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

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. 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 in 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 peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay. Here's today's episode. I guess this week is Kristin Neff. Kristen's an Associate professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas here in Austin. She's the author of the book 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 Germany 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 as 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 in 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 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. And I think this is a very important thing we get into sort of some of the concerns that people have with self compassion. 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 field. 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. Hey Kristen, thank you so much for making time. You're super busy and we're going to talk a lot about what it is that keeps you busy. I've wanted to speak with you for probably about four or 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 piqued 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 named Elliot Troiel who was just amazing. When 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 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 how gender hierarchy in a very traditional place like India impacted how people resolved conflicts between their personal needs and their other's needs. Some people had said that 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 with a lot of gender hierarchy that, yes, women really need to do their duty and 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 emphasized 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, that we're individuals who can reason and. 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're 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 I left my husband for ended up dying of cancer within a year. My husband, who had 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 very soap opera ish, Peter. It was 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'd been going through. And I was always a spiritual person. My mother had books by, like, Indian gurus. Niram Das's Be Here now was on my coffee table, which is partly what drew me to India, to be totally honest. I also 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 the Thich Nhat Hanh group, a group that followed the teachings of the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, it was right down the street from 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 more scientifically grounded. The thing about Buddhism is it's more like a science of the mind. There'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, 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'd just been hearing good things about mindfulness meditation. But really, thank goodness it was a Thich Nhat Hanh group, because Thich Nhat Hanh 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 Thich Nhat Hanh. And so the very first night I went the Woman leading the group talked about self compassion. If I had gone to a transcendental meditation group or some other group, it may have been, I don't know, Shambhala or some other 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. You know, I'm here for you. I started really just. I did it 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 when 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. I also 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'm this type of person or I am that type of person. Did it take a long time to notice that? It certainly got better as I got more deep into it. Especially as you go deeper into meditation, you can start to see even more subtle layers of self judgment. But it wasn't necessary to get there before I could start seeing the benefits of self compassion. So it deepened 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 thing, 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 where 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's work is?

So the idea is we have different parts of ourselves. That all kind of play a role. And he. It's a terrible name. We called 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 ourselves that maybe wants to defend against the wounds of the shamed part of ourselves and maybe is really angry at others or gets really busy. You know, we have different parts that have 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 ego as 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 or 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 all the self critical parts of ourselves before we can activate the self compassionate part. 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 compassionate part. I was able to see, wow, this really makes a difference. If you take that self compassionate part and aim it inward as opposed to outward, it almost immediately changes the landscape. Also the physiological as well as the mental landscape 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 or inadequacy related to my father and all the stories that you unpack in therapy. But it was easier than I thought it was. 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 compassionate self 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 in 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 and 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 broadside 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 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 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'd spend 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 just blown away by how useful it was. And then so I started getting interested in Buddhism and the whole idea of self concept. What is this thing we call a self anyway? And it really made a lot of sense to me, 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 postdoc with Susan harder 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 and moral reasoning, and she was studying autonomy and connectedness and relationships. Your self concept, are you other focused? Are you self focused? Are you both? So it's an absolutely natural fit for me to go work with her and do my postdoc. But she was also one of the country's 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 to like yourself as opposed to hate yourself. But the ways we get our self esteem can be very, very problematic. You know, a lot of social comparison is contingent. Like for you, if you shoot the bullseye, 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 was 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 when 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 defined 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, I'll blank it on his first name, who created the Rosenberg Self esteem Scale. That was probably one of the big factors, creation of good measures of self esteem. Because people could say, wow, when people score higher on the self esteem steam scale, they're less depressed, they're less anxious, they're happier. And then that kind of started kicking the ball rolling of noticing. And it is true people with higher self esteem have better mental health than people with low self esteem. But the problems is 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 valenced, 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 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 esteem. You feel worthy, not because you're good at something that you value, you feel worthy just because you're a human being. An intrinsic 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, I compare my self compassion measure against a self esteem measure. You'll find that it's self compassion that explains stability of self worth over time. You know, 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 won'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're completely orthogonal. When you put them all together in a regression 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 is 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? 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 test or something, you're really worried about doing well because you know, if you don't, you know, 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're 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. You still want criticism. You want to know where you went wrong and how you could improve. It's not 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, you got my support, I'm here for you. That type of constructive voice is actually more effective. Yes. A coach that says, you're crap, 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, 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, study after study shows that.

Yeah. So walk me through some of the social or 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 a vocabulary test. They took like the hardest items from the sat. They had the students take the test and 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. Try not to beat yourself up about it. Just you try to be kind and supportive to yourself about failing this test. The other group that gave the self esteem instruction, they said don't worry about it, you got into Berkeley, you know, you're smart, kind of gave 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 studied was related to how well they did 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 you crap. Yeah, like you guys got into Berkeley and you still flunked 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 it's 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 psychologically 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 rp. 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. So what happens is when you're self compassionate about a failure, first of all, it allows you to learn more from the failure. I mean, it's such a truism, failure is 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, where did I go wrong? How Could I do better next time? But self compassion support actually does give you that presence of mind to be able to learn from your experiences. And so self compassion leads to what they call growth mindset, where you actually learn from your mistakes as opposed to a 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 7 or 8, once kids have learned about friendship and they have called 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. They're all one or the other. I would assume two way thinking would have to kick in, which would be about age 7 or 8. So there are some good books out there and you can find them on my website if you want to get the reference. Kind of teach kids when they learn about friendship that 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 adolescence, once 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, 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 borough 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 comparison, 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 would seem 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 doesn't 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. And 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, 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 sitcoms on and everyone watched all in the Family or MASH or whatever it was. I'm probably dating myself. You're probably like seven when 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, they can 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 that suicide rates are up and stress is up. I just don't know. I think the jury's out. I think the jury's out. I think in some ways social media can be used. For instance, if you're part of the LGBTQ 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 can 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. It's really scary. We don't know.

That's a missing 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. It is like independence is just around the corner. He's a sophomore in high school. He was delayed because we homeschooled him. We started him a little bit back so that he could 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 2 or 3 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. Well, at least we know it's not autism. Look at that eye contact. But then it turned out it was autism. He's actually an extroverted. There are extroverted autists. He's an extroverted autist.

So what did you notice? And when the diagnosis finally came, how did you start to process that? And how did your training in 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 echolalia, just the 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 autists are 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. It just 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 those. But it 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. 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. But what I did was I allowed every single emotion to come up. You aren't 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 going to be okay. I'm here for you. I'm so sorry you're having struggling, but I care about you. I treated myself just like I would treat 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 not going to allow myself to feel this way, I think it would have created a tension 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 were 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 wrote 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 made. Had this whole adventure and we took our son to Mongolia and he wrote a bestselling book and a documentary about it. And he really tried to look on the positive side of it. There's 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 his was like he. I think he has a line in his book. When 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 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 before he'd repeat words, might be like food he liked back then, 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's actually female, but 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 overgrowth 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 hyperspecialization and fixations. There's a really good scientific reason to think why things like being on a horse, finding the refinding of the balance would help cross brain communication, which might allow for things like language. And also it was just a lot of fun, basically learned to speak on horseback. It was pretty amazing.

Remind me how old Rowan was when you guys did this trip.

About five, between 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, autistic 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 there's kind of two parts to that research. One is that people with early childhood trauma, so sexual, emotional, physical abuse, it actually hinders the ability to be self compassionate 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 going to 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 what happens is everything gets kind of jumbled up and mixed in. And for some people, actually it 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, which is supposed to make you feel safe, it actually makes you unsafe. And so some people, when they 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 kind of some sort of abuse it's harder to be self compassionate if you have a trauma history. But having said that, self compassion is one of the best ways to deal with early childhood trauma. Because what you're doing is you're like re parenting 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 are so hard, wow, it's really hard to feel that I'm worthless. These feelings of shame, they're 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 its role for sure. What you're really doing is learning how to hold the pain, any pain, with this kind 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 bumpier, and it usually really helps to 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. There's different ways you have to approach it and the weigh in is a little different, 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 from early trauma through self compassion. And so there's research showing 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 moved 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 had experienced, they were less likely to develop post traumatic stress syndrome. In a way. Post Traumatic stress syndrome is when the trauma almost gets locked in your body and you keep re experiencing the trauma because you can't process it. Self compassion towards the trauma helps you process it. So it doesn't get, you might say, locked into place through 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, There's a huge boom already in 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, well, both self compassion and a sense of connectedness. The two are actually, they 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 connectedness. The three components of self compassion are self kindness, mindfulness and common humanity, or kind of the sense of connectedness. And the three really do go hand in hand. They operate as a 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 like there was a meta analysis that found 0.28, 0.30 so significant. Not mind blowing, but still there with physical symptoms at least self reports of like colds, aches, pains, physical symptoms, a lot of research actually. Fuchsia Sirwa is one of the big researchers in this area and she finds that it's linked to better physical health. There's also research showing this is probably why it's linked to physical health is it operates through the nervous system. So self compassion. And this is done either looking at self report of self compassion or by like enhancing a self compassionate mood. You can have people think of something they're dealing with and write to themselves 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 is 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 telomere length though. So it does.

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 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 want to kind of go back to tease out a little bit more of the nuance in this because one could easily misconstrue self compassion for self. 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? If you think about it, we like one and we don't like the other.

Well, that's a good 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 construct of self compassion, we need to include the sense of common humanity. I name it common humanity. I actually wanted to call it interdependence or inter being. 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 leads an imperfect life. Suffering, failure, hardship. This is part of the shared human condition. And also if you really go 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 co arising in the idea that you can really separate yourself out of the larger whole and in some ways is an illusion. You don't have to go that deeply with it, but that's ultimately where it's 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. Poor me, this is like the worst thing ever. Kind of very self focused. Mindfulness kind of has more equanimity. It's more of a balanced state of mind. It kind of sees things as it is just belittle things where we do see importance. It doesn't like say, carry on that type of thing. I'm not going to focus on the fact that this is hard. I'm just going to pretend it's not there. That doesn't help. But on 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, there's like an inherent sense of perspective there. Because we're treating ourselves as we would treat another. We aren't lost in our drama or like stepping outside of ourselves. And that perspective which actually leads, it's not 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. 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 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. And 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 we beat ourselves up. Which comes with 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 compassionate motivation, if you want to help people move from motivating themselves with criticism to a more kind of constructive criticism, more compassionate motivation, if you leave out that step of having compassion and even gratitude to our inner critic for 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. You know, it's not a really rational part of ourselves, it's just like an emotional reaction. 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 shouts even louder if we don't listen to it. But if we listen to it and say, hey, okay, I see you worried. You're worried about my safety. Thank you so much. I hear you. Trust me, I'll do everything I can to keep myself safe. Once you do that, then it's much easier for the more compassionate part of ourselves to try to motivate a change. It also wants to keep us safe, also wants to do our best, also wants us to change unhealthy behaviors. But does it not because it's afraid that we'll be inadequate, but just because it cares is 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, et cetera. 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 glean 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 a bad person. What are you going to do with that? Right. It's not helpful, but you don't want to shut down that voice at all. But you don't want it dominating 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 addiction? 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 with addiction as the outcome of the intervention? There may not be. I think it's 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 through AA that said it was all about shame and others say it was all about self compassion. So I think it really 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're really addicted, it may make it harder for you to be self compassionate. Once you come off a substance, it may be easier to be more self compassionate. So all these things are always kind of bi directional.

And how easy is this? I mean, I think as we sort of think and look to the future of using self compassion as an intervention. So if you think about the easiest interventions are 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. And there's also compassion focused therapy, which is similar, that is designed for clinical populations. And there have been randomized controlled trials of both with a wait list control, which isn't as good as an active control where you put people in peer support. You might get similar findings and actually expect you might get similar findings from a peer 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 also the research shows it 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 reality. The self compassion is easier, it's more portable, it's more scalable. I personally think if we started looking at does adding explicit self compassion into these interventions strengthen it? I suspect you'd find it does. We aren't quite there yet.

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 a 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 the 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 compassion.

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 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 base their 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 aware, not like freaking out aware, but you're aware, like, okay, this is what's happening, 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, 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 a self compassion break in the middle of your day and you notice you're suffering, giving yourself kindness and support like you showed a good friend. It didn't matter how you practiced. So meditation isn't necessary, but mindfulness is. 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 is tried and true. It can change your mind, neuronal pathways, Meditation is good. I believe in 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. Hospital. Six weeks of training, one hour a week, just done at 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, you know, stressed out. Healthcare professionals. We didn't give them any meditation. But we said on the job, whenever you notice you're stressed or upset or have something difficult happens, we give them certain practices they could use to deal with it. We did get some informal mindfulness packs and like feel the soles 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 compassionate. Actually there's some research that shows it helps you stick with the meditation practice if you have self compassion. Because meditation is 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 in which it seems kind of foreign to people. I think there's a lot of blocks to 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 retreat nearly as much as I used to. First of all, the pandemic and just my life getting so busy, but I still meditate. Yeah.

What is it for you that has kept meditation as sort of part of your daily routine?

Well, the meditation, the reason it's useful because what meditation basically is a really focused time. You aren't doing anything else. You're kind of reducing sensory input. I actually usually meditate in 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 early in the morning or late at night.

You don't fall asleep doing that.

Sometimes I do, but sometimes I don't. Like if I do it when I'm really awake. If I wake up at 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 load network quiets 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 unless 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 a 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 tooth and 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 clinging 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 in 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? Like you can try to fight the pain. Unfortunately, I know it's not going to 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 to accept 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. You know, 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 to 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 Germer. We met back in 2008. We're partners and we've created this program. We've got the center for mindful self compassion. We have teacher training, we have adaptations. It's its own thing. Chris and I, it was totally us together that created this program.

And.

And the workbook is the eight week program in workbook format. So 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 and at least piqued 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 Germer's book, the Mindful Path to Self Compassion. Some people don't like workbooks. They like more like the stories. And so that would be my favorite book.

Well, Kristin, this has been a really interesting discussion and I'm really a huge believer 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. It's lovely.

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