The Power of Self-Compassion

Hi! Welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. So today, we'll talk about how self-compassion eases anxiety and stress, soothes our nervous system, and calms our minds. So, some of us respond to anxiety when it arises with denial, we might try to push it away, or we might try to fight with it. Sometimes we might be frustrated, ashamed, or angry with it. And while there's nothing wrong with any of these emotions, they do have a tendency to intensify our difficult feelings, rev up our nervous system and pull us into reactivity and struggle.

So, what would happen if instead of fearing anxiety or fighting with it, we met it with kindness and compassion? What if we approached it with an open heart? So, although that might sound a little counterintuitive to open your heart to anxiety, it's actually a powerful way to regulate our emotions and finding a calm. So, according to professor Paul Gilbert, we have three types of emotional regulation systems. We've got the threat system, the drive system and what he calls, the soothing system. So, the threat system focuses on self-protection. It's our fight or flight response.

The drive system is reward-focused. It's involved in wanting, striving, achieving, and consuming. It's what helped our ancestors go and find food and make shelters and tools. The soothing system focuses on bonding and connection. It involves caring, kindness, and play.

In the soothing system, we feel more safe, relaxed, content, and connected. Now, when we're experiencing a lot of stress and anxiety, we often get stuck in our threat system. And when that happens, we can start to feel frantic, revved up, reactive and unhappy. And if we're responding to that anxiety with anger, shame, fear, and struggle, we just get more stuck there. But if we can bring compassion and kindness to what's happening, we switch on our soothing system and we start to surround our anxiety with care, kindness, and soothing.

So when we switch that soothing system on, our brain also releases oxytocin, so we get this squirt of hormone that makes us feel connected, calm, and happy. So oxytocin is often called the cuddle hormone because of that sense of love and connection that it brings. It makes us feel safe. So by practicing self-compassion and kindness, what happens is we stop getting caught in that vicious cycle. We soothe our nervous system and bring kindness to ourselves when we need it the most.

So in today's meditation, we're going to practice in this way — bringing loving kindness to our feelings, to ourselves and to whatever arises.