Verified by 
Depression
New Year’s Compassion
The best way to change is to accept who you are
Posted December 31, 2014
Wow, you’re such a moron. It was so stupid to think that you could have possibly succeeded.
Perhaps appearing to insult the reader may not be the ideal start to a post entry, but I’m illustrating a point. When falling just shy of their goals, most people would not appreciate being talked to this way. And yet that’s how a lot of us talk to ourselves.
The New Year is upon us, and with it the apparent opportunity to accomplish everything we want. Unfortunately, the way that most people interact with themselves sabotages their chance for success, which is why most New Year’s Resolutions fizzle out by Valentine’s Day. The high failure rate comes from the brain’s control of old habits and the effect of self-criticism on the habit circuit. Fortunately, there’s something you can do about it.
One of the keys to changing bad habits is creating a positive internal environment. That doesn’t mean you need to put a positive spin on everything and view the world through rose-colored glasses, it just means you should commit to being more compassionate with yourself. As I write in my upcoming book (The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, available now for pre-order) (my resolution: don’t be shy about promoting my book), when trying to change your habits, “be as patient and kind with yourself as you would be with a cute little puppy that you’re trying to house-train. Stressing out the puppy will only make it pee on the floor.”
Your habits are controlled by a deep reptilian part of your brain called the striatum. It controls all your bad habits as well as your good ones. New Year’s Resolutions are by definition not yet habits, so they rely on activating the prefrontal cortex to override the striatum. Unfortunately, self-criticism actually increases activity in the striatum (Longe 2010). That means when the prefrontal cortex and striatum are battling for control over your actions, self-criticism helps push things in favor of old habits. So trying to make a New Year’s Resolution while engaging in self-criticism is like driving your car with one foot on the brake and one on the gas. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Several studies have demonstrated the power of changing self-compassion to help change habits. One study on smokers showed that practicing self-compassion helped them quit (Kelly 2010). Importantly, the people who benefitted the most were the ones who started out highly critical of themselves. Another recent study on people with eating disorders showed that increasing self-compassion helped improve eating habits (Gale 2014). These results demonstrate that mindfulness, understanding, acceptance and kindness toward yourself are effective ways to accomplish your resolutions.
What can you do with this information? Try some self-compassion exercises. Here are a few you can practice that were adapted from successful studies of self-compassion:
1. Visualize your most compassionate self, someone who understands the difficulty of your change, who has wisdom to see what is best for you and strength to cope with challenges. Visualize yourself as someone who is nonjudgmental, caring and encouraging. From this perspective write a letter to yourself supporting your New Year’s Resolution.
2. When examining a “bad habit” try to understand from a non-judgmental perspective why you do it in the first place. What are the challenges you’ve experienced that created the habit in the first place? This includes accepting the evolutionary basis for your actions. Your brain evolved in a particular way over millions of years. Almost everything that you can think of as “wrong with you” such as overeating, anxiety, smoking, etc develops from how the human brain evolved. Accept that it may be difficult to overcome evolution.
3. Accept compassion from others. One study showed that fear of self-compassion was strongly linked to fear of compassion from others (Gilbert 2011). And that leads in to…
4. Examine your fears. What keeps you from being compassionate towards yourself?
5. Be aware of the language you use in talking to yourself. Does it sound more like a supportive friend or an angry boss? What would a supportive friend say?
These self-compassion exercises will help your prefrontal cortex win the battle with your striatum to help accomplish your New Year’s Resolution. But beyond accomplishing resolutions, increasing self-compassion on its own increases life-satisfaction and decreases stress, anxiety and depression (Neff 2013). And don’t you deserve that anyway? (If the little voice in your head answered “no,” then you would probably benefit a lot from a little self-compassion.)
REFERENCES:
Kelly AC, et al. (2010) “Who Benefits from training in self-compassionate self-regulation? A study of smoking reduction.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Longe O, et al. (2010) “Having a word with yourself: Neural correlates of self-criticism and self-reassurance” Neuroimage.
Gale C, et al. (2014) “An Evaluation of the Impact of Introducing Compassion Focused Therapy to a Standard Treatment Programme for People with Eating Disorders.” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy.
Gilbert P, et al. (2011) “Fears of compassion: Development of three self-report measures.” Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice
Neff KD, and Germer CK. (2013) “A Pilot Study and Randomized Controlled Trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program.” Journal of Clinical Psychology.
If you liked this article then check out my book - The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time
