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

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. I guess this week is Kristen Neff. Kristen's an associate professor

00:00:55.580 of educational psychology at the university of Texas here in Austin. She's the author of the

00:01:01.220 book, self-compassion, the proven power of being kind to yourself. She's widely regarded as one of

00:01:07.860 the world's leading experts on self-compassion, being the first one to truly operationally define

00:01:13.680 and measure this construct basically over the past decade. Now, in addition to her research into

00:01:19.520 self-compassion, she's also developed an eight week program to teach self-compassion skills in daily

00:01:24.980 life. She co-created this with her colleague, Dr. Chris Germer. It's called the Mindfulness Self-Compassion

00:01:31.620 MSC. I stumbled upon Kristen's work in my own search for better understanding self-compassion.

00:01:40.300 This is something that came up for me personally as an area that needed enormous improvement. And in

00:01:47.000 doing so, I realized I wanted to speak with her, reached out to her, and obviously the rest is history.

00:01:53.180 In this episode, we talk about her own journey towards the discovery of self-compassion, which

00:01:58.520 somewhat coincided with her discovery of mindfulness. And you'll see in this podcast,

00:02:03.100 it's actually quite interesting. And it takes me until the very end of the podcast to truly

00:02:07.120 appreciate the distinction between mindfulness and a practice of mindfulness in meditation.

00:02:12.860 And so if you're listening to this and you're an astute listener of podcasts where either meditation

00:02:18.500 has been discussed or the concepts of mindfulness have been put forth, pay close attention, and

00:02:22.860 hopefully you won't make the same mistake. I will. But basically, Kristen arrives at this conclusion

00:02:29.660 that when she's going through a difficult time in her life, the best approach is to take a compassionate

00:02:35.520 approach to herself. And that experience personally then basically shapes the remainder of her

00:02:40.980 professional career. And she does a great job here contrasting self-compassion from self-esteem and

00:02:47.060 self-pity. And I think this is a very important thing. We get into sort of some of the concerns

00:02:51.800 that people have with self-compassion, you know, hey, will this reduce my output or my productivity

00:02:57.340 or my competitiveness? And I think you'll see that, frankly, by the end of this, this is a very nascent

00:03:02.180 feel. Much of what we talk about here is not hard science. There are a lot of things here that we are

00:03:06.760 speculating on. But I think what nobody will speculate on if they've put any of this into practice

00:03:12.060 is that you feel better. And ultimately, that's probably the metric that matters more than

00:03:17.200 anything else. So with that said, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kristen Neff.

00:03:28.800 Hey, Kristen, thank you so much for making time today. I know you're super busy and we're going to

00:03:34.260 talk a lot about what it is that keeps you busy. I've wanted to speak with you for probably about four

00:03:40.020 or five months now since I started to become interested in your work and the broader topic

00:03:45.880 of self-compassion. But I think to understand how you came to study it, we have to understand more

00:03:52.460 about you and what it is that sort of brought you on that journey. So I sort of know little bits of

00:03:58.780 your story, but I kind of want to go back a little bit further, maybe even starting in college. What did

00:04:04.240 you study in college and what piqued your curiosity? Okay, so actually, as an undergraduate, I was very

00:04:11.140 much into issues of kind of culture and how culture impacts reasoning. I took a three-part series in

00:04:18.820 cultural anthropology, and I just fell in love with the topic, thinking of how culture in the larger

00:04:24.900 cultural context may influence the way we think about the world and think about moral topics. And so

00:04:31.400 I went to UC Berkeley to study with a moral developmental scholar named Elliot Turiel,

00:04:37.160 who was just amazing. And I was, again, researching. I was really interested in things like how people

00:04:42.820 balance concerns with autonomy and connectedness. It was a theme, actually, that's run through my entire

00:04:47.880 research career. Kind of, if you think about how they balance concerns with self and other. And I

00:04:53.480 started getting interested in that in terms of moral reasoning, how people resolve moral conflicts,

00:04:58.260 especially between self and other. I did my dissertation research in India, looking at,

00:05:04.400 I think it was called, reasoning about rights and responsibilities in the context of Indian family

00:05:09.180 life. So basically, I became interested in how, especially how gender hierarchy in a very traditional

00:05:15.920 place like India impacted how people resolved conflicts between their personal needs and their others' needs.

00:05:23.180 Some people had said that India is a duty-based culture, and it's all about meeting the needs of

00:05:28.580 others. Whereas the United States is a rights-based culture, and it's all about meeting our own needs.

00:05:34.340 I thought, well, is that really true? I mean, what about gender? It seems like with a lot of gender 0.75

00:05:39.860 hierarchy that, yes, women really need to do their duty and meet their husband's needs, but husbands have a

00:05:45.840 lot of rights to do what they want. So you can't really separate out power and gender and culture 0.62

00:05:51.460 from the way people think about things. And by the way, I did find that. I found that they emphasize

00:05:57.060 duties for wives and rights for husband, but the Indian woman were like, but that's not fair. 1.00

00:06:03.140 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

00:06:07.880 that we aren't totally dictated to by our culture. We're individuals who can reason and decide, actually,

00:06:13.640 that's not fair. I think that should change. While I was in India, I started, basically, I talk about it a lot

00:06:20.480 in my book, but while I was in India, my life fell apart, basically. I had been married and it was

00:06:26.420 kind of a, I'll go ahead and say it right here because we're talking. What had happened was I left

00:06:31.460 my husband for another man, which is something that I was a very moral person. I never, ever thought I

00:06:38.020 would be in that situation, but it happened. So I left my husband for another man who was supposed to

00:06:43.960 join me in India and he didn't. And basically, so the whole thing fell apart and I came back to

00:06:50.840 Berkeley. And actually, when I came back, talk about trauma, he was, he had brain cancer and he

00:06:55.920 died within a year. The man I left my husband for, who didn't leave his partner for her. And so

00:07:01.980 basically I was a mess. I was feeling a lot of shame. It was very traumatic. I consider myself a very

00:07:07.920 moral, honest person. And the fact that I got myself in that situation kind of was just really

00:07:13.040 upsetting to me that I had allowed myself to get in that situation. Plus the fact that it really

00:07:18.600 didn't work out so well, right? So he didn't come and the guy I left my husband for, ended up dying

00:07:24.220 of cancer within a year. My husband, who had been divorced when I got back, hated me. And I was just

00:07:30.280 a basket case, basically. And so I thought I would learn mindfulness meditation because I'd heard that

00:07:35.620 mindfulness was good for stress and trauma and all this stuff, which I was going through.

00:07:39.980 So I started learning about Buddhism as a way to kind of help me through what I was going through.

00:07:46.520 What kind of support network did you have at this time? So I'm trying to picture this. So

00:07:49.880 how long were you in India? A year. I was in India for a year.

00:07:54.080 And so you come back and you're in the process of writing your dissertation now, I assume?

00:07:58.940 Yes. I wrote up my dissertation.

00:08:00.540 What type of interaction you're having with your girlfriends? Are they

00:08:04.440 consoling you? Do you feel isolated?

00:08:07.620 I had a very good support network. And actually, believe it or not, I had actually met the man who

00:08:12.280 was going to be my second husband when I was in India. He came as well, which helped. It was a

00:08:17.580 very soap opera-ish, Peter. It was like days of our lives, right? It was kind of the script of a soap

00:08:23.480 opera, all these elements that came together. I had support, but I knew I really needed something

00:08:30.160 to help me deal with everything I'd been going through. And I was always a spiritual person.

00:08:35.140 My mother had books by like Indian gurus. Dharam Das's Be Here Now was on my coffee table,

00:08:40.720 which is partly what drew me to India, to be totally honest. I also thought that I might

00:08:44.780 find some spiritual awakening there. It didn't actually happen in India. It happened when I got

00:08:50.180 back. But nonetheless, I was always kind of drawn to those alternate ways of thinking about the world.

00:08:55.980 So it was kind of a natural for me to start meditation.

00:08:58.520 And what drew you to a mindfulness form of meditation? There are other forms, of course,

00:09:05.140 and especially being in India, certainly the birthplace of transcendental meditation or other

00:09:10.180 things.

00:09:10.940 To be totally honest, it was because this meditation group, which was the Thich Nhat Hanh group,

00:09:16.360 a group that followed the teachings of the Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, it was right down the street

00:09:19.980 from me. So it was kind of happenstance. The one thing that I kind of liked about Buddhism,

00:09:25.160 I didn't know a lot about it, but I knew enough to know that it was more scientifically grounded.

00:09:30.540 The thing about Buddhism is it's more like a science of the mind. It's not a lot of belief

00:09:35.120 systems. You don't have to believe in reincarnation. You don't have to believe in

00:09:38.760 a god or gods, just basically a way of understanding the mind. And because I was a scientist getting my

00:09:45.660 PhD, that also drew me. And then plus, I'd just been hearing good things about mindfulness

00:09:49.980 meditation. But really, thank goodness it was a Thich Nhat Hanh group because Thich Nhat Hanh is 0.99

00:09:55.960 one of the Buddhist teachers that talks a lot about self-compassion, more than a lot of other

00:10:00.580 teachers do. Others do, but that's like a big theme of Thich Nhat Hanh. And so the very first night I

00:10:06.300 went, the woman leading the group talked about self-compassion. If I had gone to a transcendental

00:10:11.320 meditation group or some other group, it may have been, I don't know, Shambhala or some other type of

00:10:15.860 meditation, they might not have talked about self-compassion. It may have just been about

00:10:20.080 quieting the mind, stilling the mind, observing the mind. Not the group I went to. She talked a lot

00:10:25.160 about self-compassion and it had an immediate impact on me. I mean, literally, when I got home

00:10:30.660 the first night, I thought, wow, I had never even thought about being actively kind and supportive to

00:10:39.780 myself. I wasn't a particularly harsh self-critic. You might think that I was. I actually wasn't. I was

00:10:44.880 kind of like an average self-critic, but I was feeling a lot of shame about everything I'd gone

00:10:49.580 through and the kind of soap opera that had become my life. When I just started being actively kind

00:10:54.940 and supportive to myself, I started speaking to myself in a way like, hey, Kristen, I know you're

00:10:59.540 hurting. This is really hard. It's understandable. There's a lot of reasons for how things unfolded the

00:11:04.900 way they did. I mean, I'm here for you. I started really just, I did it silently, but speaking to myself

00:11:11.080 as if I was speaking to a friend and it really was like finding a superpower I didn't even know

00:11:16.780 I had. It was almost immediate, the impact it had on me. Now, mindfulness meditation took a lot

00:11:22.280 longer to figure out. It's a more subtle practice. Then I did learn to meditate and I went on many

00:11:27.260 retreats. But self-compassion and probably because I have fairly secure attachment with my parents,

00:11:32.560 it wasn't very difficult for me to learn and I got it almost immediately, but I did have to practice

00:11:37.440 applying it to my life. Now, how do you go to the point where you are able to sort of

00:11:43.920 say to yourself in compassionate ways, the things that you're saying without first being aware of

00:11:50.940 what the default voice is that's probably happening subconsciously? Is that necessary? Because to me,

00:11:57.540 that's the harder part is I think we'll discuss later. Most of us have some level and some more than

00:12:04.900 others of being incredibly critical. The real challenge is how subconscious that critical

00:12:11.020 voice is and how we're not aware of it. So were you even aware at that point of how degrading you

00:12:17.700 could be to yourself or how demeaning you could be? I think you're right that some of these things

00:12:22.980 are less conscious than others. Like I say, I actually wasn't a particularly harsh self-critic.

00:12:29.140 It was more that I was just lost in the, I mean, I was feeling shame. And so you might say there was

00:12:35.360 self-criticism, but it wasn't an entrenched pattern for me. How were your behaviors? Because I guess that

00:12:40.960 to me is one of the telltale signs. You come back from India, you're probably at that point, mostly 1.00

00:12:45.980 sitting in your apartment and much of your work is analyzing data and writing. But how did that shame

00:12:51.560 manifest itself as an outward manifestation of whatever the inner voice was saying? Were you in any way

00:12:57.600 depressed or anxious or anything like that? I think I was feeling discombobulated. That's probably the

00:13:05.080 best word I can use to describe it. I didn't get into a deep depression. I also had a lot of stuff

00:13:11.340 going on in my life at the same time. So again, I was also starting a new relationship, which kind of

00:13:16.420 made it more complicated. It also gave me, you might say, some support. But I've always been

00:13:22.220 psychologically oriented, kind of interested in my internal landscape. I could be aware of the

00:13:28.640 feelings of guilt and shame. For me, the biggest shameful thing was I've always identified as being

00:13:35.060 a very honest person. And the fact that I did that was just, it was really hard for me because it just

00:13:41.660 goes against my self-concept. The fact that I got myself in that situation. I understand it, how it

00:13:47.600 could happen. But it was really hard for me. I started noticing these thoughts about my self-concept.

00:13:54.860 What does this mean about the type of person I am? And that was really helped by starting Buddhism

00:14:00.960 because Buddhism is all about understanding this sense of self that causes suffering, this sense of

00:14:06.720 identification with the separate self, the kind of thoughts of I'm this type of person, or I am that

00:14:12.120 type of person. Did it take a long time to notice that? It certainly got better as I got more

00:14:17.380 deep into it, especially if you go deeper into meditation, you can start to see even more subtle

00:14:22.940 layers of self-judgment. But it wasn't necessary to get there before I could start seeing the benefits

00:14:28.720 of self-compassion. So it deepened over time. A lot of people are just blown away by the simple thing

00:14:35.120 of putting your hand on your heart and saying something kind and supportive to yourself. Here's the

00:14:40.120 thing, Peter. I really believe in part psychology. I've used internal family system therapy. I used that type

00:14:46.080 therapy for many years. That's Dick Schwartz, right? Dick Schwartz's model where we have different

00:14:50.240 parts of ourself. And I really do believe we have different parts of ourself. Can you explain to

00:14:54.800 folks a little bit about what Dick's work is? So the idea is we have different parts of ourselves

00:14:59.140 that all kind of play a role. And it's a terrible name. He called it internal family systems. But

00:15:03.840 basically the idea is we have different parts of ourself that kind of form a family and interact

00:15:08.980 like a family, but it's on the inside and not just outside. And so we have a part of ourselves

00:15:13.700 that may be self-critical, maybe feel shame. We also have a part of ourself that maybe wants to

00:15:18.580 defend against the wounds of the shamed part of ourselves. So maybe he's really angry at others or

00:15:23.400 gets really busy. You know, we have different parts of them, a different function. The function of all

00:15:28.460 the parts ultimately is safety. It's kind of survival. That's kind of how these operate. So there's a part

00:15:34.840 that defends our ego as a form of survival. There's a part that defends against those feelings of shame,

00:15:39.480 but there's also a compassionate part of ourselves. I really believe that all of us have. And that

00:15:45.380 compassionate part of ourselves typically gets exercised when we're relating to others, people

00:15:51.680 we care about, maybe our children or good friends or other people we're close to. We also have a

00:15:57.720 compassionate part of ourselves. So I don't think it's the case that you need to totally uncover that

00:16:04.560 all the self-critical parts of ourselves before we can activate the self-compassionate part.

00:16:09.480 It's there. We actually are already pretty familiar with it as it relates to other people.

00:16:14.760 So I think what happened is I was able to activate that self-compassionate part. I was able to see,

00:16:19.600 wow, this really makes a difference. If you take that self-compassionate part and aim it inward as

00:16:24.280 opposed to outward, it almost immediately changes the landscape. Also the physiological as well as the

00:16:29.800 mental landscape. You're actually moving from the threat defense mode to the attachment system mode.

00:16:35.060 You're kind of priming your own attachment security when you tap into the compassionate part of

00:16:39.800 yourself. So for me, it got better over time. It went more deep over time. I was able to uncover

00:16:45.640 more layers, more hidden cells full of shame or inadequacy related to my father and all the stories

00:16:50.920 that you unpack in therapy. But it was easier than I thought it was. That's the thing that surprised me

00:16:56.900 over my career. It's actually easier than you might think to help people get in touch with their

00:17:02.040 compassionate self. Because for many, many people, that compassionate self is very, very well

00:17:08.460 practiced as an expert, just aimed at others. So you don't have to create something totally new

00:17:13.460 that's not there. That's the useful thing about it. Yeah. I have a friend who in sort of helping me

00:17:19.300 think about this. So unlike you, I'm probably naturally much more self-critical. You sort of

00:17:24.840 describe yourself as probably in the middle, kind of normal. I would be an Olympic level self-critic,

00:17:30.100 including actually audibly. I mean, I could literally, you'd think I was a crazy person

00:17:34.800 at times because I could literally speak in a voice like this to myself in an incredibly harsh

00:17:40.180 and critical way. So a friend of mine, Rick Elias, who has been on this podcast and who I consider not

00:17:47.560 just a friend, but kind of a life mentor said, I want you to practice something, which is when you're

00:17:55.080 in that moment and you're about to have that discussion with yourself, I want you to picture

00:18:00.300 that the same events occurred that are upsetting you, but now it wasn't you that did it. It was one

00:18:07.000 of your close friends that did it. How would you console him? This is interesting. It was for me a

00:18:13.760 process of five months of doing this. But for example, I'll give you, so there's two things I do

00:18:19.080 almost every day. I either shoot my bow and arrow or drive my race car simulator. Now those are two

00:18:25.780 seemingly nonsensical activities, but unfortunately they both have become barometers of self-worth.

00:18:33.000 So when they don't go well, the inner self-directed hatred is enormous and it results in anger and

00:18:41.620 tantrums and outbursts and feelings of total worthlessness when they don't go well. So instead what I

00:18:47.680 started doing, and I literally did this every single day for five months is after every single

00:18:53.080 episode of doing one of those activities, which meant every single day, I would take my phone out

00:18:59.000 and I would speak into the recorder as though it were my friend who had that bad experience.

00:19:06.920 And I would say, I would use my name. So I'd say, Hey Peter, I know you just had a really bad day

00:19:13.120 shooting and you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if your life depended on it, but it doesn't

00:19:17.960 mean you're bad. It just means that you had a bad day at archery today, but you're still a great dad.

00:19:23.040 And you're going to get another chance to come out here and do this tomorrow. And there are probably

00:19:27.440 reasons for it today. You might not even know why you didn't shoot poorly, but I would send text

00:19:33.240 that message to my therapist every single day as a form of accountability. It really was amazing

00:19:40.520 how much it deescalated me. It was actually very quick. It used to be at the point where driving

00:19:47.420 or shooting poorly could ruin my day. And it got to the point where within about three minutes,

00:19:55.160 I had forgotten about it. Yeah. That's the power of self-compassion. And again,

00:20:00.360 it's because you already had that part developed. It had been one thing if you hadn't had any experience

00:20:05.000 your whole life of how to be compassionate or supportive to someone. But you'd spend many,

00:20:10.460 many years developing that skill, probably with your kids or your friends. So you just needed to

00:20:14.880 access that part of yourself, which you weren't accessing before. And that's why I found to get

00:20:20.740 back to kind of in terms of for myself, that's why I was blown away by how useful it was.

00:20:27.820 And then, so I started getting interested in Buddhism and the whole idea of self-concept.

00:20:32.180 What is this thing we call a self anyway? And it really made a lot of sense to me, this way of

00:20:36.940 understanding how the sense of separate self and ego and separation leads to suffering.

00:20:43.180 And so I thought, well, maybe I want to kind of pivot. And I didn't pivot totally away,

00:20:47.620 but pivot away from moral reasoning and get into understanding self-concept,

00:20:51.960 how the development of our self-concept impacts things. So I did my postdoc with Susan Harder,

00:20:58.120 studying self-concept development. She was also studying autonomy and connectedness.

00:21:03.880 So it was a natural fit. So I've been studying autonomy and connectedness and moral reasoning,

00:21:08.380 and she was studying autonomy and connectedness and relationships. Your self-concept, are you

00:21:13.260 other-focused? Are you self-focused? Are you both? So it was an absolutely natural fit for me to go work

00:21:17.980 with her and do my postdoc. But she was also one of the country's leading self-esteem researchers.

00:21:22.820 And she had done research along with others showing that self-esteem is not necessarily a good thing.

00:21:29.420 It's good to like yourself as opposed to hate yourself, but the ways we get our self-esteem

00:21:34.340 can be very, very problematic. A lot of social comparison is contingent. Like for you,

00:21:40.580 if you shoot the bullseye, you feel good about yourself. If you miss it, you hate yourself. I mean,

00:21:44.500 that's not very stable. It's very contingent. It's unstable. So it was when I was finding out more

00:21:50.500 about self-esteem. And I was just kind of questioning the whole self-esteem thing anyway

00:21:54.120 through my Buddhist practice. And what is this thing we call an ego and that we invest so much

00:21:58.400 in that we have to judge it positively and it can't be negative at all. And then it was just

00:22:02.660 a natural to think, wow, I think self-compassion is a lot more helpful than self-esteem. When I was

00:22:07.920 working with Susan, I was developing all my ideas about that. And then eventually I came to show that

00:22:13.900 empirically when I got UT Austin.

00:22:15.660 When you sort of take a broad lens at human psychology, when did this idea of self-esteem

00:22:24.160 become something that was really pushed? I mean, certainly as long as I can remember as a kid,

00:22:30.480 I mean, this is what was talked about all day. Every day the table was pounded. Kids that don't

00:22:35.040 have high self-esteem do drugs and whatever sort of, but that couldn't have been the narrative forever.

00:22:40.220 Was there somebody that was a champion for this school of thinking or?

00:22:43.300 Well, it's interesting because if you actually look at the founding American psychology,

00:22:48.140 William James, who was writing early 1900s, 19th century, he wrote about self-esteem and he

00:22:54.280 actually identified contingent self-esteem. He defined self-esteem as perceptions of competence

00:23:01.380 in domains of importance. In other words, being good at those things in life that are important to

00:23:06.200 you. Like you could probably care less if you're bad at hockey, if you don't play hockey, but you do care

00:23:10.900 if you're bad at archery because you care about archery. That's kind of the way self-esteem works.

00:23:14.780 We need to be good at those things in life that we value. So he was actually talking about it way back

00:23:19.980 then, but then it didn't really take off in psychology. Then they started going into psychoanalysis and then

00:23:26.060 into behaviorism. And it was probably people like Rosenberg, I'll blank it on his first name, who created the

00:23:32.840 Rosenberg self-esteem scale. That was probably one of the big factors, creation of good measures of

00:23:39.180 self-esteem because people can say, wow, when people score higher on the self-esteem scale, they're less

00:23:44.400 depressed, they're less anxious, they're happier. And then that kind of started kicking the ball

00:23:49.320 rolling of noticing. And it is true. People with higher self-esteem have better mental health than

00:23:55.460 people with low self-esteem. But the problems is, it's all the unhealthy ways they get to that high

00:24:01.140 self-esteem, like feeling better than others, bullying others. We know that the reason kids in middle

00:24:07.580 schools start to bully others is to have high self-esteem because they want to feel good about

00:24:11.140 themselves in comparison.

00:24:13.320 How do we compare and contrast narcissism with self-esteem or other negative traits? Because

00:24:19.700 self-esteem by itself doesn't really sound to be negatively valenced, but a lot of those other

00:24:23.960 traits do.

00:24:25.020 There's nothing wrong with self-esteem. And in fact, there's a pretty strong correlation between

00:24:29.060 self-compassion and self-esteem. If you're self-compassionate, you have higher self-esteem and you have less

00:24:34.000 self-hate. So they're linked. But the healthy form of self-esteem is what they call unconditional

00:24:39.760 self-esteem. You feel worthy, not because you're good at something that you value, you feel worthy

00:24:46.240 just because you're a human being, an intrinsic sense of self-worth. And that's the type of self-esteem

00:24:52.220 that self-compassion gives you. If you look at them head to head, I compare my self-compassion

00:24:57.400 measure against a self-esteem measure. You'll find that it's self-compassion that explains stability

00:25:03.760 of self-worth over time. In other words, it doesn't go up and down as much because it's less contingent

00:25:09.740 on outcomes on a good day and on a bad day.

00:25:13.700 So just to make sure I understand that, there's some discordance between self-esteem and self-compassion.

00:25:19.040 A person with self-compassion generally has self-esteem, but not everybody with self-esteem

00:25:24.600 has self-compassion. Yes, exactly. It's hard to tease them apart. But for instance,

00:25:30.220 if you have self-esteem because you're a narcissist, you probably won't have higher self-compassion.

00:25:35.880 You don't have lower self-compassion either, because that would have to say that people who

00:25:39.620 aren't compassionate, who hate themselves have higher narcissism. So they're completely orthogonal.

00:25:44.680 When you put them all together in a regression equation, you control for self-esteem and self-compassion

00:25:49.280 and then narcissism as the outcome. It actually came out as 0.0 correlation, totally orthogonal

00:25:54.840 between self-compassion and narcissism, where self-esteem, I forget what it was. I think it

00:26:00.620 was a moderate correlation. I'd have to look again. It's not that self-esteem is bad. We want to feel

00:26:06.320 worthy. It's really why we feel worthy, how we feel worthy. It's important.

00:26:11.560 I think viscerally, it makes so much sense using, like I said, the trivial example of do you shoot

00:26:17.100 well or not. If your self-worth is dependent on performance, you're doomed to fail at some point.

00:26:24.620 Right. And then when you do fail, what do you do? And so people criticize themselves thinking it's

00:26:30.100 going to improve their performance. And by the way, it does kind of work. It has to be admitted.

00:26:35.540 Many people have gotten through med school or law school through harsh self-criticism. So it's not

00:26:40.460 like it doesn't work at all, but it works with a lot of negative side effects, like a performance

00:26:46.200 anxiety is a big one. So if you have a lot of anxiety because you're slamming yourself, you're

00:26:51.500 beating yourself up. Next time you have some big test or something, you're really worried about doing

00:26:56.200 well because you know if you don't, you've gotten the negative reinforcement of beating yourself up.

00:27:01.120 So it makes you more anxious, which actually undermines your performance. It can make you more

00:27:05.480 disconnected from others if you're really invested in doing better than other people. And that can lead

00:27:10.180 to like little interpersonal behaviors that actually aren't good at creating closeness and

00:27:14.360 connection. It kind of works. There's a lot of problems with it. And self-compassion works

00:27:19.860 better. What we know in the research is constructive criticism is more effective than harsh criticism.

00:27:26.360 And we know that. Of course we know that. You still want criticism. You want to know where you went

00:27:30.520 wrong and how you could improve. It's not like, oh, that's fine. If you're a professional archer

00:27:35.860 saying, oh, well, just had a bad day, that's not going to help you. And that's not going to help

00:27:40.660 you achieve your goals, which means it's actually not ultimately loving.

00:27:43.560 If you're a professional archer, you want to do your best because that's related to your happiness

00:27:49.180 and well-being. But what's going to help you do your best? Constructive criticism says, okay, well,

00:27:55.220 here's what didn't work. And you did it this way. This didn't work. Why don't we try it this way?

00:27:58.880 I believe in you. You've got my support. I'm here for you. That type of constructive voice is actually

00:28:04.060 more effective. Yes, a coach that says, you're crap. You better do better. It kind of works. It doesn't 1.00

00:28:09.760 work as well as constructive criticism. And we know that. Because obviously that's one of the

00:28:14.520 concerns that anybody would have going down this path of self-compassion. If somebody had spoken to

00:28:20.700 me when I was in high school or college and said, look, we're going to work on you not beating yourself

00:28:25.880 up, I would have said, no way. I'm not willing to give up my edge in exchange for feeling better in

00:28:34.280 the moment. Right. Which is ironic because it actually doesn't give you an edge. It actually

00:28:38.480 is not nearly as effective. It gives you more of an edge if you have constructive criticism than

00:28:44.700 destructive criticism. And again, study after study shows that. Yeah. So walk me through some of the

00:28:50.460 social psychological experiments that can test that hypothesis. Research has come out of UC Berkeley,

00:28:57.360 which shows a lot of research shows that self-compassion is not only more effective than

00:29:03.360 self-criticism, which kind of occurs naturally, but also is more effective than self-esteem as a

00:29:08.660 motivator. So just as an example of one type of study, they had UC Berkeley undergraduates. They had

00:29:14.660 them all fail a vocabulary test. They took like the hardest items from the SAT. They had the students

00:29:22.180 take the test and everyone failed because it was a really hard test. They split up the students into

00:29:27.100 three groups. One group, they gave instructions to be self-compassionate about the failure. It was a really

00:29:32.820 hard test. Try not to beat yourself up about it. Just try to be kind and supportive to yourself

00:29:38.240 about failing this test. The other group that gave a self-esteem instruction, they said,

00:29:42.900 don't worry about it. You got into Berkeley. You know you're smart. Kind of give them a self-esteem

00:29:47.340 boost. And the other group, they didn't give any instructions, which meant they were probably

00:29:51.480 self-critical. They didn't encourage the students to be self-critical and be kind of unethical.

00:29:56.180 They just didn't say anything. What they did is they said, you're going to take the test again.

00:30:02.180 You got some free time to study for the exam. They had materials they could study for the

00:30:06.820 vocabulary test. Just kind of let us know when you're done and you're ready to take the exam.

00:30:12.460 And what they found was that people who were told to be self-compassionate about the failure

00:30:18.180 studied longer and harder than the other two groups. And how long people study was related to

00:30:24.540 how well they did on the next exam. I mean, what would be another interesting group as a fourth group

00:30:29.120 would be a group that was berated and told... You're crap. 1.00

00:30:33.640 Yeah. Like you guys got into Berkeley and you still flunked this test. That's pathetic. 1.00

00:30:38.380 I'd be curious to know if that was positive or negative in terms of reinforcing additional study. 0.98

00:30:44.420 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

00:30:49.360 actually insult subjects in an experiment like that because it's considered psychologically damaging.

00:30:54.440 Let's pause for a moment on that. The IRB won't let you say to an undergraduate something like that.

00:31:01.260 Whereas think about what was done 40 and 50 years ago with some of the famous psychology experiments

00:31:06.060 down at Stanford. That's why they've changed the IRB. And actually, Peter, do you know what you have

00:31:10.400 to use as an insult? The feedback you use is you did average. That's considered an insult. If you tell

00:31:16.820 people their score was average, it's considered an insult. There's lots of research like that.

00:31:22.220 So what happens is when you're self-compassionate about a failure, first of all, it allows you to

00:31:27.060 learn more from the failure. I mean, it's such a truism. Failure is our best teacher. But if you're

00:31:32.240 full of shame and you're just really mad at yourself, you don't actually have the presence

00:31:36.360 of mind to look objectively and say, huh, where did I go wrong? How could I do better next time?

00:31:42.280 But self-compassion support actually does give you that presence of mind to be able to learn from your

00:31:47.840 experiences. And so self-compassion leads to what they call growth mindset, where you actually learn

00:31:52.800 from your mistakes as opposed to a fixed mindset, which means you just think you're stupid or smart, 0.99

00:31:56.960 one or the other. 0.99

00:31:58.540 How soon in a child's development can these patterns be set?

00:32:05.100 We don't have a lot of data with kids. Partly that's because we don't have a good way to measure

00:32:10.740 self-compassion in children. There are a few scales actually just came out the scale for youth that can

00:32:17.500 be used for younger kids at brand new. It came out like last year. It hasn't been used much.

00:32:21.940 We don't have a lot of data on this, but I suspect that about age seven or eight, once kids have learned

00:32:30.420 about friendship and they have like Puget would call two-way thinking, you can understand reciprocity,

00:32:36.160 they understand concepts of fairness, they understand kind of that back and forth, they can

00:32:40.360 take the perspective of another. To be self-compassionate, you have to take the perspective

00:32:46.580 of another towards yourself. And also, by the way, self-criticism doesn't really kick in until later

00:32:52.280 on in development, partly because of that, because children are just kind of like happy and they have

00:32:56.940 a positivity bias and they tend to think they're great unless their parents tell them the exact

00:33:01.620 opposite. It's called one-way thinking, they're all one or the other. I would assume two-way thinking

00:33:07.280 would have to kick in, which would be about age seven or eight. So there are some good books out

00:33:11.940 there and you can find them on my website if you want to get the reference to kind of teach kids when

00:33:16.980 they learn about friendship that they should also be their own best friend. Learn about what it means

00:33:21.520 to be a good friend, they should also learn to be a good friend to themselves. And I suspect that's

00:33:27.300 probably the best time to start introducing these concepts. And then adolescence, once you start

00:33:33.880 getting metacognition and you get more abstract thinking, it's even more appropriate because

00:33:38.820 that's when really the self-concept formation starts kicking in. What kind of person am I?

00:33:44.140 And then you can start having conversations with teenagers. They actually do understand

00:33:48.320 issues like, do you really want your sense of self-worth to be contingent on being pretty enough or

00:33:54.560 having people like you or being smart enough? They have enough abstract thinking skills to be

00:33:59.000 able to understand something like self-compassion. Now, some would argue that we're sort of in the

00:34:04.320 midst of a social experiment for which the outcome might not be known for decades, which is a group of

00:34:11.240 kids that are growing up in a world where comparison is at a level that you or I couldn't imagine.

00:34:19.320 You and I grew up, so I'll speak for myself, but I didn't have a clue outside of my neighborhood.

00:34:26.040 There was nothing. I mean, even looking at the TV was very abstract. Not like I knew anybody that

00:34:32.220 lived out of the borough of the city that I lived in. And you barely watch TV. There was no way to sense

00:34:40.680 what was happening. And of course, today that couldn't be further from the truth. So you spoke earlier

00:34:45.640 about ego being so entwined in self-compassion, sorry, in comparison to others that you would

00:34:52.440 argue that we are in an environment today where the potential for that comparison, that ranking is

00:34:58.840 so high. So it would seem to me that self-compassion is more important today than potentially it ever has

00:35:04.100 been. I hear what you're saying. I think it certainly is frightening. On the other hand, I don't know a lot

00:35:10.940 about it. My son doesn't use social media. I don't use social media. I'm like a dinosaur. I

00:35:15.640 my book has a Facebook account, but I don't. So it's a whole other world. And I know I'm not

00:35:19.940 really part of it. My son's not part of it either, but I do from friends who have teenage kids. I do

00:35:25.080 hear this. On the other hand, it seems like that the younger generation is more open-minded

00:35:31.320 than past generations, that it may be because they've got the ability to know so many different

00:35:38.200 stories. Like in some ways, when we were growing up, probably a little older than you, but still it was

00:35:43.260 like there was a few sitcoms on and everyone watched all in the family or mash or whatever

00:35:47.860 it was. I'm probably dating myself. You're probably like seven when those came out, but

00:35:51.660 nonetheless, there were certain sitcoms that everyone watched. And that was kind of the

00:35:55.900 unique frame of reference, shared frames of reference, at least in cultures like the United

00:36:01.040 States. But now people, they can get the point of view of like so many diverse points of view,

00:36:06.580 depending on what they like, what they're interested in. I haven't seen any data. Well,

00:36:14.420 that's not quite true. There is some data showing that suicide rates are up and stress is up. I just

00:36:20.820 don't know. I think the jury's out. I think the jury's out. I think in some ways, social media can be

00:36:25.580 used. For instance, if you're part of the LBGTQ community, you have access to people like you in a

00:36:31.440 way that you wouldn't have had 20 years ago. And in that sense, social media could be a positive

00:36:36.940 thing. It can make you feel less isolated and more connected to others. On the other hand,

00:36:42.120 if you're just looking at Instagram and followers, maybe not. So I think, I just don't know what to

00:36:46.780 think about it. It's scary though. I admit it. It's really scary. We don't know.

00:36:50.980 That's an interesting point. Now you mentioned your son does not use social media. Your son has autism,

00:36:56.420 correct? Yes.

00:36:57.300 He's how old now?

00:36:58.460 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

00:37:05.680 how proud I am of him that he just got his driver's license. It is like independence is just around the

00:37:12.460 corner. He's a sophomore at high school. He was delayed because we homeschooled him. We started him

00:37:17.920 a little bit back so that he could catch up academically. But yeah, he's doing really well,

00:37:22.480 really well. You probably start to figure out that something is not exactly quote unquote normal

00:37:30.140 when your son is two or three years old. I knew earlier because I was trained as a developmental

00:37:35.840 psychologist and I knew something was up, but there's a myth that autistic children don't make 1.00

00:37:41.720 eye contact. They make eye contact a little less frequently, but a lot of them make a lot of eye

00:37:46.520 contact, especially with their parents. And I literally used to joke with his father,

00:37:50.580 ha, well, at least we know it's not autism. Look at that eye contact. But then it turned out it was

00:37:55.780 autism. Well, he's actually an extroverted. There are extroverted autists. He's an extroverted autist. 0.60

00:38:01.560 So what did you notice? And when the diagnosis finally came, how did you start to process that? And

00:38:07.620 how did your training in self-compassion serve you? I started noticing because he was delayed in

00:38:13.540 language development. Actually, delayed pointing is one of the biggest indicators of some sort of delay.

00:38:19.300 And he was just using the echolalia, just the repeating of the words and kind of the repetitive

00:38:24.560 behaviors. But he was very social. I had the stereotype that autistic kids, they weren't loving,

00:38:31.240 they weren't affectionate, they didn't make eye contact, which wasn't him at all. But then once I

00:38:35.720 realized that a lot of autists are extroverted and social, I realized, oh yeah, he's got it. And then 1.00

00:38:40.580 we had the official diagnosis. It was devastating. It was devastating. The first feeling, quite honestly,

00:38:46.420 is one of disappointment. It just has to be kind of owned. This isn't what I imagined being a parent

00:38:51.460 would be like. I imagined something different. These long, in-depth philosophical conversations

00:38:57.360 about life. And actually, we're starting to finally have those, but it took a lot longer than I thought

00:39:02.200 it would. He wasn't potty trained until he was five, which is really, really hard. He would tantrum a lot,

00:39:09.220 well past the terrible twos. And so I was disappointed. I was overwhelmed. It wasn't the

00:39:16.000 plan I had signed up for. And so my self-compassion and my mindfulness practice both together, and they

00:39:21.320 really can't be separated. Mindfulness is a necessary ingredient of self-compassion. The day after he got

00:39:27.720 his diagnosis, I went on a meditation retreat. And I just sat there on my cushion, and I cried.

00:39:34.020 But what I did was I allowed every single emotion to come up. You aren't supposed to feel disappointed

00:39:39.640 because I love my son more than anything else in the world. I didn't say, okay, this emotion's allowed,

00:39:45.400 and that emotion isn't allowed. I just let any emotion I had to come up, feelings of grief,

00:39:51.180 feelings of disappointment, feelings of fear. And not only was I allowed myself to be with them

00:39:58.060 without suppressing them or fighting them, the thing that made the biggest difference for me

00:40:03.880 is I actively gave myself support because of them. This is really hard, Kristen. I know you're

00:40:10.080 disappointed. I know you're frightened. It's going to be okay. I'm here for you. I'm so sorry that you're

00:40:16.000 having struggling, but I care about you. I treated myself just like I would treat a good friend who had

00:40:21.820 a similar situation. What I found, and over and over again, the more I could give myself compassion,

00:40:27.740 compassion for my son's autism, the better parent I was to him. And the more I could accept him,

00:40:33.420 the more I could accept my own difficult feelings about his autism, the more I could actually accept

00:40:37.680 his autism. Whereas if I had fought them and suppressed them or said, I'm not supposed to feel

00:40:42.420 this way, or I can allow myself to feel this way, I think it would have created a tension that would

00:40:47.280 have actually made it more difficult to accept him for who he was. And when you were going through

00:40:52.480 this process, did your husband mirror you in that practice or did he sort of have his own way of

00:41:00.720 doing this? So you were kind of in this journey of you were supporting him and he was maybe delayed.

00:41:07.100 And what was that dynamic like? A bit of both. He had kind of his own way of dealing with things.

00:41:13.740 He's much more of a doer and wrote this book called The Horse Boy. And he thought about,

00:41:18.020 how can I make this into an adventure? That's kind of his way of dealing with things. If life throws

00:41:22.900 you lemons, how am I going to make lemonade? Which is a little different than my way of doing it. And so

00:41:27.660 he had this whole adventure and we took our son to Mongolia and he wrote a bestselling book and a

00:41:33.360 documentary about it. And he really tried to look on the positive side of it. There's really value to

00:41:38.980 that as well. A different approach than what I took. Mine's kind of more like, how do I hold

00:41:43.740 the pain with love? And he was like, yeah, I think he has a line in his book. When life gives you lemons,

00:41:49.900 why stop at lemonade? Make a margarita. Very much his way of dealing with things. And by the way, we

00:41:54.960 aren't together anymore. Just so you know, we split up about nine years ago. There was a point in that

00:42:00.640 documentary, by the way. Oh, so you did see it? Yes, yes, I did. It's very powerful. It's at least

00:42:06.660 represented in the documentary that Rowan basically didn't make a sound. Maybe I'm misremembering

00:42:13.940 this, but it was only when he first encountered the horse that he sort of came to life. Am I

00:42:20.680 remembering that correctly? It was the first time he did a complete sentence. So before he'd repeat

00:42:26.560 words, it might be like food he liked back then, it might be bottle or water or muffin or something

00:42:32.640 like that. He would repeat the words. But it's the first time when he got on Betsy. I actually

00:42:37.100 wasn't there when it happened. So I'm assuming it's true. He said, he's a nice horse. Betsy's

00:42:43.280 actually female, but he's a nice horse. First time he was on the back of the horse. And I did see a

00:42:48.780 change. So there's some research to suggest on horses. It's actually, they think it may have to do

00:42:53.560 with the cerebellum because when you continually have to find and refine your balance, it influences the

00:42:59.660 cerebellum, which helps brain integration. And one of the things that's happening with autism is a

00:43:04.760 lack of brain integration because overgrowth of white matter. You probably know all this about

00:43:09.420 autism, lack of adequate pruning. It's hard to get cross-brain communication in autistic kids, which 1.00

00:43:15.080 is one of the reasons you get kind of hyper-specialization and fixations. There's a really

00:43:19.760 good scientific reason to think why things like being on a horse, finding the refinding and the balance

00:43:25.520 would help cross-brain communication, which might allow for things like language. And also it was

00:43:29.900 just a lot of fun. Basically learned to speak on horseback. It was pretty amazing.

00:43:35.000 Remind me how old Rowan was when you guys did this trip?

00:43:37.840 About five, between five and six.

00:43:39.780 And you obviously alluded to kind of these outbursts, right? I mean, children with autism

00:43:44.980 obviously can have remarkable outbursts.

00:43:48.240 Yeah. They get overwhelmed. My son likes to tell me autistic children, they don't tantrum because

00:43:54.140 they're trying to get their way. They do it just because they get overwhelmed and it's just a

00:43:59.200 natural reaction, but they don't do it to manipulate. So it's interesting, which I think is very true.

00:44:05.000 So where does self-compassion come into trauma? You alluded to it very briefly up front, but

00:44:11.220 there's also some literature for formal diagnoses of PTSD, isn't there?

00:44:16.240 Oh, in terms of self-compassion?

00:44:18.180 Yes.

00:44:18.600 It's not so much that self-compassion aids in the diagnosis of PTSD. There's a lot of research

00:44:24.640 actually on self-compassion and trauma. So there's kind of two parts to that research. One

00:44:29.680 is that people with early childhood trauma, so sexual, emotional, physical abuse,

00:44:35.620 it actually hinders the ability to be self-compassionate as an adult. And that's mainly

00:44:40.260 because of the attachment system. So if you have secure attachment, it means you think you're

00:44:45.420 kind of valuable, you're worthy, and your needs are worth being met. If you had secure attachment

00:44:50.020 with your parents and your parents treated you like you were worthy and they met your needs

00:44:53.680 consistently, then when you're an adult, it's easier to think that I'm worthy and I'm going to

00:44:58.240 meet my needs because I'm worthy of having my needs met. If you have insecure attachment,

00:45:02.980 then you may not think that your needs are worthy of being met. And if your parents were actually

00:45:07.180 harshly critical or actually abusive, what can happen is the system that's supposed to make you feel

00:45:12.980 safe. The attachment system gets fused with feelings of fear because these people who are your only

00:45:19.380 source of safety and comfort in life are also terrifying you. And then so what happens is

00:45:25.280 everything gets kind of jumbled up and mixed in. And for some people actually it can be frightening

00:45:30.600 to give themselves compassion. Paul Gilbert talks about this. He calls it fear of self-compassion

00:45:35.520 because basically when you're activating the attachment system, which is supposed to make you feel safe,

00:45:40.960 it actually makes you unsafe. And so some people when they start opening their hearts with self-compassion,

00:45:46.480 they have memories, traumatic memories come up or like just this voice in their head saying you're 0.99

00:45:50.640 crap, you're worthless, or maybe some memories of kind of some sort of abuse. It's harder to be 0.99

00:45:56.300 self-compassionate if you have a trauma history. But having said that, self-compassion is one of the

00:46:02.800 best ways to deal with early childhood trauma because what you're doing is you're like

00:46:07.000 reparenting yourself. So maybe the program is, okay, you're worthless, you aren't worthy of care. But if you 0.91

00:46:13.920 actually intentionally give yourself compassion for those feelings, which are so hard, wow, it's really

00:46:20.400 hard to feel that I'm worthless. These feelings of shame, they're really difficult. How can I learn to relate

00:46:25.840 to the pain of the trauma with some kindness? It's not like cognitive behavioral therapy where you work

00:46:31.660 directly with rewriting those negative schemas. I mean, that's also useful. It has its role for sure.

00:46:37.360 What you're really doing is learning how to hold the pain, any pain with this kind, supportive stance.

00:46:44.680 And so when you do that, there's actually some research showing you can get what they call earned

00:46:48.080 secure attachment as an adult. You can actually learn to have a secure attachment schema through

00:46:55.000 self-compassion. Maybe your parents didn't meet your needs consistently, but you can learn to meet your

00:47:00.200 own needs consistently when you're frightened or you need help or you need support in some way.

00:47:05.860 It is harder, the road's bumpier, and it usually really helps to have a good therapist, help you

00:47:09.700 unpack all of this. Once people can do it, there's lots of research, especially with compassion-focused

00:47:15.120 therapy created by Paul Gilbert, which is specifically designed for people with early trauma.

00:47:21.400 There's different ways you have to approach it, and the way in is a little different,

00:47:24.500 it has to go slower, and things are a little different. But it actually is remarkably effective,

00:47:28.420 and you can get people who are able to heal from early trauma through self-compassion.

00:47:32.840 And so there's research showing this. If you look at trauma that's not caused by early childhood,

00:47:36.780 for instance, there's a lot of work with combat veterans. So combat veterans who went to Iraq or

00:47:42.120 Afghanistan who experienced a lot of combat trauma, what they found is those veterans who are more

00:47:47.520 self-compassionate toward themselves about what they'd experienced, they were less likely to develop

00:47:52.920 post-traumatic stress syndrome. And so in a way, post-traumatic stress syndrome is when the trauma

00:47:58.480 kind of almost gets locked in your body, and you keep re-experiencing the trauma because you can't

00:48:02.900 process it. And so self-compassion towards the trauma helps you process it so it doesn't get

00:48:09.640 kind of, you might say, locked into place through post-traumatic stress syndrome.

00:48:12.860 Yeah, which really makes so much sense when you look at the incredible success that the

00:48:19.200 organization MAPS has had in testing MDMA in people with PTSD, because MDMA is the ultimate

00:48:27.840 compassion molecule. So it basically takes a slight amount of compassion you might have,

00:48:33.120 and it just amplifies it tremendously. And that's presumably why people in as few as two or three

00:48:39.800 sessions can have otherwise debilitating PTSD rectified.

00:48:45.320 I think there's only one study that did show that MDMA increased self-compassion, but there isn't

00:48:50.780 a lot. I think there's a huge, we'll see, starting, there's a huge boom already in looking at

00:48:56.780 psychedelics, MDMA, mushrooms, because what they do is they give you an experience of basically love

00:49:02.780 and connectedness. And I think, as you say, one of the reasons probably that it works is by increasing,

00:49:08.920 well, both self-compassion and a sense of connectedness, the two are actually, they go

00:49:13.120 hand in hand. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that that's kind of the active ingredient

00:49:18.220 of how it works, is through increased self-compassion, increased mindfulness, and increased

00:49:23.040 connectedness. The three components of self-compassion are self-kindness, mindfulness, and common

00:49:28.700 humanity, or kind of the sense of connectedness. And the three really do go hand in hand. They

00:49:33.660 operate as a system.

00:49:34.640 What's the relationship between those and physical health?

00:49:39.140 So there is an emerging literature that shows that self-compassion is linked to better physical

00:49:44.120 health. It's kind of a small to medium correlation, maybe. I think like there was a meta-analysis

00:49:49.580 that found 0.28, 0.30. So significant, not mind-blowing, but still there with physical symptoms,

00:49:56.480 at least self-reports of like colds, aches, pains, physical symptoms. A lot of research,

00:50:01.140 actually Fuchsia Sirwa is one of the big research in this area, and she finds that it's linked to

00:50:05.940 better physical health. There's also research showing, this is probably why it's linked to

00:50:10.200 physical health, is it operates through the nervous system. So self-compassion, and this

00:50:15.080 is done either looking at self-report of self-compassion, or by like enhancing the self-compassionate

00:50:20.940 mood. You can have people think of something they're dealing with, and write to themselves

00:50:24.980 a paragraph, being mindful, kind of accepting of what's happening, remembering that they aren't

00:50:29.560 alone, common humanity, and being kind to themselves like they would be to a friend.

00:50:33.920 To induce the three components of self-compassion, what we find is, first of all, it reduces

00:50:38.880 sympathetic activity, things like inflammation, things like cortisol levels, and also increases

00:50:45.540 heart rate variability, which is the main marker we have of parasympathetic activity.

00:50:50.240 And it's probably by changing the nervous system reaction that it influences physical health,

00:50:56.320 because of course, what your body's doing, how reactive it is, is linked to how healthy

00:51:00.560 you are. Also, immune function is linked to better immune function.

00:51:05.040 It actually seems to me like, I wouldn't be surprised if a greater body of literature emerges

00:51:10.900 from this, because I think it sounds so cliche to say that the mind and the body are related.

00:51:18.300 But they are.

00:51:18.860 They clearly are. And I think anybody who's tried to help people in one of those dimensions and not

00:51:26.620 been able to help the other is pretty aware of that focus. And certainly, I interviewed Bob Sapolsky

00:51:33.020 some time ago, and I think his work in stress is just so interesting. And stress is really, to me,

00:51:39.320 kind of just one other piece of this vector. So I'm excited to hear that we're becoming more aware of

00:51:45.260 this. Because obviously, the lens I kind of come at all these things through is longevity. And

00:51:49.320 longevity isn't just living longer, it's living better. And that, for me, I think, was the turning

00:51:54.820 point in coming to accept the value of this, was even if figuring out a way to become more

00:52:01.720 self-compassionate didn't make you live one day longer.

00:52:06.020 It increases telomere length, though, so it probably does.

00:52:08.680 But even if it didn't, the impact it would have on the quality of your life alone would

00:52:15.540 be worth it. And I think in the final analysis, quality of life matters more than length of

00:52:21.900 life. And there's no reason you can't strive for both. The old joke about lifelong caloric

00:52:27.180 restriction is it will increase your lifespan and you'll know it, or something to that effect.

00:52:31.920 It'll feel like it. You'll live longer and it'll sure feel like it because you're so miserable. 0.91

00:52:35.560 So to me, that's kind of a big part of it. I want to kind of go back to tease out a little

00:52:40.540 bit more of the nuance in this, because one could easily misconstrue self-compassion for

00:52:45.900 self-pity. How do you distinguish these?

00:52:49.320 We need the three components of self-compassion. Just self-kindness or self-love. It could be a

00:52:56.180 self-focused state that I'm just poor me and I feel sorry for myself. What's the difference

00:53:01.820 between pity and compassion? How do you know, and what's the difference between when someone

00:53:06.760 pities you or someone has compassion for you? If you think about it, we like one and we don't

00:53:11.840 like the other.

00:53:13.320 Well, that's a good question. I mean, pity feels condescending, I suppose.

00:53:17.500 Exactly. There's separation. You're looking down. It's a separation. Compassion is,

00:53:22.340 hey, I've been there, man. It's shared. And that is the whole difference between compassion

00:53:27.460 and pity. And that's why in my measurement and my construct of self-compassion, we need

00:53:33.880 to include the sense of common humanity. I name it common humanity. I actually wanted

00:53:39.520 to call it interdependence or interbeing. It's kind of like going beyond the separate self,

00:53:44.580 but I knew that that would be kind of a hard term for most people to get their head around,

00:53:48.240 but that's really what it's pointing to. When you have self-compassion, you recognize that

00:53:53.740 everyone's imperfect. Everyone leads an imperfect life. Suffering, failure, hardship, this is part

00:54:00.540 of the shared human condition. And also, if you really go deeply enough with it, you also realize

00:54:05.560 that what I experience is not separated from what you experience. It's all part of these interdependent

00:54:11.160 causes and conditions co-arising in the idea that you can really separate yourself out of the larger

00:54:16.800 whole, and in some ways is an illusion. You don't have to go that deeply with it, but that's

00:54:21.140 ultimately where it's pointing. But if you didn't have that sense of connectedness in the experience

00:54:27.720 of suffering, it may turn into self-pity. That's why that part has to be there. Also, mindfulness.

00:54:33.520 So self-pity isn't very mindful. Self-pity tends to exaggerate. It tends to catastrophize. Poor me,

00:54:38.960 this is like the worst thing ever. Kind of very self-focused. Mindfulness kind of has more

00:54:43.640 equanimity. It's more of a balanced state of mind. It kind of sees things as it is. Just the little

00:54:49.040 things where we do see importance. It doesn't like say, carry on, that type of thing. I'm not going

00:54:53.380 to focus on the fact that this is hard. I'm just going to pretend it's not there. That doesn't help.

00:54:57.840 But on the other hand, catastrophizing doesn't help either. And the mindfulness component partly comes

00:55:02.900 from the inherent perspective that comes from self-compassion. Ironically, it's interesting to

00:55:09.860 think about this, but because we're used to giving compassion to others, whenever we give ourselves

00:55:16.620 compassion, there's like an inherent sense of perspective there, because we're treating

00:55:20.840 ourselves as we would treat another. We aren't lost in our drama. We're like stepping outside of

00:55:25.700 ourselves. And that perspective, which actually leads, it's not exactly the same as mindfulness,

00:55:30.960 but they're very related. It actually gives us more perspective and balance in terms of how we relate

00:55:36.440 to our own situation. From my point of view, all three need to be there to be self-compassionate.

00:55:41.980 And actually, psychometrically, if you look at psychometric analyses at the self-compassion

00:55:46.460 scale, they all operate as a system. And all three change simultaneously. So they really do

00:55:53.520 operate as a system. Now, one of the things that anybody who starts to practice this becomes aware

00:56:00.520 of is when you fall short of it, depending on how harsh a critic you are in the first place,

00:56:06.820 you can easily fall into a pattern of self-judgment.

00:56:09.100 Right. Beating yourself up for beating yourself up.

00:56:12.120 It's the double bang.

00:56:13.340 Yeah.

00:56:13.680 So what advice do you have for folks who want to begin this practice to pull themselves out of that

00:56:20.760 spiral?

00:56:21.580 Well, I think it's really helpful to know why we criticize ourselves. We criticize ourselves

00:56:26.680 because we care. The reason we criticize ourselves is because we want to be well. We want to do our best.

00:56:33.440 We want to be safe. We want people to love us, to support us, because we're afraid that if we don't

00:56:40.180 do well, maybe we're going to harm other people or we're going to harm ourselves. Bad things are going

00:56:44.000 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

00:56:49.720 well. And so it all comes from a basic sense of safety. We don't need to beat ourselves up for beating

00:56:55.980 ourselves up. We need to have compassion for the reasons we beat ourselves up, which comes with a very

00:57:01.780 natural desire to be safe. And once you recognize that, it's like, oh, okay, that's just me trying to be

00:57:08.420 safe. Well, actually, there's a more effective way to help myself feel safe. And that is by giving myself

00:57:13.620 compassion for what's just happened. When we teach people, especially self-compassionate motivation, if you

00:57:20.060 want to help people move from motivating themselves with criticism to a more kind of constructive

00:57:25.640 criticism, more compassionate motivation, if you leave out that step of having compassion and even

00:57:32.380 gratitude to our inner critic for trying to keep ourselves safe, it actually doesn't work. And I think

00:57:39.560 why that is, is because that part of ourselves, the self-critical part, is really scared for its life in

00:57:44.760 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

00:57:50.620 make this mistake, or life will end if I'm not a good archer, or whatever. You know, it's not a really

00:57:54.220 rational part of ourselves. It's just like an emotional reaction. And so if we just skip over that part and

00:57:59.540 say, hey, shut up. I don't want to listen to you. I want to listen to my compassionate part. That part of us 0.99

00:58:04.200 gets even more scared. Life's going to end and you aren't listening to me. Listen, listen, listen, life's

00:58:09.280 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,

00:58:14.520 hey, okay, I see you're worried. You're worried about my safety. Thank you so much. I hear you.

00:58:20.580 Trust me, I'll do everything I can to keep myself safe. Once you do that, then it's much easier for

00:58:26.500 the more compassionate part of ourselves to try to motivate a change. Again, also wants to keep us

00:58:31.800 safe, also wants to do our best, also wants us to change unhealthy behaviors, but does it not because

00:58:37.900 it's afraid that we'll be inadequate, but just because it cares. It's a much more effective and

00:58:42.460 sustainable voice of motivation. I think that's a really interesting point. I'm glad you brought it

00:58:48.860 up because I don't think I've appreciated that nuance. You do have to acknowledge, again, this

00:58:54.680 maybe comes back to maybe not so much Dick Schwartz's model, but other models of essentially us having

00:59:02.300 wounded children within us, adaptive children within us, functional adults, et cetera. You can't ignore

00:59:09.460 anyone's voice inside. That's right. And the idea is just integration. We want integration and we want

00:59:15.520 to learn. Part of what your inner critic is telling you may be useful, but you just want to claim what's

00:59:20.740 useful. And what's useful is probably about, hmm, where did you go wrong? What could you do better

00:59:24.540 next time? It's not useful to say you're worthless or you're a bad person. What are you going to do with 0.56

00:59:29.580 that? It's not helpful, but you don't want to shut down that voice at all. But you don't want

00:59:35.880 dominating things either because it's a very one-sided, very kind of immature, not very wise

00:59:42.140 part of yourself that just is freaking out basically. I have no doubt that there is a very

00:59:48.880 strong correlation between, and it would really be a reciprocal correlation or an inverse correlation

00:59:54.000 between high levels of self-compassion and low levels of maladaptive behaviors, such as addictions.

01:00:00.540 I wouldn't dispute that for a second. What I'm curious about is how much is causative. In other

01:00:07.320 words, is there any evidence that we could use self-compassion as an intervention to treat at

01:00:15.840 least partially maladaptive behaviors, gambling, substance addiction, things like that?

01:00:21.740 I wish there were more research on self-compassion and addiction. There is a little bit of intervention

01:00:28.180 research, I believe. Actually, I'm trying to think. Is there a randomized controlled trial

01:00:34.960 with addiction as the outcome of the intervention? There may not be. I think it's more cross-sectional

01:00:40.100 research that shows they're negatively correlated. And of course, we don't know causality in that case.

01:00:46.340 There is some research showing that one of the things when AA is successful, it appears that one of

01:00:51.940 the reasons it may be successful is because it increases self-compassion. By the way, I think it depends

01:00:56.640 what group you belong to. I've had people who've gone to AA that said it was all about shame.

01:01:01.320 And others say it was all about self-compassion. So I think it definitely varies depending on

01:01:05.580 what group you go to. I would be willing to bet money that you would find that. I don't think

01:01:10.120 we're quite there yet. And in terms of the two-way causality, for instance, if you're really addicted,

01:01:16.200 it may make it harder for you to be self-compassionate. Once you come off a substance,

01:01:20.480 it may be easier to be more self-compassionate. So all these things are always kind of bi-directional.

01:01:25.000 And how easy is this? I mean, I think, as we sort of think and look to the future of

01:01:30.080 using self-compassion as an intervention. So if you think about the easiest interventions are drugs,

01:01:35.920 here's a pill. The treatment group gets a placebo pill. The intervention group gets an active pill.

01:01:42.180 All you have to do is take this one pill once a day, and we'll figure out if it lowered your blood

01:01:46.100 pressure or your cholesterol. Well, when you start to get into, now we're going to test whether

01:01:51.060 mindfulness-based meditation is beneficial or self-compassion is beneficial. It becomes more

01:01:56.200 complicated. How challenging is it from a clinical research standpoint to package the practice that

01:02:04.600 you've spent the better part of 20 years refining in yourself, writing about, but then taking it into

01:02:11.440 a clinical setting with a group of subjects and being able to blind them, being able to randomize them

01:02:16.800 and then blind researchers who are going to measure outcomes based on, obviously, the differences in

01:02:21.760 behaviors? We have developed the Mindful Self-Compassion Training Program, which actually

01:02:27.520 isn't designed for clinical populations, but can be adapted for clinical populations. And there's also

01:02:33.500 compassion-focused therapy, which is similar, that is designed for clinical populations. And there have

01:02:39.260 been randomized controlled trials of both with a waitlist control, which isn't as good as an active

01:02:45.500 control where you put people in peer support. You might get similar findings. And I actually expect

01:02:50.160 you might get similar findings from a peer support group. It's actually not that difficult. I think we

01:02:56.020 definitely have the tools in place right now to do the research. I'm not doing that research because I'm

01:03:00.620 more focused on developing the interventions. I really hope people do. Also, I don't think it has to be

01:03:05.720 reinventing the wheel. I think adding some explicit self-compassion to pre-existing interventions that

01:03:12.300 we know work is probably the way to go. There's more than just self-compassion. Self-compassion isn't

01:03:17.140 everything. I think including mindfulness interventions. I have to say, personally, my feeling is, although

01:03:23.060 mindfulness training naturally increases self-compassion, it makes it stronger if you make it explicit. If you

01:03:29.020 give people explicit tools they can use to practice self-compassion, that's not meditation. Because when

01:03:35.640 you're in the supermarket and you have some thought or something happens, you're not going to sit down

01:03:40.460 and meditate in that moment. But you can put your hand on your heart and say something supportive to

01:03:44.620 yourself. It's very portable. It's very scalable. And also the research shows it doesn't require

01:03:50.380 meditation to learn it, which also makes it more accessible to a lot more people. I love meditation,

01:03:57.180 but it's just a lot of people aren't going to meditate. That's just reality. The self-compassion is

01:04:01.360 easier. It's more portable. It's more scalable. I personally think if we started looking at those

01:04:07.600 adding explicit self-compassion into these interventions, strengthen it, I suspect you'd

01:04:12.120 find it does. We aren't quite there yet. I think you're right, by the way. I think that's exactly the

01:04:17.180 way to go about doing it is you take interventions that are already known to have some efficacy and you

01:04:21.500 layer this on. Because I think as your story explains, this is a relatively straightforward

01:04:27.300 intervention to teach somebody. And the results can happen quite quickly. I mean, if someone who's as

01:04:32.960 harsh a self-critic as I am can, in a period of months with a little bit of daily practice,

01:04:39.560 with something tangible, because it's tangible to practice, I'm quite excited about it in the sense

01:04:44.600 that I think there's a pretty big opportunity there. I want to go just into the mindfulness

01:04:49.160 component a little bit, because you've made this point now several times, which is, look,

01:04:54.040 mindfulness is not a necessary component of self-compassion. No, it is a necessary component

01:04:58.880 of self-compassion. Oh, it is. Okay. So I misunderstood. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought

01:05:03.700 a mindfulness-based meditation practice is what I really mean. Is that necessary?

01:05:08.260 You don't need to meditate to be mindful. So meditation is probably the most tried and true

01:05:14.020 way to increase mindfulness. Most mindfulness training programs base their techniques on meditation.

01:05:20.320 But being mindful is just kind of being aware. Whenever you're aware that you're suffering,

01:05:25.140 you're being mindful of your suffering, especially when you're aware in a certain way,

01:05:28.540 when you're aware, not like freaking out aware, but you're aware like, okay, this is what's happening.

01:05:32.960 So mindfulness itself, you can't have self-compassion without some degree of mindfulness.

01:05:38.200 But our research shows we did a randomized controlled trial, the Mindful Self-Compassion Program,

01:05:42.260 and we found that practice was linked to gains in self-compassion, but it didn't matter whether

01:05:49.820 that practice was sitting down and doing self-compassion meditations, the program has many,

01:05:55.060 or it was just simple things like taking the self-compassion break in the middle of your day,

01:05:59.340 and you notice you're suffering, giving yourself kindness and support like you showed a good friend.

01:06:03.740 It didn't matter how you practice. So meditation isn't necessary, but mindfulness is.

01:06:09.040 And you can also learn mindfulness without meditation. It's just a little tricky because

01:06:13.000 mindfulness is kind of vague and abstract. It's hard to get your hands around it. So meditation

01:06:18.000 helps. Do you think an analogy to make this point would be that having strong legs is necessary

01:06:25.340 for walking up a hill? One way to do that is just to walk up a hill. Another way to do it is actually

01:06:32.640 go to the gym every day, lift weights and walk up the hill where the actual mindfulness meditation is

01:06:38.460 going to the gym. It's doing the very concentrated, focused exercise. Technically, you don't have to

01:06:44.620 do it to still do well, but you're in the long run maybe going to do better.

01:06:48.540 Yeah. So we don't know. We don't have data in the long run what's better. I mean, meditation,

01:06:52.560 we know it's tried and true. It can change your neuronal pathways. Meditation is good. I believe

01:06:58.600 in meditation. I'm a meditator. I think it's a little unfortunate that so much emphasis has been

01:07:04.920 placed on meditation because not everyone's going to meditate. Not everyone wants to meditate. Some

01:07:11.020 people don't have time to meditate. It doesn't appeal to them. Again, I do think self-compassion

01:07:16.000 is more scalable. You can have someone. So for instance, we just did a training program for

01:07:21.340 healthcare workers working at a pediatric hospital. Six weeks of training, one hour a week, just done at

01:07:27.420 lunch, very minimal training. We did not give them any homework they had to do outside of the class

01:07:33.320 because they didn't have time. They were stressed out healthcare professionals. We didn't give them

01:07:37.060 any meditation, but we said on the job, whenever you notice you're stressed or sad or have something

01:07:43.040 difficult happens, we gave them certain practices they could use to deal with it. We did give some

01:07:48.560 informal mindfulness practices, like feel the soles of your feet, come back to the present moment.

01:07:54.200 We did things like the self-compassion break, put your hand on your heart and help people develop

01:07:58.700 phrases that work for them to remind them of the three components of self-compassion.

01:08:03.180 And they got a lot out of it. They didn't have to meditate. After we taught the program, a lot of

01:08:08.560 them said, actually, maybe I'll take the full program and learn how to meditate. You know what I mean?

01:08:13.360 So yeah, so maybe they'll go on to meditate after learning some self-compassion. Actually,

01:08:18.320 there's some research that shows it helps you stick with the meditation practice if you have

01:08:22.100 self-compassion. The meditation is hard, but I don't think it's the only way forward. And I do think

01:08:28.460 I just think, unfortunately, in our culture, there's a way in which it seems kind of foreign

01:08:33.320 to people. I think there's a lot of blocks to meditation that aren't there with self-compassion.

01:08:39.820 But it's obviously stuck for you. You've gone on several retreats, it sounds like.

01:08:43.580 Yeah, 40 retreats. I don't go on retreats nearly as much as I used to. First of all,

01:08:47.900 the pandemic and just my life getting so busy, but I still meditate, yeah.

01:08:51.940 What is it for you that has kept meditation as sort of part of your daily routine?

01:08:58.460 Well, the meditation, the reason it's useful, because what meditation basically is,

01:09:03.220 it's just, it's a really focused time. You aren't doing anything else. You're kind of reducing sensory

01:09:08.880 input. I actually usually meditate in bed. It's not quite as good as doing it on the cushion,

01:09:14.800 but it's still pretty good. And it's kind of more doable for me, right? So I'll do early in the

01:09:18.920 morning or late at night.

01:09:20.220 You don't fall asleep doing that?

01:09:21.960 Sometimes I do, but sometimes I don't. Like if I do it when I'm really awake,

01:09:25.960 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

01:09:30.600 it. And it actually will help me fall asleep. I'll be honest, the quality of the meditation is not

01:09:35.620 quite as good as when I sit on my cushion, but at least I do it. Whereas sometimes I just find I

01:09:41.140 don't have time. Yeah. So meditation is helpful. First of all, because what happens when you meditate

01:09:46.720 is you get into a certain brain state, basically what happens is your default mode network quiets.

01:09:53.060 And so your brain state changes and it's easier for you to see clearly. It's easier for you to pay

01:09:58.140 attention. There's less chatter in the brain and that's very helpful. Yeah. So meditation is great,

01:10:04.860 but I just don't want people to think that unless they meditate, they can't learn this skill.

01:10:09.720 So for instance, there was one study that just had people kind of like you, instead of texting

01:10:13.860 themselves, kindness, they wrote a compassionate letter to themselves, the three components,

01:10:18.920 mindfulness, common humanity, kindness, what's a day for seven days, one week. And it reduced

01:10:23.420 depression for three months and increased happiness for six months. That's doable. Anyone could do that.

01:10:29.380 You don't have to learn how to meditate to do that. And it still helps you.

01:10:33.320 Does your son have a practice around this? It sounds like he's quite aware.

01:10:37.360 He's finally coming around to self-compassion, but he fought it tooth and nail for years. I mean,

01:10:41.800 just really recently, like the last few months, he's come around to it. He used to say, don't give

01:10:46.820 me that self-compassion stuff, mommy, because he didn't want to accept the pain. He wanted to fight

01:10:52.080 the pain. You don't want to accept imperfection. He was like just clinging on tooth and nail, you know,

01:10:57.900 to, he wanted the pain to go away. He didn't want imperfection to be there. He was like full on

01:11:03.820 resistance, but he can articulate it. And I would kind of think, okay, well, good luck with that one.

01:11:09.060 What can I do? Like you can try to fight the pain. Unfortunately, I know it's not going to help,

01:11:13.540 but people have to come to that conclusion themselves. But now finally, he's starting to

01:11:19.720 see the value of being kind to himself and see the value of just kind of understanding that yet

01:11:25.520 he's got to accept imperfection. He said to me the other day, he said, imperfection is like spicy food.

01:11:32.140 You know, if everything was perfect, all our meals would be bland. You know, we need some variety.

01:11:36.060 We need some spice to our life. He came up with that himself.

01:11:39.840 That's kind of amazing.

01:11:41.540 Yeah, it is. And he's finally getting there. He's 18 now and he's really

01:11:44.900 getting kind of to the next level of self-reflection and stuff. So he's a little behind,

01:11:50.180 but he's definitely getting there.

01:11:51.940 You have a workbook that's based on your book, correct?

01:11:55.140 The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook is basically the Mindful Self-Compassion Program,

01:11:59.660 which I co-developed with Chris Germer. We met back in 2008. We're partners and we've created

01:12:05.780 this program. We've got the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. We have teacher training. We

01:12:10.340 have adaptations. It's his own thing. Chris and I, it was totally us together that created this

01:12:16.360 program. And the workbook is the eight-week program in workbook format. So you basically

01:12:22.160 take yourself through the program.

01:12:23.720 Yeah. I mean, to me, that seems like a really logical place for somebody to start if listening

01:12:28.840 to this podcast has got them interested and at least piqued some amount of curiosity around this

01:12:34.340 idea. It's a very structured way to go through this. It's not the way I did it, but I've looked

01:12:39.500 through the book and I thought, boy, this is a really nice way to be guided through something.

01:12:46.240 I would certainly make a plug for that. You can just get it on Amazon. It's easy to hear.

01:12:50.940 It's like $10. Yeah. If you want to actually train in self-compassion, it's an empirically

01:12:56.260 supported program. There are randomized controlled trials. It's very carefully sequenced. We refine

01:13:01.600 the program over years and years and years and what worked and what didn't work. I'm pretty

01:13:06.220 confident in the efficacy of the program. But if you want more personal stories, then you could

01:13:12.580 probably go with my first book, Self-Compassion, or Chris Germer's book, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion.

01:13:18.100 And some people don't like workbooks. They like more like the stories. And so that would be my

01:13:22.740 favorite book. Well, Kristen, this has been a really interesting discussion. And I'm really a

01:13:27.640 huge believer in this work that you're doing. And you've also lived it too. You've had these ups and

01:13:33.780 downs and these challenges that have, I think, kind of allowed you to sort of roll with things that

01:13:38.260 are hard. I had a lot to be self-compassionate about, that's for sure.

01:13:41.760 Well, I look forward to meeting you in person at some point when this pandemic

01:13:46.720 rolls over. And again, thanks so much for your time today.

01:13:50.300 Thank you. It was lovely.

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The Peter Attia Drive - November 30, 2020

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

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