't everything. I think including mindfulness interventions. I have to say personally, my feeling is, although mindfulness training naturally increases self-compassion it makes it stronger if you make it explicit. If you give people explicit tools they can use to practice self-compassion that's not meditation

because when you're like in the supermarket and you have some thought or something happens you're not going to sit down and meditate in that moment but you can put your hand on your heart and say something supportive to yourself. It's very portable, it's very scalable, and that's the research shows that doesn't require meditation to learn it, which also makes it more accessible to a lot more people. I love meditation, but it's just a lot of people aren't going to meditate. That's just the reality. The self-compassion is easier, it's more portable, it's more scalable. I personally think if we started looking at those adding explicit self-compassion into these interventions, strengthening it, I suspect you would find it does. We're quite through it.

I think you're right, by the way. I think that's exactly the way to go about doing it is you take interventions that are already known to have some efficacy and you layer this on because I think as your story explains, this is a relatively straightforward intervention to teach somebody. And the results can happen quite quickly. I mean, if someone who's as harsh as self-critic as I am can in a period of months with a little bit of daily practice with something tangible, because it's tangible to practice, I'm quite excited about it in the sense that I think there's a pretty big opportunity there.

I want to go just into this mindfulness component a little bit, because you've made this point now several times, which is, look, mindfulness is not a necessary component of self-compression. No, it is a necessary component of self-compassion. Oh, it is. Okay, so I misunderstood. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought a mindfulness-based meditation practice is what I really mean. Is that necessary? You don't need to meditate to be mindful.

So meditation is probably the most tried and true way to increase mindfulness, most mindfulness training programs based on techniques on meditation. But being mindful is just kind of being aware. Whenever you're aware that you're suffering, you're being mindful of your suffering. Especially when you're aware in a certain way, when you're not like freaking out aware, but you're aware like, okay, this is what's happening. So, mindfulness itself, you can't have self-compassion without some degree of mindfulness.

But our research shows we did a randomized controlled trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program, and we found that practice was linked to gains in self-compassion, but it didn't matter whether that practice was sitting down and doing self-compassion meditations, the program has many, or it was just simple things like taking the self-compassion break in the middle of your day, and you notice your suffering, giving yourself kindness and support, like you two are a good friend. It didn't matter how you practiced. So meditation isn't necessary, but mindfulness is.

And you can also learn mindfulness without meditation. It's just a little tricky because mindfulness is kind of vague and abstract. It's hard to get your hands around it. So meditation helps. Do you think an analogy to make this point would be that having strong legs is necessary for walking up a hill. One way to do that is just to walk up a hill. Another way to do it is actually go to the gym every day, lift weights, and walk up the hill where the actual mindfulness meditation is the going to the gym.

It's doing the very concentrated, focused exercise. Technically you don't have to do it to still do well, but you're in the long run, maybe going to do better. Yeah, so we don't know, we don't have data in the long run, what's better. I mean, meditation, we know it's tried and true, it can change your normal pathways. Meditation is good. I believe meditation, I'm a meditator. I think it's a little unfortunate that so much emphasis has been placed on meditation,

because not everyone's going to meditate. Not everyone wants to meditate. Some people don't have time to meditate. It doesn't appeal to them. Again, I do think self-compassion is more scalable. You can have someone. So, for instance, we just did a training program for healthcare workers working at a pediatric hospital. Six weeks of training, one hour a week, stunted lunch, very minimal training.

We did not give them any homework they had to do outside of the class because they didn't have time. They were stressed out healthcare professionals. We didn't give them any meditation, but we said, on the job, whenever you notice your stress or you sad or have something difficult happens, we give them certain practices they could use to do with it. We take you some informal mindfulness practices like feel the souls of your feet, you know, come back to the present moment. We did things like the self-compassion break, put your hand on your heart,

and help people develop phrases that work for them to remind them of the three components of self-compassion. And they got a lot out of it. They didn't have to meditate. After we taught the program, a lot of them said, actually, maybe I'll take the full program, learn how to meditate. You know what I mean? So yeah, so maybe they'll go on to meditate after learning some self-compassion.

And actually, there's some research that shows it helps you stick with the meditation practice if you have self-compassion. The meditation's hard, but I don't think it's the only way forward, and I do think I just think unfortunately in our culture there's a way which it seems kind of foreign to people. I think there's a lot of blocks, the meditation that aren't there with self-compassion. But it's obviously stuck for you. You've gone on several retreats. It sounds like yeah, 40 retreats. I don't go on retreats nearly as much as I used to.

First of all, the pandemic and just my life getting so busy, but they still meditate, yeah. What is it for you that has kept meditation as part of your daily routine? Well, the meditation, the reason it's useful, because what meditation basically is, is it's a really focused time. You aren't doing anything else. You're kind of reducing sensory input. I'm actually usually meditating bed. It's not quite as good as doing it on the cushion, but it's still pretty good, and it's kind of more doable for me, right? So I'll do it early in the morning or late at night. You don't fall asleep doing that? Sometimes to do, but sometimes I don't. If I do it when I'm really awake, if I wake up in three in the morning, let's say my

mind's racing, then it's a really good time to do it, and it actually will help me fall asleep. I'll be honest, the quality of the meditation is not quite as good as when I sit on my cushion, but at least I do it, whereas sometimes I just find I don't have time. Yeah, so meditation is helpful, first of all, because what happens when you meditate is you get into a certain brain state. Basically, what happens is your default one that works quiet. And so your brain state changes and it's easier for you to see clearly. It's easier for you to pay attention. There's less chatter in the brain and that's very helpful.

Yes, so meditation is great, but I just don't want people to think that in the less they meditate, they can't learn this skill. So for instance, there was one study that just had people kind of like you instead of texting themselves, kindness, they wrote a compassionate letter to themselves, the three components, mindfulness,

common humanity, kindness, what's the day for seven days one week? And it reduced depression for three months and increased happiness for six months. That's doable. Anyone could do that. You don't have to learn how to meditate to do that and it still helps you. Does your son have a practice around this? It sounds like he's quite aware. He's finally coming around to self-compassion but he fought it to the nail for years. I mean, just really recently, like the last few months, he's come around to it. He used to say, don't give me that self-compassion stuff, Mommy, because he didn't want to accept the pain. He wanted to fight the pain. He didn't want

to accept imperfection. He was like just clicking on tooth and nail, you know, to he wanted the pain to go away. He didn't want imperfection to be there. He was like full on resistance, but he could articulate it. And I would kind of think, okay, well, good luck with that one. What can I do? You can try to fight the pain, unfortunately. No, it's not gonna help, but people have to come to that conclusion themselves.

But now finally, he's starting to see the value of being kind to himself and see the value of, just kind of understanding that yeah, he's got except imperfection. He said to me the other day, he said imperfection is like spicy food, you know, if everything was perfect, all our meals would be bland. We need some variety. We need some spice to our life.

He came up with that himself. That's kind of amazing. Yeah, it is. And he's finally getting there. He's 18 now and he's really getting kind of into the next level of self-reflection and stuff. So he's a little behind, but he's definitely getting there. You have a workbook that's based on your book, correct? The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook is basically the Mindful Self-Compassion program, which

I co-developed with Chris Gourmer. We met back in 2008 where partners and we created this program. We've got the Center for Mindful Self Compass and we have teacher training, we've added patients. It's its own thing. Chris and I was totally us together that created this program and the workbook is the eight-week program in workbook formats. You basically take yourself through the program. Yeah, I mean to me that seems like a really logical place for somebody to start if listening to this podcast has got them interested in at least peaked some amount of curiosity around this idea. It's a very structured way to go through this.

It's not the way I did it, but I've looked through the book and I thought, boy, this is a really nice way to be guided through something. I would certainly make a plug for that. You can just get it on Amazon. It's easy to... It's like $10. Yeah. If you want to actually train in self-compassion, it's an empirically supported program. There are randomized controlled trials. It's very carefully sequenced. We refine the program over years and years and years and what worked and what didn't work. I'm pretty confident in the efficacy of the program. But if you want like more personal stories, then you could probably go with my first book, Self-Compassion, or Chris Grimmer's book, The Mindfuls Half, The Self-Compassion.

Some people don't like workbooks, they like more like the stories. And so that would be my tree book. Well, Kristen, this has been a really interesting discussion. And I'm really a huge believer in this in this work that you're doing. And you've also lived it too. You've had these ups and downs and these challenges that have I think kind of allowed you to sort of roll with things that are hard. I had a lot to be self compassionate about. That's for sure. Well, I look forward to meeting you in person at some point when this pandemic rolls over. And again, thanks so much for your time today. Thank you, lovely. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to

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