Self-Compassion: Learn To Stop Beating Yourself Up

As my blog is centered around self improvement, self-compassion is one of my most passionate topics. Sounds pretty simple, right? Be nice to yourself. You would be surprised how often we do not practice this. Especially being a college student, I am nowhere near perfect and, whether I like to admit it or not, I tend to screw up quite often. People make mistakes, both big and small, and it is extremely easy for us to spend time beating ourselves up after we do something wrong or mess up. In fact, practicing self-compassion has shown to be highly beneficial to mental health.

 

For some reason, in our society it is too easy to focus in on all of the negatives and mistakes we have made until it takes over our thinking and leaves no room for positive thinking or improvement thoughts. Learning to "look on the bright side" or "don't sweat the small stuff" needs to make a comeback in my opinion. One of the main components of self-compassion is centered around Common Humanity. Common Humanity means realizing that yes, you have struggles in our life, but so does everyone else in the world; it is recognizing that all people stumble in life and that is completely normal. Loving yourself, thinking highly of yourself, and most importantly forgiving yourself. Practicing self-compassion can be extremely difficult. If you do something wrong, something bad or frowned upon, something embarrassing, it can be very easy to sit and reflect on the negative action or experience, to replay the situation and pick out every little thing you did wrong or what you should have done. This type of thinking/reflection can lead to regret, blame, and even negative views of yourself. It becomes a problem when we get so upset at ourselves for doing something wrong that we begin to attribute it to who we are as a person, rather than being human and making a mistake.

Training ourselves to practice self-compassion and to love and forgive ourselves is a very important milestone on the pathway to self-improvement and your overall happiness. The following link provides additional information on the topic of self-compassion, its benefits as well as relation to mindfulness - which is what my first blog is focused around! I highly recommend checking it out, and practicing loving yourself on a daily basis can truly make a difference. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201610/the-many-benefits-self-compassion