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There is a particular kind of tired that comes from being endlessly generous with everyone except yourself. A friend has a hard day and the warmth comes so naturally, patient words, the benefit of the doubt, room to be human. Then your own hard day arrives and something in you switches to a stricter voice, one that keeps score and asks for proof before it hands over any of that same warmth.
Dr. Kristin Neff has spent decades studying exactly this gap, from her research base at the University of Texas at Austin. In her latest review of the field, published in the Annual Review of Psychology, self-compassion shows up again and again as one of the strongest predictors of lower anxiety and depression, and steadier resilience through hard seasons. Researchers followed people over time and found that their baseline self-compassion predicted how they were doing months later, and even through something as disorienting as a global pandemic, the more self-compassionate among them moved through it with less loneliness, calmer moods, and higher life satisfaction. Read the full review here.
Here is the reframe worth carrying with you today. Self-compassion, at its root, is simply the practice of being as good a friend to yourself as you already are to the people you love. You already have every skill this requires. You already know how to listen, how to soften, how to say “of course you feel that way.” The only new move is turning that same attention toward yourself. This is the same idea we sat with in You’re Already Part of Something Bigger. Treat Yourself Like It., and it echoes through The Armor You Built To Survive Is Ready To Be Soften too. The armor goes soft the moment you decide you deserve the same gentleness you hand out so freely.
Kristin Neff puts it simply. “At the most basic level, self-compassion simply requires being a good friend to ourselves.”
Try this today. Bring to mind whatever you are carrying right now, the thing sitting heaviest on you. Picture your closest friend telling you the exact same thing. Notice the sentence you would say back to them, the kind, specific, true one. Now say that exact sentence out loud to yourself. Let it land the way it would if a friend said it to you.
You are allowed to be the friend you have always been to everyone else. That is the whole insight today, and it is the resolve to the tired, score-keeping voice this post opened with. Being loved was always available to you, starting with your own kindness toward yourself. If you want more of this in your inbox, join us here.
Sources
- Neff, K. (2023). Self-Compassion, Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annual Review of Psychology. self-compassion.org
- Kristin Neff, quote via Goodreads
- Start Early Today, You’re Already Part of Something Bigger. Treat Yourself Like It.
- Start Early Today, The Armor You Built To Survive Is Ready To Be Soften
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