The Importance of Unconditional Self-Love

Why it’s important to love yourself, even when you don’t love where you’re at.

What would you do if you knew you would probably fail, but believed that it was just a part of life?

Before you read this article, it might be a good idea to take a moment to reflect on how you treat yourself when things don’t go to plan. Maybe you didn’t get the job you wanted, or you could have handled your finances better this month, or maybe you just didn’t get everything you wanted done in a day. How do you talk to yourself when you’re in these situations? When you make mistakes, does it tend to reinforce feelings that you’re never going to achieve the things you want? Or do you accept them as an inevitable part of life and opportunities for growth?

If you tend to think negatively about making mistakes, or things not going to plan, it might feel natural to chastise yourself, or even like it’s the right thing to do. How else will you make sure it doesn’t happen again? But psychological research shows time and time again that success and happiness doesn’t come from not making any mistakes, or necessarily knowing how to “fix” them when you do. Good mental health, which arms you to tackle life’s challenges, comes primarily from being kind to yourself, and relating to yourself in a healthy way when going through a personal struggle.

The word of the day is self-compassion. If you are someone who struggles with psychological wellbeing, emotional intelligence, self-esteem, healthy body image or motivation, self-compassion might be a foreign concept to you. Self-compassion is treating yourself with love, even though you might not love where you are at. It’s being kind and supportive to yourself, and judging yourself less harshly, no matter what you think of your situation. It’s understanding that you aren’t alone in your imperfection and accepting that it’s a part of being human.

Not only can self-compassion help with general negative emotions, it can be the thing that generates motivation after failure and helps you take the next step, instead of giving up.

They’ve just got that “Je Ne Sais Quoi”

Think about that one person you know (we all have one) who when you think about them you wonder how they manage to do as much as they do. Life seems to be a breeze for them, they have success after success, they never seem down or anxious and when they are asked how they do it, the answer is never anything unexpected. It might even be all the things that you are already doing, but you don’t feel like you’re anywhere near their level. There must be more to it.

It is very likely that the person you are thinking about is simply self-compassionate. They fail just as much as everyone else does, but they take those experiences in their stride, and don’t make it mean anything about how they view themselves. In fact, they don’t engage with negative emotion any more than they want to, choosing to move on, and grow wherever they need to. Because they don’t see making mistakes as a threat to their self-esteem, they are more motivated to try the things they want to and so they tend to achieve more.

The good news is, self-compassion can be both learned and induced temporarily, meaning you can work towards a kinder self-understanding, and also try some simple exercises when things get tough while you are on the journey. The other good news is, you don’t have to have high self-esteem for self-compassion to work. This means that even though you might not love yourself, or where you are in life, you can still reap the benefits of treating yourself with love, which may in itself lead to higher self-esteem.

If you are trying to get to a more emotionally resilient, motivated and positive version of yourself, self-compassion might be the key.

What does self-compassion look like?

The first thing to understand is that self-compassion has actually been defined quite precisely by Dr. Kristen Neff on the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS). It is made up of three positive and three negative components, and it is important to understand which areas you need to work on specifically to identify how a lack of self-compassion might be hindering your goals.

There are three positive components to the SCS are Self-Kindess, Common Humanity, and Mindfulness, and three negative components: Self-Judgement, Isolation and Over-Identified. To learn more about what these look like, you can fill out this questionnaire.

These components map out how a person emotionally responds to pain or failure, how they cognitively understand their circumstance, and how much they engage with suffering. Do they tend to fixate on all the things they aren’t happy with, or equally acknowledge all the great things happening in their life? Do they recognise their situation as something many people go through, or do they tend to feel more isolated? These things might seem like a someone’s temperament or a permanent mindset, but you can choose to see things either way. Though it might feel unnatural or inauthentic at first, training yourself to be more compassionate with yourself can have wonderful short term and long term benefits.

In psychological studies, induced increased self-compassion is linked to a reduction in depression, anxiety, shame, stress, rumination, self-criticism, perfectionism, body-shame and fear of failure (Miyagawa, Yuki & Niiya, Yu & Taniguchi, Junichi, 2019).

An exercise to boost self-compassion

Self-compassion is the presence of positive and the absence of negative self-behaviours. It starts by paying better attention to your experiences and your automatic responses to them. Journalling is a great way to do this, as it helps you bring focus to specific thoughts. Here is one way you can start to approach yourself more compassionately, inspired by a 2019 study (Miyagawa, Yuki & Niiya, Yu & Taniguchi, Junichi):

• In your journal address yourself kindly, whether it’s a daily journaling practice or you are just working through some emotions.
• Try to integrate compassionate messages to yourself as you write, and try not to criticise yourself; embrace your weaknesses just as you embrace your strengths.
• Take your time, and choose your words wisely. If you have any recurring negative thoughts, make note of them and try to identify where they are coming from. Try to think of something more compassionate to write down instead. If you can’t think of anything compassionate, try to write down something neutral.

Another way to quickly boost self-compassion is to have a mantra ready that you can repeat to yourself in times of self-doubt or discomfort. Dr. Kristen Neff offers this one:

“ This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is a part of life. May I be kind to myself?”

Take some time to think of a personal mantra that will quickly dispel any self-deprecating thoughts.

For more exercises, you can visit Dr. Neff’s website.

Be kind to yourself, as you are

Self compassion is about more than just telling yourself you are perfect as you are, and everything is going to work out in the end. It’s about embracing yourself as a whole human being with a whole human life. Sometimes, it’s not that we expect perfection, but the expectations are so high, we might as well be. What are those expectations based on? It might be the achievements of our peers, our own ambitions, or other people’s expectations of us, but it is very rarely based on what we know of ourselves. Self-compassion is about recognising and accepting our strengths and weaknesses, and also accepting that sometimes neither can predict or determine the way life goes.

Self-compassion gives you the resilience to constructively learn from undesirable experiences and decide what they mean to you emotionally, what they mean about you as a person and what they mean for you and your path in life. Only you can decide whether you are deserving of kindness and compassion, but that also means you get to decide that you are.

References

Kristin D. Neff, Phoebe Long, Marissa C. Knox, Oliver Davidson, Ashley Kuchar, Andrew Costigan, Zachary Williamson, Nicolas Rohleder, István Tóth-Király & Juliana G. Breines (2018) The forest and the trees: Examining the association of self-compassion and its positive and negative components with psychological functioning, Self and Identity, 17:6, 627–645, DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2018.1436587

Miyagawa, Yuki & Niiya, Yu & Taniguchi, Junichi. (2019). When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade: Self-Compassion Increases Adaptive Beliefs About Failure. Journal of Happiness Studies. 10.1007/s10902–019–00172–0.