Self-Compassion

During this time of the year, full weeks, cold weather and lots of work, students start to feel down. How do we pick ourselves back up? The answer, self-compassion. “Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?” (selfcompassion.org) In order to make self-improvements, self-compassion is the key, “With the clarity it brings, we can try to understand what the feelings are telling us—what we can learn about our desires, boundaries, or needs” (mindful.org). It helps people thrive and become more positive while learning or working on loving yourself. It is also been proven that it reduces anxiety and depression, it helps the person work on mindfulness since it’s one of the three components of self-compassion. The other two are, self-kindness and common humanity. Self-kindness and common humanity are somewhat similar- self-kindness is when we are supportive and understanding to ourselves, common humanity is when we are that for others. Both involve not judging ourselves or others for our mistakes or misunderstandings. (Self-compassion)

I have never heard of self-compassion and so I wanted to spend a few days trying it myself. I spent 7 minutes every morning meditating and I felt less stress going into my day, I worked on mindfulness, (Benefits of Mindfulness) which I have done before and always try my best to be mindful when I feel myself getting anxious. But to really practice self-compassion I worked on being positive about my mistakes or others, if I messed up doing something or got frustrated with myself or someone else I would stop, take a breath and tell myself to be more gentle and nurturing.

In order to challenge myself more, I had someone take picture of me… Something I have always been self-conscious about is seeing myself in pictures. I always feel like I look weird or not pretty, when we first started taking pictures I felt extremely awkward and out of my comfort zone. Looking back at them instead of judging myself and saying things like “ew”, I tried being more positive and I felt better about myself and even a few of the pictures I really loved.