How to Be Nice To Yourself When You Mess Up
For many of people, a mistake or failure can feel like the end of the world.
Does your default, kneejerk response look like self-criticism or blame, beating yourself up mercilessly, or ruminating about what happened (thinking about it over and over again)? You’re not alone.
Whatever your go-to strategy is, I’m guessing it doesn’t feel very kind – or very helpful. In fact, you may have noticed that it usually just leaves you feeling bad about yourself, and ironically doesn’t help you do better next time.
Today I’m going to talk about the most helpful way to be nicer to yourself when you make a mistake. This is going to help you not only cope better when you mess up, but actually learn from your experiences. It’s called self-compassion and it really works.
Table of Contents
What is Self-Compassion?
You might be wondering what is self-compassion and how does it compare to regular compassion? Here’s how compassion and self-compassion are defined:
Compassion: having sympathetic concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others
Self-compassion: giving yourself the same sympathetic concern you give others
Essentially, self-compassion is being kind and understanding to yourself when you’re confronted with personal failings. It’s treating yourself with kindness when you’re in pain or suffering, as opposed to beating yourself up.
And as you may have experienced, there’s no learning or improving in harsh criticism. When you criticize or beat yourself up, you’re usually left feeling alone, dejected, and demotivated. This is because self-criticism actually shuts down the learning centers in your brain. So not only do you trigger a fight-flight response, but you lose the ability to learn for next time.
The 3 Components of Self-Compassion
Self-compassion differs slightly from regular compassion because it’s comprised of three important components. All three elements need to be present in order to effectively self-soothe and encourage yourself. These are:
Mindfulness
Self-kindness
Common Humanity
I’m going to break down and define each one so you can see how they work and interact with each other, as well as how to practice.
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Component #1: Mindfulness vs. Overidentification
Mindfulness is the ability to be present with what's happening as it's happening, without judgment. It’s the ability to see things as neither good or bad, just as they are.
While meditation is a form of mindfulness, you don’t have to meditate to be more mindful.
Most of us operate on autopilot at some point, which can be extremely helpful for tasks like cleaning, doing anything repetitive, or even driving. The problem is that overusing autopilot for difficult situations means being unaware that you’re have a tough time.
Being mindful is simply the opposite of being on autopilot.
You need to have the courage to be present with your difficult thoughts and feelings, instead of ignoring or suppressing them. Mindfulness gives you the ability to recognize when you’re having a moment of struggle.
It’s not possible to ignore your pain and feel compassion at the same time, you need both. Mindfulness also requires that you not “over-identify” with negative thoughts and feelings, so that you get caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.
Component #2: Self-Kindness vs. Self-judgment
Self-kindness means treating yourself with kindness and compassion as opposed to harsh self-judgment when you notice you’re struggling or suffering.
And suffering doesn’t have to be a big, traumatic experience either.
Some common experiences of suffering can look like things not going the way you hoped, being rejected or dismissed, or feeling unhappy or disappointed.
If your default response is to beat yourself up, your brain is naturally responding to your suffering with frustration or resistance, rather than acceptance or kindness.
While this is entirely understandable, that frustration comes at a cost. It can easily lead to self-judgment or self-criticism, which as I mentioned, shuts down the part of your brain responsible for learning and adapting.
Actively choosing self-kindness over judging yourself is a skill you can learn. It’s much more challenging than judging yourself, especially if you’re used to that, but the research is abundantly clear that self-judgment negatively impacts your wellbeing.
Related: 3 Myths about Self-Compassion
Component #3: Common humanity vs. isolation
Common humanity connects you to the idea that all people are imperfect and all people lead imperfect lives.
This prevents you from the irrational sense of isolation: thoughts like, “No one understands me” or “I’m all alone”, which only compounds your pain.
Suffering and feelings of inadequacy are part of the shared human experience. There’s an interesting irony in that feeling alone in your suffering, you become deeply connected to a very common human experience.
This is what separates self-compassion from self-pity, or feeling sorry for yourself. The notion that your experience is simply part of the human condition can be humbling, and even comforting in some ways. It’s OK to acknowledge how hard life is sometimes!
Self-pity is filled with resistance and anguish, which further exacerbates your suffering. Self-compassion is the recognition that what you’re experiencing is hard and it’s entirely normal.
The benefits of self-compassion
There is a ton of great research that shows self-compassion increases your motivation and your confidence.
And most importantly it helps you not give up when facing setbacks, which is key to reaching your goals. Whenever you pursue something that matters to you, you’re likely to encounter obstacles or challenges, which can easily derail your progress.
Research has shown that self-compassion makes a person more resilient, and more able to bounce back after messing up.
It lowers self-criticism and builds up self-worth, helping you become more ambitious and successful, rather than complacent and lazy. This is partly due to an increasing ability to adapt to setbacks, rather than give up.
We’ve also seen that particularly in comparison to self-esteem, self-compassion is associated with:
Greater emotional resilience
More accurate self-concepts
More caring relationship behavior
Less narcissism and reactive anger
There’s also some research that suggests it helps make you more compassionate towards others. There’s a warmth in feeling connected to others, in feeling like you’re not alone in your struggles. It might allow you to extend that same courtesy to others, whether they “deserve it” or not.
When people increase their own well-being, they usually become more patient, cooperative, and caring in their relationships. In compassion for your own pain is a sense of common humanity: we all suffer, we all face disease and death, we all lose things that we love.
Treating others with compassion and acceptance can start with being able to treat yourself that way first. And if you’re way more compassionate towards others, you’ll simply extend some of that to yourself a little bit at a time.
What to do when you’re angry with yourself
You may have tried to be nice to yourself or practice self-compassion, but found it especially challenging when you’re angry at yourself.
While anger is an incredibly useful emotion, it goes a bit haywire when it’s directed at yourself. Anger is self-protective, which is great for outside threats. But internally, that anger becomes the “fight” in “fight or flight” and typically looks like: criticism, blame, or self-doubt.
And because anger feels protective, it can be hard to let go of the urge to fight yourself. In fact, it can feel really satisfying or even self-righteous! For anyone with a trauma history, it might even feel unsafe to be kind because it’s not as self-protective, and a even a little vulnerable.
Notice the next time you feel angry with yourself and do a quick check-in:
What kinds of thoughts show up?
What do you have an urge to do?
Is there a part of you that doesn’t want to stop being angry?
This will give you a good indication of what might get in the way of practicing self-compassion. This is useful because being mindful of these automatic thoughts and reactions allows you the opportunity to respond differently. And mindfulness also happens to be the first step in practicing self-compassion.
You can notice the urge to beat yourself up, recognize that it’s a part of you that's trying to help you do better, and also see that it’s not the most helpful way to do so. This gives you the opportunity to choose what to do next, rather than being at the mercy of what your fight-flight response tells you to do.
Related: How to Stop Worrying & Overthinking
How to practice self-compassion
Now that you fully understand how self-compassion works and why it helps, you might be wondering how to actually put it into practice. Thankfully it’s not super complicated to get started.
Follow these same steps anytime you’d like to respond to a challenge or struggle in a self-compassionate way.
Instructions:
Think of an area you consistently struggle with or find yourself having difficulties. This could be struggling to keep up with a workload, making a mistake at work, or embarrassing yourself in a social situation.
What was your most recent experience of failing or messing up? Bring to mind what happened and try to remember how you handled it afterwards.
Next, imagine someone you care about experiencing the same exact scenario. They failed or messed up in some way and now feel terrible about themselves. Picture them beating themselves up or blaming themselves.
What would you say to them?
What kind of action would you take? (For instance, giving them a hug or doing something nice for them)
Now, compare the response to your friend to how you typically talk to yourself.
In what ways does it look different? Are you more harsh and less forgiving towards yourself?
Are you quick to offer support and guidance to others, but not yourself?
Think of it this way: if you talked to others the way you talk to yourself, would you have any friends left? And yet for some reason, it still feels acceptable to be nasty and mean to ourselves.
Notice the stark difference between the way you help others and the way your mind tries to help you when you mess up. Which one feels more helpful? Remember that not everything your mind says is helpful! A fight-flight response is rooted in survival, not connection.
A quick and simple self-compassion exercise:
Another great way to put this into practice is to ask yourself every day: “How can I be a friend to myself today?”
When you have a negative thought, practice asking yourself, “Is this helpful? What would I say to a friend?”
The goal of this isn’t to ignore or try to make negative thoughts go away.
It’s simply to start observing and responding to your thoughts differently than you might on autopilot. If there’s any useful information in a negative thought, you can take it and use it, and if not, then just let it be.
New habits take time to stick, so make sure to create a daily, visual reminder to help you remember to ask yourself these questions. Use whatever methods have helped you in the past to start and maintain new habits.
Here are some suggestions:
Post-it note
Notecard
Whiteboard message
Calendar alert
And it’s especially important to allow yourself space to mess up. Don’t beat yourself up for beating yourself up!
It can be really easy to fall back into the self-criticism trap. Use it as an opportunity to notice how it feels and gently correct. And keep in mind you’re not always going to want to be nice to yourself. As I mentioned earlier, anger and criticism is a self-protective response, even when it’s not helpful.
If you’re struggling to be nice, try saying something like this:
“Oh wow, look how easy it is to keep being nasty to myself. I feel really bad now, even though there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to stop. What would I say to my friend? I’d probably tell them…”
And if you’re really having a tough time, try doing something immersive and distracting. Afterwards, you can come back and practice being more compassionate once that fight-flight response has calmed down.
How self-compassion motivates you
Maybe you’re worried that once you start being nice to yourself, you’ll start being lazy or let yourself off the hook. A lot of people believe self-criticism and self-judgment is motivating and thankfully the very opposite is true.
As I mentioned above, there’s an overwhelming amount of research that shows self-compassion actually increases motivation, rather than decreases it.
One reason for this is that self-compassion makes it easier to take risks because you’ll know that on the other side, you’ll be able to show up for yourself in a kind and helpful way. This takes the pressure off of being perfect because you’re able to learn from your mistakes.
It’s possible to be nice to yourself and hold yourself accountable when you mess up. It’s just that accountability looks a little different than your standard harsh criticism. Here’s an example:
Self-critical accountability: “I can’t believe I failed that test. I’m such an idiot! I’ll never graduate at this rate. Now I’m going to have to pull an all-nighter to pass the next test.”
Self-compassionate accountability: “Wow, I’m really upset that I failed my test. I really want to do better next time. Maybe I need to start studying earlier or look into tutoring to ensure I pass the next one.”
Notice how the self-compassionate response to failing a test still holds yourself accountable, but it opens up space for helpful suggestions. The self-critical response only assigns blame and in the constricted view of what happened, can only see an unhelpful suggestion as a way out (pulling an all-nighter). And for others, it’ll likely lead to giving up entirely.
Self-criticism means blame while self-compassion means responsibility. Consider this the next time you’re criticizing yourself: is there a sense of accountability and problem solving in my thoughts or is my mind playing the blame game?
Related: 5 Ways to Reduce Stress Today
I hope this has convinced you that self-compassion is a useful tool to start practicing every day. Self-criticism prevents you from learning from your mistakes, which in turns leads to more self-criticism. Being kind to yourself is the antidote to that harsh self-criticism.
This all may sound easy in theory, but can be difficult in practice. Try setting an intention at the beginning of the day and then reflect on how things went at the end of the day. And remember not to beat yourself up for beating yourself up!
The next time you mess up, try talking to yourself like you would a friend and see what happens. Does it feel better, even just a little bit? Does it leave space for helpful problem-solving? Stay with that for a few seconds to let your brain process and remember that.
The more you practice, the more likely it’ll become your natural, default response.
