WRB Self Care Week: Start by being Compassionate to Yourself

​Women Rocking Business's Self Care Week - April 2018

​A Guest Blog written by Rachel Evans from Healthy & Psyched 

​Start by being compassionate to yourself!
​
What we say to ourselves on a daily basis is a really important act of self-care. 

We can spend a lot of time being hard on ourselves and focusing on the negatives of a situation. But research shows that people who are more compassionate with themselves have with better mental health, higher life satisfaction and wellbeing, more effective coping skills, and ability to manage their emotions, as well as a healthier diet, regular exercise regime and better sleeping habits (Barnard & Curry, 2011; Sirois et al., 2015; Zessin et al., 2015). 

What is Self-Compassion?

Dr. Kirstin Neff, explains self compassion as “kindness toward the self, which entails being gentle, supportive, and understanding rather than harshly judging oneself for personal shortcomings”.

As one of the leading experts in the field of self-compassion, she identifies three interrelated aspects:

1. Self-kindness - responding to difficult/ distressing thoughts, feelings and situations with understanding, sympathy and care rather than self-criticism. 
2. Common humanity - knowing that everyone has challenging experiences and everyone makes mistakes. We can often feel alone in our struggles and it helps to know that we all go through them. 
3. Mindfulness - awareness and acceptance of our experiences and the ability to recognise when we are suffering. It’s a balance between not ignoring our negative thoughts/emotions and conversely, not becoming too wrapped up or overwhelmed by them.  ​

​Three ways you can build self-compassion:

1. Recognise negative self-talk and self-critical thoughts. 
   The first step to being able to accept our thoughts it to be aware of them. Negative thoughts often taken the form of labeling ourselves (e.g. lazy, a failure), catastrophising events (i.e. imagining the worst case scenario), or creating rules (such as I should, must, ought, never), which we invariably break and feel guilty about. If you recognise yourself having these thoughts then just notice them with a mindful awareness rather than getting swept away by them. 
   
   
2. Talk to yourself like you would a friend.  
   If your friend was suffering what would you say to them? Think about times you are being self-critical or struggling, what do you say to yourself?  Is there a difference between how you respond to your friend and how to act towards yourself? How could you be more caring towards yourself when you’re in a difficult situation or when you notice that you’re having negative thoughts? Try it for one week and notice what happens. 
   
   
3. Let go of being perfect.
   In my experience, small business owners are typically perfectionists; they fear making mistakes in their pursuit of excellence and suffer from constant self-doubt, self-criticism and feelings of inadequacy if their impossible standards are not reached. If you identify yourself as a perfectionist, then you can begin to become more compassionate to yourself by using the mantra ‘I have the right to make mistakes’ or ‘I am doing the best I can’. Once I started to incorporate these mantras into my life I found that I felt happier and better able to get past the fears of failure that often stopped me from being productive.
    

As a start to your new self-compassionate mindset, why not thank yourself for reading this article and commit to trying one of the three strategies today.

​About the Author:
Rachel Evans holds a first class honours degree in Psychology (BSc.) and Masters degree in Health Psychology. She is currently studying for a PhD in the psychology of behavior change at Sheffield University and to become a Master Practitioner in Eating Disorders & Obesity with the National Center for Eating Disorders. Rachel is passionate about the psychology of eating and works 1-1 or in groups with clients to help them develop a healthy relationship with food, their body and their mind. Read more on her blog Healthy & Psyched or catch up with her on instagram, facebook and twitter.
​