Is your inner voice very critical? Do you struggle to treat yourself with the kindness you show to others? In this episode I talk about why self-compassion is key to good mental health.
In this episode, I talk about why self-compassion is key to good mental health and how to build it for yourself in 2022.
I describe the inner critic and how to change it, at around 11 minutes, and at around 20 minutes, I suggest ways to develop more self-compassion.
Brene Brown's TED talk can be found here - The Power of Vulnerability
My Mindfulness Tips can be found on my blog
You can sign up for Sarahs newsletter here https://sarahdrees.co.uk/lets-keep-in-touch/
You can find a full transcript of this episode at https://ask-the-therapist.simplecast.com/episodes/building-self-compassion-in-2022/transcript
Follow Sarah Rees:
📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahdrees.co.uk/
👍 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/sarahdrees.co.uk
😀 Therapist Corner: https://www.facebook.com/PrivatePracticeCBT
💻 Website - https://sarahdrees.co.uk/
This episode was written and presented by Sarah Rees. It was edited by Big Tent Media and Produced by Emily Crosby Media.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
compassionate, mind, people, compassion, building, inner critic, self criticism, notice, compassion focus therapy, vulnerability, thinking, resilience, difficulty, soften, mindfulness, cbt, vulnerable, therapist, experiences, critic
Welcome to Ask the Therapist, a monthly podcast for everyone who's interested in how our minds work, building resilience through journaling, and all things therapy. I'm your host, Sarah Rees, a mental health nurse and CBT therapist with over 20 years of experience in the field of mental health.
Happy New Year, it's 2022. Can you believe it? It's going so fast. So welcome to the new year. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what would be most useful to talk through today. And if there was one thing that would be beneficial for people's mental health, what would that be thinking about all the people I see in clinic and everybody around me and everything we've been through over the last couple of years collectively, if there was one thing that I think would have a big impact, it would be if we're all more self compassionate, and work on improving the relationship we have with ourselves and working on that inner critic, I think it would have a huge impact not only for us, but also for everyone around us. I really believe that the relationship we have with ourselves sets the tone and the foundation for all other relationships around us. When we are in a better place, which we are when we are meeting our own needs. From a more compassionate standpoint, we are in a much better position to sport everybody else around us and just enjoy life as well as being more psychologically resilient. So we can roll with the punches that life will no doubt throw at us. And self compassion is a skill you can learn develop compassion, focus therapy, and compassionate mind training has been developed by Professor Paul Gilbert over in Darby university, to people who struggle with high levels of shame and self criticism. When we are self critical, it can be really difficult to allow ourselves to experience self warmth or self acceptance, and to enjoy life. There are blocks to these softer, warmer experiences from ourselves or from others, which therefore makes us more vulnerable to anxiety, burnout, stress, or depression. Because we need warmth, support, care, love, connection, contentment, and the ability to be able to enjoy things. Because this builds our resilience and our general emotional well being. Professor Paul Gilbert is one of the founders of the compassionate mind Foundation. And I was very lucky to train with him in compassion focus therapy a few years ago over in Darby. And he developed this approach when he was working as a CEO, he's a psychologist, but he was working as a CBT therapist. And so many people do really well with CBT, it's, you know, the research demonstrates that huge majority of people are able to change the way they think and feel and the behaviours and change negative patterns into more useful ways of thinking and being and doing, but some people don't respond that well. And he really became interested in why those people don't do as well. So we looked into this and found that while with CBT, you can help people change their thoughts very effectively. If these thoughts are being experienced in the person's mind, in a very harsh or critical way, than they do improve your wellbeing. So he's started kind of saying, asking people, please tell me a bit about how you say that in your mind. How is it you talk to yourself, so you've got kind of more understanding of people's inner landscape, if you like, how they actually speak to themselves what the tone is, like, you know, the demeanour of the voice, if they recognise the voice, sometimes people talk to themselves. And all they almost hear a bully in their mind. So when he found this out, he started doing more research. And this kind of critical in a narrative is aligned with vulnerability for for poor and mental health outcomes. In a short, it's really important that our internal worlds are a supportive, encouraging place. And this is been backed up time and time again, in the research that's been done me a lot of which I mean, it's been done all over the world, but a lot of it's been done by the compassionate mind foundation by Paul Gilbert and his team. So what is compassion and why is it so important? So compassionate? One, this is from the compassionate mind Foundation website, which I'd really encourage you to go and have a look at. And I just thought this definition of what compassion is, is just really love. Like, they say that compassion is one of the most important declarations of strength and courage known to humanity. It is difficult and powerful, infectious and influential. It is a universally recognised motivation with the ability to change the world.
That's huge. And it changes the world it starts with you. So being more compassionate to ourselves, then really enables us to be outwardly a lot more compassionate. But also, I work with lots of people that are very compassionate to the families and their friends, but a huge blocks of them being kind of themselves. And when we are harsh and critical in our own minds, we become quite self focused, because you're under attack, you're under threat by our own mind. So actually, you need to see working on yourself is a word another way of supporting other people around you. Compassion is shaped by two psychologies. So the first is the ability to turn towards difficulty. When things are difficult, we tend by difficulty, do we or negative thoughts or bad things happening, that it pops up, and we push it away, or we squash it down. And then it has a tendency to pop back up and smack us back in the face at a later date. But the first psychology of compassion is to start to notice difficulty and turn towards it, sitting with it for a bit longer than normal maybe. And the second is about having the motivation, the strength and the wisdom to alleviate that difficulty. So Paul often gives the example of you're walking down a road, and you're walking past a river. And you notice a boy that's in the river unable to swim. So he's he's wailing about and screaming and flapping about, now you might run towards the boy and be motivated to help. But if you then jump in the water and you can't swim, that's not a wise decision. So you're motivated to turn towards the difficulty. But then you have to use your strength and your wisdom to alleviate that difficulty. See, wisdom and strength is a huge component of encourage a huge component key components of compassion. It's often about doing really tough things and not just taking the easy route. A common myth about compassion that it is that it's just about being kinder to yourself nice and caring. And while these are really good qualities and life qualities and passion, and developing a more compassionate self goes much deeper than this. It really you need to add the components of courage and wisdom in there as well. And it's motivation. Compassion requires you to turn towards difficult experiences, thoughts, emotions and feelings. And this requires the ability to be vulnerable, because it's not easy to turn towards the tough stuff. It makes us vulnerable. So there is a need to also be vulnerable. And when I say to people, how can I do so this a lot in clinic need to allow yourself to be a little bit more vulnerable, that generally people's hackles go up, because their association is that vulnerability is weakness. And at this point, I will then grab my pen and write down Brene browns, the power of Vulnerability TED talk, I'll add it into the show notes. But I think it's one of the videos that I most recommend people to watch, because she did a lot of research around well being and what Brene Brown found is that actually for really good well being we need to be able to be vulnerable, and we need to be okay with vulnerability and to embrace vulnerability. She talks about vulnerability being the birthplace of connection and creativity and well being to be vulnerable. You need resilience and strength and avoiding vulnerability is much easier, but it prevents you from fully engaging in the experiences and in establishing what the distress or difficulty needs. So if you're not set in with difficulty, you can't understand that as a CBT therapist, adding in compassion focus therapy to my work was absolutely transport Meishan or rarely, in, you know, the benefits for my clients, because huge numbers of people will have an inner critic. But compassion focus therapy also helped me to understand how complex and tricky Our minds are. Its origins lie in evolutionary psychology, which teaches us that our brains are built for survival. So they're all our brains, nobody gets away with this, all our brains are built exactly the same way. All our brains are really good at noticing problems and threats. And many of the psychological difficulties we struggle with are not just not off belt, they're how our brains are built. And almost our brains are kind of wired for a time and evolution when we had lots of predators, and we had to be very aware of threats. And the same threats are just not there anymore. But our brains are still programmed in that our old way. These things are obviously beyond our control. But we can learn to support ourselves through the development of being self compassionate, to improve our well being, and build a tolerance to difficulty and distress. So we can train our minds to do something different. One of the key things I think that I think about 90% of people I see, report is that they have a relentless inner critic. And let's look a bit deeper at what that means. So the term inner critic, I'm sure you know exactly what I mean. But it is used to describe negative thoughts that we have about ourselves. While these thoughts can help us recognise where we've gone wrong, and how to put things right, many people find that inner critic goes too far, when you really get to know it and really listen to it and sit with it. Rather than off of offering constructive, motivational criticism. The negative internal commentary tells us we're bad, we're wrong or inadequate, worthless, guilty, and so on. This can be in credibly detrimental to our emotional well being. Being self critical makes us more vulnerable to depression, and anxiety. And I say this day in day out, it's like carrying round a ball in your mind. Often we don't even notice we're doing it, even though they're unhelpful. The negative patterns of how we think in our mind can become automatic. And as we know, from CBT, our thoughts impact how we feel and what we do, and in turn create our worlds that we live in. So how we think the thoughts we have are hugely important. A few episodes ago, I did a whole episode on thoughts and thought records and and that might be you know, if you want to look more into that, that might be a useful episode to look back on. So what do you need to do? Well, in order to change it, you first need to notice that this is sometimes referred to as having awareness of mind. Often, we are so busy and overwhelmed. We have no idea of our minds, they're just running on automatic. And don't forget that we have this negative cognitive bias. And we are built to notice threat for our survival. So an unmanaged mind is very tricky. The first step to overcoming or even if we could start to just soften your inner critic is to start noticing where it shows up. Helping people create more awareness of the mind is one of the very reasons why I created the CBT journal. Because journaling is one of the best ways to achieve awareness of mind. Try writing down some of your self criticism when you notice it show up. All just check in with yourself a couple of times a day, and just have a thought, What am I thinking here, just become aware of your mind and start jotting it down. This will slow down your thought process and help you gain a different perspective. You also need to understand the function of your inner critic in order to change it. So the first step is becoming aware of it. The second step is how is it serving you? For example, clients often tell me it motivates them or keeps them in check. They worry that without it, they might become lazy or unmotivated or disorganised. But when we explore this further, you begin to see that the very reason why you don't use your inner critic to motivate your family and your friends, is the very reason why you shouldn't use it to motivate yourself. Once you're more aware of your inner critic, and it's impact, the impact it's having on your life, you can begin to question it. Think about his purpose and explore why would it be beneficial to alter it? And what blocks are there to altering the inner critic or letting go of it? Is your inner critic really helping you to get to where you want to be in life? How do you feel after a self critical marathon? Just spend some time thinking about those emotions and feelings after you spent some time doing it? There is a really huge reason why coaches, teachers, and therapists don't use criticism as their main motivational tool for behaviour change or learning. Because it doesn't work. It's also worth thinking if it wasn't there anymore. So if I could say to you, okay, you've listened to this podcast episode, being self critical, is not helpful, let's be more self compassionate, let it go. And after this episode, you can just think, right, that's it goodbye in a critic Are there any fears that come up, that'a really good way of noticing if there's any blocks to let it go. If I often say that to clients in the therapy room, I'll say, if you were to walk out here, without the inner critic, what comes up, and there is some times there's a little bit of panic. And then it's time to think about finding another way. So once you become more aware of your internal dialogue, you have the ability to change it. But this can take time you're training your mind, you might have been self critical for many years in a very automatic way. So it's like toning a muscle, it takes time. And you may find self criticism continues popping up unexpectedly, it's much easier to notice what you are not doing very well. So spending some time each day noting down what you've done well, and really building the antidote to self criticism can be really helpful. Personally, for me, my inner critic, it always reappears whenever I do something new. And I know its function is to prevent me from doing new things. So I don't make mistakes or look silly. But now I'm aware of this. I know it's gonna show up, I can anticipate it. And I can think actually, do I want this critic to shut me down and stop me from doing this new things? Or do I want to stay in line with my values and do it any way. So I can kind of plan and prepare for it and come up with a narrative that I want to tell myself. So I can soften the inner critic. I know what it's trying to achieve Me. And I also know it's really not helpful. If I listened to my inner critic, I won't learn new things or do new things or just grow in the way I want to. And none of us get away from having to work on an Inner Critic. I remember first learning about criticism, and I was like, Oh, I don't suffer with that. I'm kind of okay. And then the more I started to learn about it, the more awareness of mind I got, and the more I could hear it popping up. And I very rarely come across people that can really say no, I'm really supportive of myself. Another way to manage the inner critic is to start considering what you would say to a friend. As you begin to understand when and why your inner critic is going to pop up, you can be ready with a new way of thinking, I find it helpful to consider what I would say to a friend, or somebody I cared about in the same situation. What advice would you get them? What would you want them to know what's important for them to hear? And practising self compassion, really toning up that it's something we can cultivate is the true antidote to self criticism. It's not just about being kind to yourself, it's about being wise, strong and courageous. Using your inner wisdom to know what's best for you. When you practice self compassion, you're building up your own inner resilience and courage is a much easier way to go through life. The starting point for developing a more compassionate mind is to practice mindfulness, because this provides the inner space to work on psychological mechanisms, such as building self compassion, working and reducing the inner critic, and enabling you to sit with and tolerate difficulty or uncertainty or, you know, difficult emotions and experiences. Mindfulness is a practice that trains the brain to focus on the hair and now just on the present moment, it induces a sense of acceptance, and makes our mind more attentive towards our feelings. It's like being a spectator and observing everything from a very safe distance. So thoughts will come in and it's about not giving them judgments, no worries about am I doing mindfulness right or wrong? In a mindful state, you're able to live every moment, just to its fullest because you're fully present. Now, as a CBT. Therapist, I recommend some type of mindfulness practice to around 95% of my clients. So it's almost every day, I would say that about 80% initially roll their eyes at the prospect of having to meditate and isn't that typical therapist thing to recommend. However, once I run through the potential well not even potential, the benefits of building a mindfulness practice, everybody's willing to give it a go, because this is another technique that's we know the science behind it. Really good for Ageing, balancing out hormones, but it improves your physical health. It softens negative thoughts, improves memory and concentration, and psychological emotional resilience reduces stress and anxiety. It just the science behind mindfulness is overwhelming. We just can't ignore it. And that's why it's so big. It's getting so popular. I'll link into a blog that I've done on mindfulness recently, and there's some resources in there. But I use the calm phone up, and there's headspace as well, that's really good. And any Google search will show up lots of resources. So you can practice mindfulness. I think it's important to know that having you know the starting place for building psychological resilience is in calming the body down. So often people do breathing exercises like calm, soothing rhythm breathing, which is just breathing in a slower, relaxed manner in a rhythm. So often, when we're stressed or anxious, we try and think our way out of things. But actually, we need to work on our body because a Karma body provides a Karma mind and we can make much better, clearer decisions from that karma mind. From a place of a Karma mind karma body, you can start to build in compassionate practices like building a more compassionate self, which is just you at your very best picture of yourself. When you're at your very best. Try and bring up a time or a memory when you felt really strong and in control. When you're motivated to do a good deed or help somebody who was suffering and you know the right course of action to take. Notice how this feels in your body. This is you or your compassionate bass. This simple exercise will help you cultivate compassion, how? How often do you really think about you being at your very best and allow those feelings and memories to flow in your body. There might be blocks to it. So expect these to come up and just keep focused on what your motivation is, which is to engage with feeling more compassionate, because when you can engage with that, generally day to day when times are hard, it's much easier to bring it on and kind of build in that practice. There are many practices that help build compassion, they are called as an umbrella term compassionate mind training and exercises. And their aim is to help people experience and foster compassion for themselves and others. It focuses on developing compassionate motivation, sympathy, sensitivity and distress tolerance, as well as the qualities of non judgement and non condemning attitudes. Exercises that support compassionate mind training might include, like we've mentioned before gratitude exercises that encourage you to savour activities that you enjoy and think about what you are grateful for is much easier to notice, like we've mentioned, when things are not going so well. So spending time thinking about what has gone well is the brilliant antidote for correcting the negative cognitive bias. Also, imagery is used a lot. You can make use of guided imagery to stimulate your mind to provoke the soothing, calming system. Our minds and bodies struggle to pull apart imagination from reality. For example, take a moment to imagine your favourite meal just indulge in that for a moment.
Close your eyes a member the last time it was placed in front of you can you notice how it smells? How does it look?
Just indulge in that memory How do you feel hungry? Now imagine you're holding half a lemon and imagine licking The juice, how does your body and your mind respond to that?
It's powerful stuff isn't. This simple exercise demonstrates how powerful the mind and your imagination convey. Images have so much more power than thoughts alone. So we need to use this skill to our advantage, we can create catastrophic images that fit with our worries. Often we're very adaptive during this. So if your mind is that powerful, you can turn it to your advantage. You can create havens that calm down your physiology make you feel safe, content, improving your physical and psychological world. Because when you calm a safe and feel content, your body goes down into the resting state where it starts restoring and repairing really good for your physical health, as well as your mental how you can train up your imagination like a muscle, so it works for you and not against you. How can you manage masu the motions at times of stress and difficulty. This builds in confidence as well as resilience benefiting your overall well being. The narratives and stories we have in our minds are shaping our world. And you can really work on cultivating your inner world, we've got something called neuroplasticity in our brain, which means that our brains are constantly evolving, growing taking shape, and we need to be more in control of the pathways and what we are cultivating. Another exercise that's often used in compassionate mind training is compassionate letter writing, where you write yourself a letter about what you want for yourself a truly compassionate laughter. And this exercise, so many fat people find it really, really moving. How often do we really think about our own knees, how we feel about ourselves how, what we want and desire for ourselves? How often do we spend time really caring for ourselves not enough. And my final thought is, think about what this can do for you. People who are constantly hard on themselves usually end up performing worse because so much of their energy and attention is spent on self criticism. When you learn to soften yourself, critic and be more self compassionate, especially when things go wrong, or you make mistakes, you're much more likely to succeed in the future. So here's to your 2022. I really hope if you take one thing from this episode is to soften how you talk to yourself and just be a little bit more supportive. Even small baby steps in the right direction will have huge impacts on how you feel and how you operate in the world and how you show up for yourself and for other people and make 2022 a little bit happier I how whatever 2022 has in store for us. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I've not done a solo one for a while. But if you've enjoyed it, I'd love to know what you thought. And if there's any topics that you would like me to cover, do drop me a little line because I'm, I'm always keen for ideas. So I'd be happy for any recommendations. And you might not know but I send out a weekly piece of mindset mail every Friday. I'll link to it in the show notes. I send out my latest blogs, podcasts. And I regularly send out psychological tools and downloads and quizzes and things that I'm using regularly in clinic and I think might be useful. So you know if you're not ready for CBT or maybe you've had some therapy and just want to kind of have little reminders of mindset and psychological tools, head over to my website and you can sign up for my weekly email. And you'll also receive their free guide to building emotional resilience. Well, I've really enjoy today and any questions or anything do let me know. And I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Take care.
Thank you for listening to ask a therapist. For more information about the CBT journal visit my website at SarahDRees.co.uk. You can also sign up to download your free guide to building emotional resilience delivered straight to your inbox. You will then also receive regular newsletters where I share my blog posts, podcasts and tips and strategies for better mental health and psychological resilience. Don't forget to review and subscribe to the podcast and you can also share episodes on social media using the hashtag ask the therapist. This episode was written and presented by me Sarah Rees and edited by Big Tent Media and produced by Emily Crosby Media.