THIS season is, of course, a time of goodwill to all. It is about giving 鈥� offering gifts to your nearest and dearest, making food for family and friends and perhaps donating to a charity that is helping people in a less fortunate position. But it can also be a time when you set yourself high standards. Any old meal won鈥檛 do, it needs to be amazing and so do the nibbles, and the wine, and the tree. Your efforts to give everyone else a good time can leave you feeling frazzled.
So, how about a little goodwill to ourselves? I am not talking about self-indulgence and self-obsession, but self-compassion. It doesn鈥檛 mean deciding that you are always great and never wrong. It means accepting that you are human and that, like everyone, you do your best but sometimes make mistakes. Recent research shows that self-compassion is essential for our mental health and, as I explain in my new book The Keys to Kindness, it is far from selfish because it can leave you in a better position to be kind to others.
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Scientists have various methods of measuring self-criticism and self-compassion, but most revolve around self-report scales. As an example, consider the following statements. Do any of them ring true for you?
鈥淚 fear that if I become kinder to and less critical of myself my standards will drop.鈥�
鈥淕etting on in life is about being tough rather than compassionate.鈥�
鈥淲hen I try to feel kind and warm to myself I just feel kind of empty.鈥�
These statements are part of a psychological scale devised by Paul Gilbert at the University of Derby, UK, who is a leading authority on shame and compassion. If you agree strongly with all three statements, you may fear being kind to yourself and favour self-criticism (though you would need to read and rate the full set of statements to be sure).
The downsides of self-criticism
The consequences of too much self-criticism and too little self-compassion can be serious. In one study, Mark Leary at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues emailed participants several times over a three-week period, asking them about the worst thing that had happened to them in the past four days and whether it was their fault. They found that people with low self-compassion tended to find it . In another study, Leary鈥檚 team found they were also much more sensitive to other people鈥檚 feedback.
A lack of self-compassion may be a particular problem for people with depression. Excessive self-criticism both puts people at a higher risk of developing the condition in the first place and then contributes to a downward spiral into despair and hopelessness. According to Gilbert鈥檚 research, knowing if people are very self-critical can , while various other studies show that people with higher levels of self-compassion .
Levels of self-compassion even made a difference to how people managed at the start of the pandemic. An international team of researchers, including Gilbert, conducted interviews with 4000 people in 21 countries during April and May 2020, when many of the participants were living through lockdowns. In every country studied, people who feared self-compassion .
So, a little self-kindness is in order, but is there a risk of becoming self-indulgent and overly focused on yourself?
The research suggests we need not worry too much. Consider one study from Australia, which followed 2000 teenagers through their last three years of school, while regularly measuring their levels of self-compassion and empathy with questionnaires. Each student was also asked to name privately the three girls and the three boys in their English class who were always ready to lend a helping hand. This allowed the team to rank the students in order of how kind other students considered them to be. The importance of self-kindness was clear. The higher the students鈥� scores on 鈥渒indness to themselves鈥�, and the more likely they were to have made it onto the kind classmate list.
This doesn鈥檛 mean that you have to be kind to yourself in order to be kind to others, but Gilbert鈥檚 studies also show that people with high levels of self-kindness are more likely to apologise if they behave badly. Tellingly, Gilbert鈥檚 investigations show that people with greater self-compassion tend to report having better relationships than those who lack it, too.
You might also wonder if self-compassion encourages laziness, or prevents you from learning from your mistakes, but this doesn鈥檛 seem to be the case. Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, asked a group of students whether they delayed studying for an exam until the last minute. Had they done less important things when they could have been revising? Unsurprisingly, the procrastinators didn鈥檛 tend to do that well on the exam in question. But if they forgave themselves for their mistakes, they were than those who had beaten themselves up about it.
How to cultivate self-compassion
If you are overly self-critical, all is not lost, because the psychological research shows that self-compassion can be cultivated. One technique that can be useful if you are struggling is to write a compassionate letter to yourself 鈥� a strategy that Leary and his colleagues have tested.
To do so, he and his team first asked participants to think of a negative event from their past that had made them feel bad about themselves and then, bearing that in mind, to list the ways in which other people may have experienced similar events. This was to prompt feelings of shared humanity. The participants were then asked to write a paragraph expressing understanding, kindness and concern to themselves in the way they might write to a friend who had experienced what they had been through.
Afterwards, those participants who completed the exercises experienced fewer negative emotions about the event than those who wrote about their own positive characteristics and tried to explain why the event wasn鈥檛 their fault, and another control group who didn鈥檛 write anything at all. Those who did the exercises continued to think that they were the type of person who bad things happened to, and they still felt they had made a real mistake 鈥� but the important difference was that they stopped hating themselves for it.
Another, more involved, programme comes from Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin and Christopher Germer, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School. Their Mindful Self-Compassion programme involves eight, weekly workshops. As the name suggests, the participants learn mindfulness skills and practical techniques for treating themselves with more caring concern. Contrary to the idea that self-compassion encourages self-obsession, the participants are encouraged to place their troubles in a wider perspective and to recognise the suffering of others. (You typically have to pay to attend a course, though free resources are available from .)
The results are striking. One study by Neff and Germer found that people鈥檚 , and their feelings of depression, anxiety and stress dropped, compared with a group of people who hadn鈥檛 yet attended the course. You might suppose that, after a few weeks, people would go back to their old habits and start blaming themselves again. But no: a year after the course, the pair found that the gains remained.
So, if you host Christmas and the turkey is drier than you would like, the pudding doesn鈥檛 come out quite right and people don鈥檛 want to play the games you have chosen, that is OK. You are only human and any imperfections are best forgiven and forgotten.
