The Building Blocks of Self-Compassion

Dr. Kristin Neff (University of Texas at Austin) is one of the leading researchers studying self-compassion. As conceptualized by Dr. Neff, self-compassion is comprised of three core components: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Examining these components closely will help us understand self-compassion and provide practical skills to cultivate it.

Self-kindness is pretty straightforward: it implies being kind to yourself and opting out of meanness or judgment. It means being loving, caring for ourselves in effective ways, being tolerant of our imperfections, not beating ourselves up, and being understanding. The opposite of self-kindness is self-judgment: being too hard on ourselves, being impatient, being intolerant, and not being able to accept parts of ourselves we don’t like. It can also involve being closed off or cold-hearted to ourselves when we struggle, telling ourselves to ‘tough it out’ or other things that are hurtful or ineffective in the long run.

Common humanity is the idea that when we’re suffering, we remember that others have experienced similar things and that suffering is part of the human experience. Struggles are something everyone goes through, and we can’t be superhuman and avoid them. At any given moment, no matter what you’re feeling, there are thousands of people in the world feeling like you are. The concept of common humanity emphasizes our interconnectedness as human beings. The opposite of common humanity is isolation: feeling cut off from others because of our suffering. While it’s a common and often subconscious reaction, struggle doesn’t have to make us feel isolated; if we recognize the shared nature of human experience (that countless others have felt as we feel now, even if the specific circumstances are different), it can actually make us feel more connected to others. We really are all in this human experience together. In contrast, we experience isolation when we assume that other people are probably happier and better off than we are, or that they can’t relate to how we’re feeling.

Mindfulness is the third, and perhaps foundational, component of self-compassion. We have a whole module on mindfulness (a very deep and rich topic in its own right), but if you haven’t worked through that one yet, we will give you a little taste here. Mindfulness is generally defined as “present moment awareness with acceptance.” It is intentionally and non-judgmentally attending to this moment - an honest, balanced awareness of what’s going on with our thoughts, feelings, sensory experiences, and our interactions with other people and the environment around us. Meditation teacher Guy Armstrong says that mindfulness is “knowing what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it.” In other words, you’re not lost in the interpretations of your perceptions, just noticing your perceptions as they are (or as close as you can get). Simply stated, then, mindfulness is about awareness. In the context of self-compassion, mindfulness is critically important because it allows us to notice and accurately identify what we’re feeling, and provides a non-reactive, accepting approach to difficult emotions. 

In this context, the opposite of mindfulness is over-identification: identifying too closely with our negativity or suffering. It involves getting too caught up in what is happening (or our judgments/interpretations of events) at the expense of mindful awareness. Over-identification can be with a feeling, an idea, or a story of how we think something is or should be. It is getting lost in emotion, resulting in a narrowing of our perception which in turn prevents us from seeing the best options for moving forward.

An understanding of the concepts of self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness informs the specific strategies we can practice for cultivating self-compassion. You’ll see these components emphasized in the activities section later on, but you can also come up with effective personalized strategies on your own that target the specific components that you need the most help with or that resonate most with you.