What Is Self-Compassion? What Does It Gain?

Self-compassion is a concept related to one’s attitudes towards himself. Self-compassionate people are people who can see their deficiencies and accept them as they are, understand the negative experiences they have experienced, and are aware that this is a natural thing for human nature, and never punishes themselves for the failures they have achieved. In short, self-compassion is the ability to show ourselves the sense of love, pity and understanding we show to the people around us. Self-compassion is also a concept that enables us to cope with the emotions created by all negative experiences. The more natural feelings such as happiness, love, and excitement are for people, the more natural in feelings such as sadness, sadness, sadness and grief. Seeing this situation as extremely necessary for a person and being able to deal with them effectively is also related to the level of self-compassion. From this point of view, people with high self-compassion look for ways to effectively eliminate negative emotions instead of focusing on them seriously.

What Are the Basic Elements of Self Compassion?

According to self-compassion researchers, self-compassion has three basic components. These elements consist of:

Be Kind to Ourselves

The most basic element of self-compassion is that we treat ourselves lovingly rather than being cruel. As we would say to a good friend instead of making critical words to ourselves, acting affectionately with words such as “I’m with you, don’t be sad anymore” greatly increases our resistance to coping with all difficulties.

Awareness of Sharing

People worry about themselves as if they were just experiencing all their negative emotions and experiences. However, this is a human experience shared by everyone. No matter what we live in, every situation we live in can or has happened to anyone. Therefore, we are not separate from other people, on the contrary, we are in the same position as them. This situation is the most important thing that connects us to others.

Conscious Awareness

Conscious awareness is being in the present and being aware of our experience. Often times we are not aware of our pain. Especially if this is due to our cruel criticism of ourselves. Our ability to be compassionate with ourselves is through seeing the fact that we are in pain and accepting that pain. When we realize how much we have harmed ourselves with our criticism, we give ourselves the compassion we need.

What is the Physiological Effect of Self Compassion?

When we criticize ourselves, we start using our body’s system of defending itself from various dangers. With this system, when there is any threat to our physical integrity, we release cortisol, also known as the stress and adrenaline hormone, so we are prepared for the fight or flight response. This system has already developed for dangers targeting our body. However, in modern times, the danger is not to our body in general, but to our sense of self. In this way, we feel something about ourselves that we do not like as a threat to ourselves and we attack ourselves.

This problem doubles when we criticize ourselves. Because we become the attacker and the attacked person at the same time. Thus, by self-criticism, we release large amounts of cortisol. This is why people who constantly criticize themselves experience a constant and high level of stress. Eventually, the body shuts down to protect itself and becomes depressed to cope with stress. The fact that all these situations do not occur is through being a self-compassionate person.

What Does Self-Compassion Gain?

There are some advantages of self-compassion. These pluses are as follows:

• Self-compassion; reduces anxiety, stress and depression.
• A person who constantly criticizes himself will lose all motivation. However, a person with self-compassion also improves his confidence.
• Self-compassion enables us to always look at life more positively.
• Self-compassion helps you enjoy life, and thus you get incredible pleasure from all the work you do.
• Self-compassion also strengthens your communication with the people around you, so you have the chance to express yourself better in every sense.
• Self-compassionate people respect their bodies. Accordingly, they take care to make healthy lifestyle choices.

What Are The Ways To Improve Your Self-Compassion?

There are a number of ways to develop self-compassion. We can talk about these ways as follows:

Create a Compassion Diary

Create a compassion diary that you keep weekly. Write down things that you feel bad about or difficult experiences that cause you pain in this compassion diary. For each activity, take care of your human sense of devotion, kindness, and processing events in a much more compassionate way. In this way, you can also observe how you developed your self-compassion during this process.

Establish a Self-Compassion Mantra for Yourself

Our self-criticism voices are quick to remind us that we’re not always good. Therefore, we will need mantras to remind us of our self-compassion. To give an example, you can start by remembering a sentence like “You are much better than you think”. Such a reminder would be enough to slow down the entire negative spiral of self-doubt and fear. The compassionate mantra will keep you focused in moments of fear by thinking about what a close friend or school teacher will say in negative times. Because we must have the ability to make a healthy self-criticism for our personal development. But for that, we must first have self-compassion. Because the ability to criticize ourselves without self-compassion can affect us very badly.