A recent study from Duke and Wake Forest Universities shows that the ability to have compassion for oneself plays an important role in overcoming the challenging events in life:
“Life’s tough enough with little things that happen. Self-compassion helps to eliminate a lot of the anger, depression and pain we experience when things go badly for us,” said Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke and lead author of the paper, which includes five peer-reviewed studies.
“Rather than focusing on changing people’s self-evaluations, as many cognitive-behavioral approaches do, self-compassion changes people’s relationship to their self-evaluations,” Leary said. “Self-compassion helps people not to add a layer of self-recrimination on top of whatever bad things happen to them. If people learn only to feel better about themselves but continue to beat themselves up when they fail or make mistakes, they will be unable to cope nondefensively with their difficulties.”
Self-compassion involves three components. They are self-kindness (being kind and understanding toward oneself rather than self-critical); common humanity (viewing one’s negative experiences as a normal part of the human condition); and mindful acceptance (having mindful equanimity rather than over-identifying with painful thoughts and feelings).
So, the next time something bad happens, try not to blame yourself too much.
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3 comments:
Thanks, doc. I need that.
Me too - makes a lot of sense from a chronic illness standpoint too. No one feels like they get everything done in life - but couple that with having "crappy health days" and it's easy to really beat up on yourself. It's a dangerous trap!
It's one of those things that we don't often think about, but can make a lot of difference.
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