10 Effective Tools & Practices For Building Self-Compassion

We have a self-compassion deficit in our culture. 

As a general pattern, us human beings tend to opt for shame and self-criticism as motivators for change, self-betterment, success or emotional balance over softness and self-kindness. Some of us may fear softness and self-kindness, regarding them as signs of failure or self-indulgence, or feel completely alienated from them on a physical level because we were never shown them or taught how to access them. We are evolutionarily programmed to express care, though if you didn’t see your caregivers, role models or influential figures in your life show themselves care and compassion, it becomes difficult to access your own self-soothing system.

Generally speaking, the idea of being kind to yourself, accepting yourself, and approaching your inner world and behaviour with understanding and curiosity isn’t culturally ingrained as deeply as the principles of competition, comparison, conformity, and endless striving to be better. To do more, have more, be more. 

We are often encouraged to outsource the conditions of our self-worth and self-esteem. To use external measurements or other people to determine how we should feel about ourselves. As a result, many of us have experienced a crisis of self-esteem. We are all too closely identified with our authoritarian inner critic and the coldness of shame.

This brings with it some challenging but fundamental unlearning and rebuilding. An idea deeply embedded in my work is the concept of unconditional self-worth, meaning: there is nothing you can do, think, or be that validates abandoning your own needs and rejecting yourself emotionally. 

No matter what has happened in the past, how many people you have hurt and lost, how many people have hurt and lost you, how alien self-care or self-compassion feels right now, nobody benefits from you holding on to guilt and shame. It just keeps you living in the dark.

And the reality is that this process of rebuilding a compassionate relationship with yourself can throw up all sorts of “stuff” that may try to keep you from starting. 

It can feel incredibly confusing, hopeless and painful, as well as exciting, necessary, and inevitable. The shadow and the light. On a practical level, how do I do it? 

It’s not as simple as flicking a mental self-compassion switch and adopting a radically new attitude and hoping for the best. It’s an experiment, it’s learning, it’s honest introspection and self-awareness, finding what you want and recognising your choices, it’s creating boundaries, embracing your shadow self, mundane everyday habit-building and profound lightbulb moments.

Here are ten effective tools and practices to familiarise yourself with to help you build self-compassion, discover unconditional self-worth and boost your self-esteem:

1) Expanding your window of tolerance

Your window of tolerance refers to the state between the two extremes of hyperarousal (aka fight-or-flight mode; think extreme, overwhelming anxiety or panic) and hypoarousal (aka freeze or flop mode; think disconnection, depression, withdrawal, no energy) where you can function effectively with day-to-day stress. 

If you often find your emotions completely overwhelming, unbearable and debilitating, this is an indication that intense emotion is not being processed and regulated effectively. This can be down to a whole number of personal factors such as early life experiences, trauma, upbringing, etc., but regardless of your personal circumstances, focusing on enhancing your emotion regulation skills and habits can help to liberate you from past experiences and patterns. 

When you expand your window of tolerance, you don’t enter the extreme states of emotional arousal as easily. A balanced state of emotion regulation feels more natural and typical. You find yourself much less emotionally reactive or defensive to the point of physical distress or debilitation. Triggers that may have historically sent you into a spiral are now responsive to compassionate self-soothing and regulation. 

It’s not possible (nor practical) to switch off any physical response to stress, but it’s possible to work with the body to better understand and meet your own needs. Pay attention to your physical sensations and your overall experience of emotions. How would you rate your level of distress? When do they feel intolerable? How often? Start noticing your feelings, thoughts and judgments around them. These are the building blocks of mindfulness practice, which will be essential to expanding your window of tolerance.

2) Befriending your nervous system

As well as the extreme states of hypoarousal and hyperarousal, it’s useful to get a sense of how your own nervous system is programmed. According to Polyvagal Theory, there are three main ‘programmes’ in the nervous system: the oldest being the parasympathetic dorsal vagal, followed by the sympathetic nervous system, and most recently (200 million years ago) the parasympathetic ventral vagal. I’ll keep this super simple!

The most recent programme, the parasympathetic ventral vagal, is associated with social engagement, connection, balance, and a sense of safety. It means that we can interact with others and participate in life and learn and play and be curious and ask for help from a place of safety and connection. 

When this programme is “in charge”, the other programmes are in safe mode, so fight-or-flight (sympathetic) can look and feel like being active, feeling driven, excited, being challenged, and freeze or flop (dorsal vagal) can look like deep rest and relaxation. It means that we still have a multifaceted nervous system, but that we can access different states and physical processes while feeling connected. We can tolerate painful emotions more effectively. Think of it as the opposite of being in survival mode, more like thrive mode.

Survival mode is when one of the older programmes are “in charge”. If the sympathetic NS is in charge, you are closed off to connection. Your body is mobilising for escape or defence. You may feel caught in a loop of anxiety, anger or fear. If the parasympathetic dorsal is in charge, you may feel withdrawn, completely disengaged and de-energised, or like you’re running on autopilot, almost like you’re not really there.

From a polyvagal perspective, clients who have experienced a combination of depression and anxiety for a long time can understand this neurophysiologically as two different branches of the nervous system competing to keep the body safe, simultaneously saying “accelerate” and “hit the breaks” which results in a state of overwhelm and shutdown. 

Exercises that centre the body and nervous system (think breathing exercises, light movement, affectionate touch, body scanning) can be incredibly beneficial to help self-regulate and ground before exploring cognitive processes like thoughts, beliefs and ideas, so you can engage from a place of connection and safety.

Can you tell the difference when you’re in safe mode or survival mode? Can you think about a time when you felt safe and connected compared to a time you felt shutdown and withdrawn, anxious or angry? What did that look like for you? Do you have an idea of which of your programmes tends to be “in charge”?

Our wonderfully evolved nervous system has aided our survival for hundreds of millions of years. Understanding how it works and how you can work with it can massively improve your relationship with yourself and your experience of life. 

3) Defining your emotional philosophy

Get clear on what you think and how you feel about having emotions, and how these shape your experience of emotions. 

Most of us, understandably, want to avoid uncomfortable feelings. We’re taught to suppress certain emotions and expressions to keep the peace, or to be socially accepted, or maintain a certain family dynamic, or to perpetuate a certain image of ourselves. However, tension and resistance around uncomfortable feelings - heightened by the emotional philosophy that they are bad and to be avoided - can actually make the experience of them worse, prolonging them and making them more intense and overwhelming. It can create shame around our emotions and ourselves. You can’t heal what you don’t feel (cliche but true!).

Your emotional philosophy contains your values which can guide you in taking action and decision-making when dealing with intense feelings.

Redefining your emotional philosophy to be more inclusive and accepting of uncomfortable feelings, to see emotions as messages and insights of self-discovery, that can be tolerated (ahem, window of tolerance) and met with compassion and curiosity, can soften and de-shame the experience of uncomfortable feelings. An emotional philosophy that serves and guides you will take into account the complexity and polarity of human experience. 

No emotion is inherently bad. Don’t actually believe that yet? That’s okay. The rest of these tools and practices are designed to help your subconscious and conscious mind adopt this philosophy. It takes practice.

4) Expanding your emotion regulation methods

Yes, suppression and avoidance are emotion regulation methods. But they often bring with them even more pain and disconnection on top of that which you’re trying to escape. If emotion regulation feels like an alien concept to you, check out the Demystifying Mindfulness workshop for therapeutic insights into mindfulness and cognitive defusion as a form of emotion regulation to help you feel calmer.

Mindfulness is a life-changing tool for emotion regulation. Finding healthy and impactful ways of channelling and expressing emotions, such as writing, journaling, making art, running, exercising, speaking to someone or out loud by yourself, is also incredibly useful and cathartic, and can help you move through the emotion without avoiding it or being completely consumed and immobilised by it. If you’re struggling with the latter, revisit tip #1 and #2. 

Self-talk, or your inner voice, is another powerful tool for emotion regulation as it is a way you can show compassion to yourself and your feelings, or practice mindful curiosity by observing how you talk to yourself. 

Sensory self-soothing strategies such as taking a warm bath or shower or laying under a weighted blanket can be useful for grounding in the present moment. Getting analytical and validity testing your own thoughts can help defuse overwhelming feelings. Insight into different emotion regulation methods will be woven throughout the rest of this article.

5) Identifying different “parts” of yourself

Something that many of us struggle with is the feeling of inner conflict. This can make us feel like something is wrong, leading us to doubt our own experience and not know how to act in a given situation. 

Maybe you believe or know one thing rationally, but feel a certain way in spite of that knowledge. For example, maybe you believe that other people are responsible for their own emotional reactions, but you feel deeply hurt inside when somebody reacts in a hostile way towards you. The knowledge and the feeling don’t cancel each other out. Rather, there is a part of you that feels hurt. Maybe this is your inner child who feels responsible for your caregivers emotions. Maybe this reminds you of a nasty former boss that left you feeling shame around your abilities, the part you think of as the “not-good-enough” part of you.

The “adult” version of you has acquired new knowledge, perspectives and boundaries, but the emotional wounds still sometimes feel fresh again. One approach is not to overidentify with that part of you that received that emotional wound. Overidentifying might look like saying “I suppose I really am not good enough, there’s no point in even trying, I deserve to be spoken to like that” and feeling all of the self-blame, shame and hurt that comes with that response to yourself. Instead, notice that this part of you and their emotional wound has been activated. 

Maintaining access to all of the other parts of yourself that you can gain perspective and wisdom from during emotional distress or discomfort is another powerful emotion regulation tool. This enables you to maintain a sense of multidimensionality and wholeness, not feeling tethered to one particular feeling or experience.

There will always be different parts of yourself that say, need and believe different things that might be in conflict with one another. A useful tool is to apply conflict resolution skills to your own inner world and different parts of yourself. What is their common goal here? Can they understand and appreciate each other’s perspective and feelings? Doing this can help you to make sense of your own complex inner experience, alleviate tension and create a feeling of being connected to yourself, of giving yourself unconditional permission to have needs and to receive love and care.

6) Examining your need to be liked or perceived in a certain way

You might not even realise that you are carrying tension and exerting mental and emotional energy trying to control how you are perceived by others. While you have agency in your interactions and relationships with others, and your choices and behaviour can influence how other people respond to you, fixating on maintaining a certain perception is a) exhausting and b) futile.

This encourages hyper self-consciousness and undermines authenticity and vulnerability. Human beings are not picture-perfect, and realness and vulnerability breeds deep connection and intimacy. High risk, high reward. What does the idea of not being liked bring up for you? What feelings and fears are underneath? What can you focus on instead? 

Jumping back to #5, there may be a “part” of you that feels incredibly anxious at the prospect of not being liked, who desires to be liked and validated by everyone. Maybe this originated as a safety or survival strategy, and you now know this part as your “inner people-pleaser”. The self-compassionate part of you might say to them, “not being liked brings up a lot of anxiety for you, it’s a horrible feeling, I’ll sit with you through this feeling and support you to release the need for control, and please know that nobody else’s judgement of you determines whether your needs should or shouldn’t be met, that’s unconditional,”

We can’t directly control what other people think about us, but we do have significant control over our actions, words, decisions, emotional expressions, and the values and principles we embody. What we believe in, how we live, and how we conduct ourselves are not always going to align with everybody else’s way of doing things. Conflict and misalignment is a fact of life, and an offshoot of freedom, self-expression and authenticity. 

Focus on harnessing your freedom, self-expression and authenticity over avoiding conflict and misalignment. In giving up the illusion of control over how you are perceived, you might find you gain a sense of self-determination and inner trust.

7. Building awareness of shame and where you’re carrying it 

You might one day have the profound realisation that your brokenness is an illusion. A familiar feeling that became a story about yourself. If I frequently feel like X, it must mean Y about me. Shame is a sneaky emotion. It latches onto your self-identity and just feels like a natural part of you; a sense of brokenness or defectiveness or self-distrust that has always been there and therefore is The Truth. 

Learning to recognise and name shame can be incredibly liberating. Not being afraid of yourself is power. Picking apart shame and all its self-fulfilling prophecies from your core self - your consciousness, creativity, intentionality and potential - is meaningful therapeutic work. 

Shame portrays you as broken or defective and can indicate a need for soothing and understanding, turning toward self-compassion and empathy rather than self-abandonment. Get curious about your shame, add context to your shame, meet it with compassion and cognitively defuse from the stories it tells you about yourself. Download the Identifying Shame workbook to help you explore these and gain freedom from shame.

8. Injecting mindfulness into your self-talk

Mindfulness is simply the art of noticing and observing without applying pre-given meanings or judgments. It allows us to accept what is and pause before over-analysing, judging and shaming ourselves for our emotional experiences.

If you recognise that you have a negative and critical way of talking to yourself, an inner voice that doesn’t feel warm, supportive or friendly, starting to notice these patterns from a more objective point of view can be incredibly useful. In doing so, you are altering the relationship you have to your inner voice by establishing a new part of yourself that is capable of observing this without automatically believing it. You are developing your “observing self” rather than solely identifying with the inner monologue that criticises, judges and shames you.

Start noticing how you talk to and about yourself, what words or labels tend to come up, and the tone and feel of your inner voice. Get curious about your experience of self-talk.

9. Separating your whole self from your problems

A lot of us find ourselves falling into the trap of fusing our whole selves to our problems.

Seeing your problem(s) as separate to who you are as a person allows you to create distance between your struggles and your identity, a lot like mindfulness, so that you do not recreate stories of yourself that depict a lack of power or worth.

This can be especially powerful for those of us prone to self-blame and criticism. Seeing yourself as separate from your problems means that challenging moments offer opportunities to create alternative stories to ones that are self-fulfilling and disempowering.

Instead of thinking about anxiety, for example, as a problem within yourself, thoughtfully experiment with the idea that your difficult relationship with anxiety is separate from who you are as a whole person. When we think of anxiety as being a problem within us, we perpetuate stories of powerlessness over anxiety are therefore less likely to make choices that may alter our relationship with it. Fusing our whole selves with our problems presents the problem as unchangeable and disempowers the choices we make over our own healing and recovery.

10. Identifying your values, principles, aspirations, strengths and things that are meaningful to you

Finding a sense of self that is grounded in your values, principles, personal meaning and aspirations is incredibly beneficial for challenging and uprooting the ways you tie your identity to struggle. Instead, by identifying these other aspects of yourself you reshape your identity and your relationship to self through in a more positive, growth-oriented, compassionate way. This helps to develop deep self-trust and empowers you to give up the control of how you are perceived, following your own inner compass and self-determination. It means being grounded in who you are, discovering what brings you joy, purpose and power.

We get to create and experiment in our lives, rejecting attitudes, ideas and inner monologues that don’t serve us and choosing to value our unique qualities and gifts.

If you feel you could benefit from one-to-one support with any or many of these, fill out this enquiry form with details about how I can best support you and I will get back to you as soon as possible.