How to Deal with Burnout Through Self-Compassion with Kristin Neff

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Kristin Neff
What do we think is going to work for a kid or a friend? If you say you’re a stupid loser, I hate you. How helpful is that really going to be? And yet somehow we think that’s going to be good for us. It knows the exact same effect.

00:00:17 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts dont strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we dont have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But its not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolfen, thanks for joining us. Back on the show is one of our favorites, Kristin Neff. She is currently an associate professor in human development at the University of Texas at Austin. While doing her postdoctoral work, she decided to conduct research on self compassion, a central construct in buddhist psychology and one that had not been examined empirically. In addition to her pioneering research in self compassion, she has developed an eight week program to teach self compassion skills. The program is called mindful self compassion. Today, Eric and Kristin discuss her new book, Mindful Self Compassion for Burnout, tools to help you heal and recharge when you’re wrung out by stress.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Kristin, welcome to the show.

00:01:55 – Kristin Neff
Hi Eric. Glad to be here again.

00:01:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, I believe this is the third time, although I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that is correct. But your work on self compassion is so important that it’s something I’m happy to keep featuring. We’re going to be discussing a new book that you have though, which is called mindful self compassion for burnout tools to help you heal and recharge when you’re wrung out by stress. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:56 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So I suppose, actually my response to that may have altered somewhat. I mean, because the obvious response is to feed the wolf of kindness and to try to promote kindness, to practice kindness, to practice peace. But I think it’s also important to feed the so called bad wolf and to kind of reframe the bad wolf, not as a bad wolf, but as a part of us that, for whatever reason, hasn’t gotten the love it needs or doesn’t feel safe, which is why often growls so loudly or, you know, barks or. What do wolves do? Howls. That’s it. They howl so loudly. So I think you primarily focus on cultivating the good habits, but you don’t want to judge or shun or, like, isolate those parts of yourself that you think are bad or unworthy, because then they just kind of go deeper in the recesses of your psyche. So I think all of our internal parts, we want to feed them understanding and safety and care with the idea that we want to behave or operate from those parts of ourselves that are in line with our values.

00:04:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I guess castigating or casting off any part of ourselves is not really to be acting in self compassion.

00:04:09 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, I mean, so Dick Schwartz, I don’t know if you’ve had him on, the founder of internal family systems, you know, talks about no bad parts. I do think it’s a really important perspective. It’s not really a bad wolf. It’s a wolf. It’s a scared wolf. And the reason it’s acting bad or mean or hateful is because part of it is scared. And so I think to the extent that we can offer that sense of safety to all parts of ourselves, sense of acceptance, and of course, accepting ourselves is not the same as accepting our behavior. So we don’t want to act like the bad wolf. We don’t want to make the other people’s problem. We don’t want to, again, act in a way that’s contrary to our values. But the impulses, the thoughts and feelings that come up, you know, we don’t choose to have them. That wolf is often formed when we’re very young as a way just to try to make us feel safe. Sometimes a child may think, okay, the only action I know how to take is to tantrum. So in some ways, that bad wolf might represent this young part of us that didn’t know any other way to respond. So it’s a good parable, but it’s also important that we don’t shun or ostracize any parts of ourselves.

00:05:16 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about this latest book, which is applying the research that you’ve been doing for a long time and writing on for a long time around self compassion, applying it to burnout.

00:05:28 – Kristin Neff
Why?

00:05:28 – Eric Zimmer
Is that the direction that you chose to take this book?

00:05:34 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So, well, it’s really just come up for me a lot in the last five years or so. It actually started when a woman, actually from a children’s hospital here in Austin, had taken our full mindful self compassion program and loved it and said, by the way, this was pre pandemic. And she said, you know, the doctors and nurses and carers at my children’s hospital, the parents, they are so exhausted, they’re overwhelmed. It’s such a stressful job. Can you figure out any way to teach them that will fit with their overwhelmed schedules? You know, that doesn’t require meditating. That’s kind of easy on the spot practices they can do to help support themselves, given all the stress they’re in. And so we did. We created something called the self compassion for healthcare communities program. We did research on it, and one of the main findings of the research was, first of all, not only did it increase self compassion, not only did it increase a sense of well being, it increased a sense of compassion for others. Compassion, satisfaction. In other words, these people could start getting satisfaction about caring for the children. When you’re so stressed and you get burnout, we’ll come back to this. You stop caring as much because you feel so overloaded and so overwhelmed, you kind of have to shut down as a natural reaction to all the stress. And we found that it did actually reduce the three core symptoms of burnout. And then the pandemic hit. Right. And so before, it was like, oh, these poor doctors and nurses at the hospital, they’re so burned out. And then it was like, okay, my source of income has totally changed. I usually made most of my income from, like, doing in person workshops. Okay, that’s off the table. How am I going to make a living? My son, you know, in special needs classes, can’t go to school anymore. And so I have to do it from home. And so I became one of those people, along with pretty much everyone else on the planet, that started feeling the intense stress that was exacerbated by the pandemic. And I’ll be honest, I definitely teetered on the edge of burnout just some moments I felt like I didn’t even want to get out of bed. It’s like, how am I going to put 1ft in front of the other? But I have my self compassion practice. So I really applied it to myself during those times. I was just there for myself. I supported myself, I allowed myself to feel my feelings. I had a way to hold the stress and kindness and warmth and support so that it wasn’t so overwhelming. And so I didn’t go into full on clinical burnout. And so toward the end of the pandemic, I thought, you know, we’ve created all these great tools and self compassion practices in the mindful self compassion program. Why don’t we write a book applying that specifically to people who are burned out? Because, again, for a while, we mainly talked about our healthcare workers, of course, who are especially burned out because of the pandemic. But it’s way beyond that. I mean, stress, chronic stress, it just seems like it’s getting more and more intense all of the time. You know, the workplace even just like stressed out by the uncertainty of whether it’s politics or global stability, there’s just so much chronic stress. I thought that this book would be helpful, and I have to say I think it is. I think we managed to write something that’s easy to read. It’s not like an academic tome. No, it’s short. It’s easy. It’s kind of entertaining, the way we tell the stories of. But it’s really practical. I mean, every single chapter has a tool that you can use. You don’t have to, like, make extra time in your day to practice it every day. You can do it on the spot, in the moment. And these practices, again, I know they work not only for my research, but really from my own life.

00:09:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you’ve been pretty open in the past. You and I have discussed the challenges of parenting your son. And it sounds like he went from having autism to OCD on top of it. And you say he started having real mental health issues. So in addition to the income, you’ve got this going on with your child. Were specifically. Were a couple of the things that you did. I assume they’re the tools that are in this book, but that you found particularly helpful for you out of the full suite of tools that are there.

00:09:44 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So probably the tool I use most often because it’s the easiest and it’s immediate, is touched, you know, because it just goes straight to your physiology. Your nervous system active, you know, probably activates the vagus nerve, parasympathetic nervous system. Just putting your hands on your heart or touching yourself in some way. It does a few things. One we have research shows, and, for instance, it lowers cortisol levels because, as infants were designed to interpret touch as a signal of, oh, it’s okay, it’s safe. Someone’s here for me. So that’s part of it, you know, changing your physiology. But it also, like, literally gives you that sense of, I got myself. I’m here for myself. It’s like, you know, you feel your own touch, and it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s right. Normally, we’re lost in our thoughts and we’re lost in the problem, but putting our hands in our body brings us back to ourself in the present moment. And so that would probably be the most common way I did it. But often just saying words of, you know, mindfulness. I know this is hard for you, a common humanity. You know, you aren’t alone in the pandemic. That was very clear. You certainly aren’t alone. All human beings are going through this right now. And then words of kindness, you know, what do you need? Actually asking myself, what do I need? Even though I couldn’t necessarily give it to myself, like, I need for this. I need to not have to wear a mask, or I need for things to be different. Okay, well, you can’t give yourself everything you need, but just simply asking the question reminds you that, hey, my needs are important, too, especially because in that situation, I was so focused on getting my son’s needs met and just doing everything I needed to do, just saying, hey, Kristin, what do you need right now? And even if it was simply like, oh, I need a glass of water, I’ve forgotten to have a glass of water all day. So a little act like that makes a difference in just reminding ourselves that we’re worthy of care. So that’s probably the main thing I do. And then the thing about self compassion, if you look what the word is, and the latin passion is to suffer, come is with a. So it’s really, how do you show up for suffering? Right. It’s very specific. What do you do when suffering is present? And normally we try to fight it, or we try to solve the problem immediately, we try to fix it, or sometimes we just avoid it, pretend it’s not there. Now, if we had a friend to be a good friend to someone else who’s suffering, usually we’re like, oh, I’m here for you. Tell me about it. We listen, we kind of make the space we allow our friend to be upset. We don’t try to shut them down. Sometimes we do try to solve their problem, but often they’ll say, hey, can you just listen to me first? I just need to express myself. So that’s really what we do with ourselves, is showing up for ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel what we’re feeling. And yes, we do try to fix our problems, but not immediately. First, we just kind of allow ourselves to feel the pain. This is hard. We kind of give ourselves emotional support. We make sure we don’t judge and blame ourselves for what we’re feeling. That’s what I like to call tender self compassion. And then fierce self compassion is more about taking the actions that might help us. And we do need both. And so I can tell you, it really saved my butt. I’m not going to lie. It really made a huge difference.

00:12:52 – Eric Zimmer
So we’ll come back to fierce self compassion in a few moments. Normally, when we think of burnout, we think about having to change the circumstances of what’s happening around us, whether that be to take better care of ourselves, to say no to things. There’s a variety of different things. And like I said, that’s going to fall under sort of fierce self compassion that we’ll get to here shortly. But in what way does self compassion, the tender side of it, help with burnout? How does that actually help with the specific thing of burnout?

00:13:26 – Kristin Neff
So you may think of burnout as the inability to cope with the stressors we’re experiencing. It overloads the system. And so when we’re overloaded, when we feel we don’t have the resources to cope with all the stress we’re experiencing, first of all, we get exhausted, kind of start to shut down. We also start to care a little bit less because, ironically, when you care about a person in your family, you’re caring about your work. The more you care, the more sensitive you are to the fact that you can’t accomplish what you want to accomplish. So we kind of shut down naturally, and then we usually start to blame ourselves. We feel like there’s something wrong with us because I should be able to cope. And that leads to feelings of incompetence like, oh, I’m just worthless. And also because, especially in western society, we judge our self worth so related to our productivity that we aren’t productive anymore, because, again, we’re just overwhelmed and beyond our capacity to cope, then we also feel badly about ourselves. So self compassion helps in so many ways. One of the things it does when we allow ourselves just to say, I feel so overwhelmed. This is so hard. I feel scared. I don’t know what to do. And we kind of bring space and warmth to those feelings. What that does is instead of those feelings, like, overwhelming us, like, I don’t know what to do. And this is too much. It’s like you aren’t just the difficult thoughts and emotions. You’re also like this warm, compassionate awareness that’s observing the fact that you’ve got all these difficult thoughts and emotions. You become bigger. It’s almost like you expand your sense of self. There’s more room for these difficult thoughts and emotions to be there, which means they’re less likely to overwhelm us by making ourselves bigger. Instead of just being locked into the difficult thoughts and emotions, we’re like the compassion that can hold these difficult emotions. When we’re bigger, we’re less likely to get overwhelmed. So that’s one way it works especially for coping. It also means that it keeps our hearts open. Right. When we keep our hearts open to ourselves, we don’t have to shut down to cope. When we care for ourselves, that also means we can still care about our work. We don’t have to shut down just to survive. And really importantly, we’re understanding to ourselves. We say, hey, you know, anyone in this circumstance would be overwhelmed. You’re doing the best you can. It’s okay to be imperfect, you know, sometimes you can’t get it all right, and, you know, just do the most you can right now and just take it step by step. I know I definitely did that in the pandemic, was like, I’m just going to do the best I can today, and I’m not going to ask any more from myself. And good enough is good enough, you know? So really, it’s the perfect antidote to burnout because it reduces feelings of exhaustion. They call it depersonalization, which is like the fancy psychological term for not caring as much, kind of shutting down, going numb, and then feelings of incompetence.

00:16:13 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve been on a couple times before, and I’ll encourage listeners to go to those episodes for more in depth on what we’re about to cover. But I do feel like it’s always worth spending a couple minutes here and maybe you can just do the couple minute tour. But in general, most of our objection when we hear this idea of being compassionate to ourselves is that it’s going to somehow make us weaker or more indulgent or less motivated or selfish. And you’ve done a tremendous amount of research that shows that isn’t true, but give us the highlights of it.

00:16:48 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So I can take them one by one so it doesn’t make you weaker. The research overwhelmingly shows it makes you stronger. Because when you show up for yourself and things are tough, that is, when you’re suffering in some way, you know, you’re stressed or you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re going to be stronger if you support yourself than if you kneecap yourself by calling yourself names or shaming yourself. I mean, that’s kind of in some ways, a no brainer. I know we think that to be tough is to be mean, but to be tough is to be supportive. Now, that doesn’t mean like papering over if there’s a problem. That’s not kind. It means giving it to yourself, straight and honest, but with kindness and support. A lot of research supporting that, the idea that it’s selfish, the burnout work is such a good counter to that. I mean, actually, if you’re going to give to others, and your giving is just one way, you only give compassion to others and you ignore your own needs, or you just ignore yourself, or you don’t think you’re worthy of getting your needs met, your cup will run dry, guaranteed, eventually, you know. So compassion needs to flow inward as well as outward in order to keep resourcing yourself so you don’t burn out. But probably the biggest one is this idea that it’s going to make me lazy or indulgent or unmotivated. The research shows it’s the exact opposite. So often what happens is when we start judging ourselves for not achieving or thinking that we should do this, we should be another way. If we fail or we make a mistake, often what happens is it creates anxiety, like, oh, I’m a failure, maybe I shouldn’t try so hard because I’m going to fail. Or what happens is we make a mistake, we’re just consumed with feelings of inadequacy and we can’t learn from the situation. You know, is it truism we learn from our failures? And so what the research shows very clearly is when you have self compassion, you can acknowledge when you’ve made a mistake, you can make the hard decisions, ones that maybe don’t feel as good but are better for you in the long run. You can learn, you can grow and you work harder and try harder, and you have less fear of failure and less anxiety. So it improves motivation. It makes us take more responsibility and choose the difficult path over the easiest path. But we will ask ourselves, is this really what’s good for me. Or is it maybe just what society tells me sometimes? Maybe you are going to change what you’re doing if it’s not truly you and it’s just what your parents told you you should do. And when we’re authentic in that way, self compassion allows us to be authentic, we’re more motivated. There’s lots of research that shows that.

00:19:16 – Eric Zimmer
When you say a lot of research, you mean a lot of research. A lot of research in the social psychology space. We hear about replication crisis and these underpowered studies. And this is a lot of research, you and the people who’ve come after you have done.

00:19:29 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, I mean, I can’t even keep up the literature if you just do a Google scholar search of things with self compassion in the title. You know, I think there’s like 8000 right now. I mean, dozens of studies come out every day. So definitely this is not based on one clever study. We have a lot of research confirming this and done various ways with self report scales, through training, through experimental manipulations. Pretty solid stuff. And you think about it, of course. Like make it so obvious. Of course, if you support yourself, you’re going to do better than if you slam yourself. I mean, what do we think is going to work for a kid or a friend? If you say you’re a stupid loser, I hate you. How helpful is that really going to be? And yet somehow we think that’s going to be good for us. You know, it’s the exact same effect.

00:20:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And I think the point that you made in the midst of all this that is so important is there is absolutely a way to hold ourselves accountable to certain standards, to be honest with ourselves when we haven’t lived up to who we want to be or in the situations we want to be. And there’s a way to do that that’s kind and not, you know, awful. And I’m working on a book, and I was writing a chapter. I was thinking about this idea a little bit. And it was interesting because I realized where I learned my particularly harsh internal voice, which has gotten so much better over the last 15 years, but was my father. And I remembered, I flashed back to playing golf and the things he would say to himself when he missed a shot, and the same things to me. And it did not make me a better golfer. It made me terrified is what it made me. Right. It made me not want to play. It made me afraid. I mean, all those things. And so it’s very clear how so I see what his intention was. He was a old school, military type person. That was how he talked to himself. But at least in my case, it absolutely was a thing that sort of backfired. Anything that I was subjected to that much criticism from him and thus then myself, I just simply didn’t do any more if I could avoid it.

00:21:33 – Kristin Neff
It used to be the parenting philosophy, spare the rod, spoil the child. And I think that’s, in general switched. Not for everyone, but we do have to have compassion for where that comes from, from whether it’s in our parents or ourselves. Because when we feel threatened just as a species, you know, we go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. The criticism is the fight mode. There’s a part of us that thinks if I just am mean enough or strong enough or intense enough, I’ll be able to control the situation, so I’ll be able to force myself to get it right or be able to force my son to have that good golf strength. It’s a distorted view. It’s an immature view. It’s kind of, you know, but it’s also very natural.

00:22:14 – Eric Zimmer
100%.

00:22:15 – Kristin Neff
The sympathetic nervous system only knows, ah, you know, that’s kind of what it’s in form of. And so that’s what it does. And it comes up and, you know, we don’t have to judge ourselves or other people for having it. It really comes from a place of fear. And so I think, really, safety is absolutely the core of a self compassion. It’s not even so much being nice to yourself. So if you look at the three components of self compassion, which are mindfulness, a sense of common humanity, and kindness and support, they really established safety. Mindfulness gives us safety when we know we are more than just these difficult thoughts and feelings. That gives us a sense of more perspective and safety. We know we aren’t alone. For human beings, feeling alone and isolated is like the scariest feeling we could possibly have. So remember, hey, we’re human. We aren’t alone. It happens. My son, for instance, he just left his suitcase on the train and left his medication in it. And the way he talked himself through it is, I know this happens to a lot of people. You could just see when he said that to himself, you know, he started feeling safer and calmer and then the kindness and support again, remembering, like, yeah, okay, maybe we did mess up or make a mistake. Yeah, we don’t want to keep on leaving our suitcases on trains. It’s not fun, but it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You know, kind of being understanding, warm, and that caring attitude is going to be more likely to help people learn from it. So, again, with my son, this actually really happened just like three days ago. I said, well, this is how we learn. This is a really good learning opportunity. One thing, maybe for now, we can keep our medication in our backpack that you carry in your body. And, like, actually, he said, well, I heard about these air tags. So I bought him some air tags to put in his suitcase. I mean, it’s kind of a mundane example, but if I had been like, oh, you stupid idiot, and he was like, I’m such a stupid idiot, he might still be just in that place. And now it’s like, okay, next time I’ll put my medicine in my backpack, and I’ll get some air tags, and I’ll maybe do, like, a little checklist. This is how we learn and grow from our mistakes and failures, but so much easier when we feel safe than as opposed to when we feel threatened.

00:24:40 – Eric Zimmer
So a lot of people, and I think I was this way when I was first really exposed to a lot of this research, will say, I hear what you’re saying about the research, and, you know, I’ve been really hard on myself, and that’s gotten me where I am. How do you respond to that? What are your thoughts about that?

00:24:59 – Kristin Neff
Well, it is true. I mean, it does kind of work, just like harsh corporal punishment for children kind of works, kind of, you might say, tried and true method for thousands of years. So it does kind of work, but it doesn’t work as well as support, feeling supported from a sense of safety. We actually take in more information when we feel safe. We’re less anxious, which allows us to take in more information. We’re less self focused, which allows us to take in more information so that we learn. So, yeah, so, you know, and it does kind of work. And it’d be silly to deny it because there are many a person who got their law degree by beating themselves up. But would they have gotten done better, maybe been less stressed, maybe had lower cortisol levels that they had taken this more supportive method? The research shows that quite clearly it’s more effective.

00:25:47 – Eric Zimmer
The other thing I’ve seen, and this is just in people I’ve coached and people I’ve known and talked to, is that it also seems like although it does work in certain people, it stops working.

00:26:01 – Kristin Neff
Yes, it does.

00:26:02 – Eric Zimmer
And I see this in people, usually in their forties, where it’s like it worked for a while, but now everything is just either having really trouble being motivated, having real problems with anxiety and depression, other things so, yes, it did work, but there was a cost. There’s a guy, I don’t know if you know, Doctor Aziz Gazapura, but he wrote a book called on my own side, which mines similar territory, which is a great phrase, you know, be on your own side. And I think he makes an analogy in it to like burning dirty fuel in an engine. Yes, it will burn, but eventually the engine is going to get gunked up. And that’s kind of what I’ve seen also is. Yes, it. I think that’s the case with me. Yes, it did work for a time. Well, maybe not. I was a homeless heroin addict at 24. Maybe it never worked for me.

00:26:52 – Kristin Neff
Yeah, it can go wrong.

00:26:54 – Eric Zimmer
I may need to rethink that one.

00:26:56 – Kristin Neff
And if you’re burnt out, harsh self criticism absolutely contributes to burnout and makes you more anxious. You’re more in that fight, flight or freeze mode, elevates your stress levels, makes you more self focused. And when you’re burnt out, you aren’t working. That’s the whole point. You’re exhausted. If you can’t get out of bed, then you aren’t producing like you used to. So in the long run, it’s definitely counterproductive. Even in the short run, it’s counterproductive.

00:27:20 – Eric Zimmer
So you say in the book that fighting burnout makes it worse and you’re talking about resistance in general being futile.

00:27:29 – Kristin Neff
Yes.

00:27:30 – Eric Zimmer
Say more about that.

00:27:31 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So this is a basic psychological principle. And again, there’s a lot of research that we know that supports this. So when a particular thought has arisen or we have a certain feeling or, you know, we’re in a situation, like, I feel exhausted and we have to accept that this is reality right now, if we say this shouldn’t be in this reality, something’s wrong with me for having this reality, or we ignore this reality. In other words, unless we accept the reality that this is how it is right now, we don’t have the sense of balance and equanimity. We need to make changes in the future. It’s kind of like racism. You know, if you fight racism, but you do it by saying, well, there’s no racism, how are you going to change it? So you kind of have to accept the present moment in order to make changes in the future. And so that’s really how it works psychologically. We don’t like to feel difficult, painful emotions. We don’t like to feel stress, we don’t like to feel anxiety. We don’t like to feel exhaustion, so we fight it. We try to make it go away, and we stress ourselves out because it’s not going away. And then it just exacerbates it. We go into this downward spiral. So if we can accept the fact that this moment, it sucks. You don’t want to say that it doesn’t suck. It does suck. It sucks to be burnt out. No other way to put it. It’s not fun. It’s not good for you, for anyone else. It’s not enjoyable. It is a problem. We don’t want to pretend that it’s nothing, you know? But then when you kind of opened that, like, oh, wow, this sucks, and you kind of give it some more space. So, again, you aren’t just the feelings of being burnt out, but you’re also this compassionate presence that says, oh, that’s really hard, you know, and, like, what can I do to help? We feel this naturally when we have compassion for someone else, we aren’t identified with their problems, and that’s what gives us the space to be bigger and just to focus on getting this kind of fount of kindness and warmth and support. So when we do that for ourselves, it’s like we enter, you might say, this bigger perspective, our bigger self, and this allows us not to be so overwhelmed. But if we resist it, if we pretend it’s not there, we fight against it. It’s almost like. It’s like if you make a really tight fist, and you fight the tight fist by making your fist tighter, it just makes it worse. But if you just open your hand, you know, you can kind of feel you open to the pain or whatever’s here, that it is still there, but you aren’t making it worse. And you also have a lot more degrees of freedom, so to speak, to figure out, well, what might I do to help myself in this situation?

00:30:01 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about approaching emotions with a strong back and a soft front. Yeah, explain that.

00:30:07 – Kristin Neff
Not to steal that line. It’s a famous line of Joan Halifax, who’s a wonderful buddhist teacher, actually. So, again, some people think that compassion is just about being soft. Like being soft and squishy. Oh, that’s. I’m so sorry. That’s so hard. You know, we might say that that’s so hard, but there’s also a certain, like, thing about having your own back. When you have your own back, it’s like there’s a strength there. There’s a stability there. Like, I’m here for you. I will do whatever I need to do to make sure you’re safe, you know, protect you if you need to or provide for your needs, drawing boundaries. For instance. You know, if other people are trying to harm you, part of having this strong back is standing up for yourself, speaking up. So the soft front is kind of, you might say, the tender self compassion of accepting the pain, accepting our difficult emotions, accepting ourselves unconditionally. And the strong back is like standing up for what’s right. Which might mean, hey, maybe some of her behaviors are not working out so well. Maybe we need to think about doing something differently because it’s not in align with my values, things like that. The strong back may say, you need to get up off the couch. You know, that’s really the interplay of the fierce and the tender, the strength and the acceptance. It’s like yin and yang. You know, if you have just one or the other, it’s not going to work. We really need both to be there simultaneously. If you’re just hard toward others or yourself, you aren’t very helpful. But if you’re just soft and squishy, you aren’t helpful either.

00:31:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes me think. A little bit of some research from Ethan Cross at the University of Michigan wrote a book called Chatter. But later in the book, he talks about something. I don’t remember exactly what he calls it, but he was talking about venting to other people and whether it’s helpful or not. And the research that they did seem to show that truly healing conversations have two elements. One element is the one that we traditionally think of, which is just listen to the person and don’t try and solve their problem. Validate what they’re feeling. Be clear that you support them, that you’re on their side. Don’t try and fix it like, do that. But that the most healing conversations also then can go on and sometimes can show the person who’s suffering some perspective that maybe they’re nothing seeing. And I think we end up very often in what we want from others and what we give others. In one of those two camps, we’re either all like, hey, I know what you’re feeling. It’s so hard. It’s so hard. Or we end up trying to solve people’s problems. And it just makes me think of what you’re saying here about this sort of strong back, soft front, or fierce and tender self compassion, that there are elements of both that are ultimately most helpful.

00:32:57 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. They really do fit together. So I’m thinking, like, with my friends, I’ve had friends tell me I sometimes give advice. I know I’m not supposed to, but if you were to ask me, would you like some advice? And then I tell them, then they know. It’s like it’s not invalidating.

00:33:14 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:33:14 – Kristin Neff
The problem with giving advice and people just want to be heard is it somehow invalidates their emotions. But if you ask, once they’re clear it’s coming from a place of support and not of trying to control or nothing judgment, then it’s so much more effective. You can kind of say it’s the same thing with ourselves. When we try to fix things immediately, there’s a way in which we’re somehow thinking that means that we’re bad or we’re wrong, you know, or that something, that the situation is unacceptable. When we make that very clear, I’m unconditionally worthy. Whether or not I’ve just screwed up, I’m here for myself, regardless of how difficult this moment is. Plus. But if there’s anything I can do to help change my behavior or do something differently, I’m open to it. Carl Rogers, you’ve probably heard this. The curious paradox is the more I accept myself, the more I can change.

00:34:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:34:04 – Kristin Neff
So the soft front actually helps us have a strong back. The art and contradiction, they work together. They enhance one another.

00:34:27 – Eric Zimmer
In the chapter about dealing with the difficult emotions of burnout, you talk about the five stages of acceptance. Can you walk us through what those five are?

00:34:40 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So there are five stages of working with difficult emotions. They aren’t as linear as I’m going to make them out to be, but I’m going to talk about them in order. The first, most natural response to a difficult emotion is resistance. We don’t like it. We don’t want it here. We want to push it away. It’s as if someone comes to your door and you don’t like who’s come there and say, go away. I don’t want you to want to talk to you. But then when we open up a little bit more to the experience of the emotion, we can actually explore what’s there. It’s like peeking through the peephole, you know, like, who’s there? Since, you know, maybe we don’t like it, but at least we’re a little curious. We aren’t full in full on resistant mode. Even though who’s there, don’t like that person, it might still be some negative reaction to it, and then there’s some tolerating. So, okay, we’ve identified what’s here. We might use mindfulness to do that. And it’s like, well, okay, this experience is here. I don’t like it, but I guess I can deal with it. It’d be like letting the person you don’t like into your foyer. You can come into the foy, but don’t come into the house yet. Right. Stay there, but it’s okay. But not so sure about it. And then once we start to feel a little safer, and this is self compassion, really facilitates this, we can be let go of resistance a little bit more. All these stages are, in some ways, letting go of resistance versus total resistance. Then we explore. We let go and have to at least figure out what’s here. And then we kind of tolerate, and then we can actually allow ourselves to feel what we feel. So we give up most of our resistance. We kind of, okay, this is what I’m feeling. I’m not going to fight it. I’m going to be with it as it is. It’s kind of letting the person into the house. Yeah, go ahead, wander around the house. That’s okay. You know, you can even use the bathroom if you want. No. You know, you’ve kind of really given up your resistance.

00:36:27 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:36:28 – Kristin Neff
And then the final stage is what’s called befriending. And this is where we realize that there’s usually some learning gift of learning in the difficult emotions. So almost every difficult emotion can be used as an opportunity to let us know where are our wounds that might need healing? Where are our triggers, perhaps that might let us know there’s some stuff we need to work on. Where might we be resisting, and where could we let go a little bit more? What lesson might I learn from this that would help me do something differently in the future? And that kind of comes at the very end. But the reason it’s important to know it goes in stages is some people think the moment they have a difficult emotion or difficult experience, they’re supposed to go straight to the, okay, what’s the silver lining? What can I learn from this? Or it’s like Rumi, just let the emotions sweep through your house. You don’t necessarily want to do that. It’s okay. Just let them into the foyer for a while if that’s all you can handle.

00:37:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Not only is that not what we sometimes want to do or should do, we just can’t.

00:37:31 – Kristin Neff
Right.

00:37:31 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s what I love about this. There’s a sumunk kid quote that I use fairly often where she talks about letting go. And she says that letting go is a spiraling and winding process. And I love that idea. And that’s why I love these stages, because my experience is we don’t tend to go from really not wanting something to be there to allowing her befriending instantly. It’s a process, and this can show stages along the way.

00:37:58 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. And the other thing it does is the part of us that’s feeling the difficult emotion. And maybe this is a young, wounded part of, if we immediately just say, okay, give up, don’t resist anymore, and befriend, or, you know, just allow yourself to feel it, you know, that part of us may feel invalidated.

00:38:16 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:38:17 – Kristin Neff
And so there’s something about saying, take your time, go slowly, lets that part of us know that, okay, it’s accepted. It can feel safe, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to, like, change on a dime. And that can also help the letting go process unfold a little more smoothly if there’s not the pressure to have to, like, let go all at once.

00:38:35 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about something called the paradox of self compassion, which is we give ourselves self compassion not to feel better, but because we feel bad.

00:38:44 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So it’s related to what we’ve been talking about in terms of resistance. So often when we give ourselves compassion and support and kindness, we do tend to feel better. You know, we’ve stopped judging ourselves or shaming ourselves, and it feels good to feel supported in this way. What can happen when practicing self compassion is we start to use self compassion as a hidden form of resistance. Like, let’s say I’m feeling worried about something coming up in the future and in the past, I gave myself some compassion. It’s okay to be worried. I’m here for you. And I started worrying a little less. What can happen after a while is then we start to give ourselves compassion to get rid of the worry instead of supporting ourselves because we’re worried. And whenever we start using something as a form of resistance, hidden or not, it doesn’t work. Right. That’s the resistance is futile idea. What we resist persists and grow stronger. And this is, again, an established psychological principle. And by the way, not always. Sometimes we can compartmentalize temporarily, but eventually we have to open to it. Otherwise it’s going to come back to haunt us. So if we just ask ourselves, why am I giving myself compassion? Is it to get rid of my pain? Or is it simply to show up for myself to be on my side as I’m experiencing pain? And it’s the second we’re after. And then, ironically, yes, of course, we’re going to do what we can to get rid of our pain. We’re going to try to make steps to be healthy. And, well, we’re going to ask ourselves what we need first. We have to accept ourselves in our situation with an open heart before we can take those next steps of trying to make healthy change.

00:40:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, this always strikes me as a form of mental and emotional judo that goes on because it’s the idea of, like, people say, well, just, if you just allow your feelings, then that’s the thing to do. And so we’ll allow our feelings, and the reason is to get them to go away. At least that’s the reason I’m doing it, right? I’m like, okay, I’m gonna allow you. So you get out of here. And it’s sort of this idea where, like, of course, there’s a part of it that does want that, and that’s what we’re aiming at. And yet, to your point, if that’s the whole purpose, then it may not work as well. It’s kind of like the whole debate around meditation practice that’s been around forever. Like, well, if you’re not practicing to get somewhere, then why are you doing it? And yet, if you’re doing it to get somewhere, it suddenly becomes a whole lot less effective. And so, like I said, it’s this sort of subtle judo I feel like we have to do inside ourselves.

00:41:22 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. Sometimes the way I work with that is I say things to myself, especially those, because, remember, it’s parts of us that are having these difficult emotions, right? Often these are young parts of ourselves, wounded parts of ourselves, scared parts of ourselves. What happens is we resist feeling them and want to shove those emotions away immediately. Those young parts of us often feel invalidated or shut down or not accepted. So sometimes I say to myself, I will not abandon you. Really? Interesting, the reaction inside your system when you say to yourself, I will not abandon you. It’s like, okay, you can feel what you feel. I won’t abandon you. And then once there’s that sense of safety, okay, I’m not going to be abandoned, then those parts start to feel safe, and then they start to let go a little more readily. But the bottom line is, I’ve actually told myself, even if you never, ever change, I still love you. And then, like, whoa, that’s a big one. Really?

00:42:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:24 – Kristin Neff
Are you sure it’s not contingent on maybe it’s making progress? Nope. When you give yourself that sort of unconditional bottom line, acceptance, you know, inevitably you can’t. You can’t do it as a form of manipulation, but inevitably, that sense of safety and love helps us release and let go of those things that aren’t serving us anymore.

00:42:44 – Eric Zimmer
So maybe what we can do with our remaining time here is to try and talk about a couple of the tools that are in this book. If somebody has listened to all of this, believes now that self compassion is a way they would like to try and approach themselves and their lives, where do they start?

00:43:02 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So it’s actually pretty easy to start. There’s a couple things you could do almost immediately, even without reading the book. One is, the good news about self compassion is most of us have a template for what compassion and support looks like. Right? Maybe we have a good friend that we were compassionate with, or we have an animal, or, you know, someone in our life we care about. We know what that looks like, what would be supportive, what is helpful. Or maybe we’ve had someone like that in our life, a teacher or a grandparent who’s been compassionate and supportive, or even if you haven’t, even if you haven’t been lucky enough to have that in your life. There’s, like, movie figures like Obi Wan Kenobi or some of these. You know, we have these, like, images from literature and film about what a really caring compassion person looks like so we don’t have to invent the wheel. So what you can do, let’s say you’re burnt out and you want to be more supportive to yourself. You can either ask, well, what would I say to someone I really cared about who was burnt out? I wanted to be there for them? Or what would maybe a really good friend say to me? Or what would this, like, fictional character that I, you know, if. Maybe if I’m really trying to say to me right now and then. So we have the template. We don’t have to invent the template. We just need to kind of adopt it. And by the way, I’m not gonna lie, it does can feel a little awkward at first. It feels like, oh, I’m being phony. I’m not really feeling it. And that’s okay. You know, you don’t have to feel it right away. Intention is driving the train here. It kind of leads the locomotive. You set your intention to be kinder and more supportive towards yourself. You try to, you know, put yourself in that position, do the perspective taking, and then eventually the feelings come later. It’s really all about cultivating goodwill for yourself. Not good feelings. Good feelings. We can’t really control whether or not we feel it, but we can cultivate our intention to be more supportive and kinder to ourselves.

00:45:00 – Eric Zimmer
You talk about something called backdraft. When we start practicing self compassion. What is that?

00:45:07 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. So maybe you do speak to yourself like you would speak to your good friend, and you say, I’m here for you. I care about you. You know, what do you need? And instead of feeling compassion or feeling safe, you feel agitated, you feel scared or maybe even angry. It’s actually very, very common. Or you feel even worse than you did before. So usually that’s backdraft. It’s a firefighting term. In firefighting, it means, you know, when you open the doors of a house on fire, the fresh air rushes in, ignites the flames, and the flames rush out. That’s why firefighters don’t just open the doors of a house on fire. Well, actually, something similar can happen with us if our whole lives, the way we’ve dealt with our pain and our frustration or our fears, by shutting down, numbing ourselves out, closing our hearts, we open the doors of our hearts, and, like, the fresh air, the care and concern rushes in. And often the old pain just rushes out. It’s like, sees the light of day and comes out in a whoosh. And so we feel it as the anger, the fear. We actually, you know, we feel worse. Or sometimes it’s just a matter of, like, contrast. You’re kind to yourself, and you immediately remember how, like, well, my parents weren’t kind to me or this person wasn’t kind to me. It’s actually all part of the healing process. It’s a natural phenomena. There’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it right. But it does mean you need to go a little more slowly. It means maybe, just maybe, you’re flinging open the doors of your heart a little too quickly. You need to, like, have those picks that the firefighters use to poke holes. In other words, you know, maybe just give yourself a little bit of compassion for a few minutes and then stop. Or give yourself compassion. Maybe not mental compassion. Maybe putting your hands on your heart and saying, I will never abandon you is way too much. You know, it can be good. But, yeah, that’s. That’s pretty intense stuff, right? Maybe something like, well, maybe I’ll just have a cup of tea. Especially if you’re british. You can have a cup of tea or, you know, take a walk or. Or do something else to just, again, validate so your needs are important, that you’re worthy of care and consideration. But this may be a little intense and maybe a little more behavioral or just kind of feeling your feet on the floor, something like that. Grounding yourself, stabilizing yourself. Backdraft usually does get better over time. It is more intense with people with the trauma history. Just something to be aware of. It can absolutely be work with, but it may, you may need to go a little slower. We have a saying, walk slowly, go farther. So it’s not like a sprint to have your heart wide open, you know, just little bits at a time as you feel more comfortable, as you get more used to it. And you can also have compassion for your backdraft, because it’s like, wow, that’s tough, you know?

00:47:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:47:51 – Kristin Neff
Hurts to give myself kindness. Like, if you had a friend who said that to you, be like, oh, oh, sorry, you know?

00:47:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think both those things. This idea of extending goodwill, not necessarily good feelings and backdraft are useful, because I do know a lot of people, this is challenging, right? They don’t believe it at first, or it feels really false, or it doesn’t feel natural. And that idea of recognizing that, like, I love the way you said it, that it’s the intention that’s driving the locomotive. It’s the intention to continue to show up for myself in the best way that I can.

00:48:26 – Kristin Neff
Yeah. What self compassion is, in many ways, it’s a perspective shift. Normally, we are in the perspective of the sense of self that needs compassion, that’s flobbed, isn’t perfect, or that’s struggling or scared or has some pain in some way. What you’re doing when you give yourself compassion is you’re switching into the perspective of the person giving compassion. Most of us, again, are used to this part of ourselves. We’re used to giving it to others. But this is also a really important part of our self. There’s always been there. And this part is less limited. It struggles less. It’s more competent, it’s wiser. It’s calmer. It’s more peaceful. It’s more loving. So you might say what we’re doing is we’re loosening our sense of identity with the normal, everyday sense of self, and we’re just adopting consciously this identity that comes up naturally when we’re there for a dog or a cat or our children. But we have to do it a little more intentionally to inhabit that part of ourselves toward ourselves. But again, it’s not rocket science. It’s a part of us. Most of us have known, you know, for a long time. We just have to remember to make that little switch. It’s a big switch. I’m not gonna lie. It’s a big switch.

00:49:41 – Eric Zimmer
I noticed that you talk about, like, talking to ourselves as we might talk to a good friend or a small child or an animal we cared about. I never hear you say talk to yourself like you would. Youre a mother. It’s a joke.

00:49:56 – Kristin Neff
It’s a joke for some people. Yeah. Also, I don’t also say your spouse or your partner either, because sometimes when people are too close, and that’s actually the reason why we say good friend, because usually you aren’t identified with your friend’s pain. If your friend loses their job, you aren’t scared by it.

00:50:13 – Eric Zimmer
Right?

00:50:14 – Kristin Neff
Right. And so you can just be your most compassionate self. But if your child loses their job or your partner, you know, we’re too close. Then our sense of self gets triggered and the fear can come in. And then when we’re afraid, we often use these strategies that we form when we are young, which are like fight or scream or hide or shame, which aren’t as effective.

00:50:37 – Eric Zimmer
Well, Kristin, thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you again. Thank you for coming back on and sharing your work with us.

00:50:45 – Kristin Neff
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for the good work you do.