Three Steps to Self Compassion

Compassion translates as 'to suffer with'. The Collins Dictionary defines compassion as "a feeling of pity, sympathy and understanding for someone who is suffering." We are taught and encouraged from a young age to be compassionate to others, but not necessarily to ourselves. In fact, British culture encourages us to be self deprecating! We will say negative things to ourselves or judge ourselves harshly in ways that we would not treat a friend or family member. This can lead to a negative feedback loop in which self criticism makes us feel worse about our own self and our circumstances, which can lead to discontent and depression. Studies have shown that people who are more self compassionate are happier. So you can see that self compassion is an important aspect of health and wellbeing. 


How to learn the skill of self compassion?

Step1 Be Kind

The first step is to be aware when you are being harsh on yourself and instead respond kindly. Try talking to yourself with your inner voice as you would to a friend or family member and as they would speak to you. When I need self compassion, a voice in my head says "It’s okay sweetheart" as if it were one of my parents. It is important because it acknowledges the suffering and offers comfort. Other times I tell myself "It doesn't matter" and I look for the silver lining of whatever has upset my equilibrium. And just as a friend or family member would give you a hug, you can hug yourself or at least touch your arm or hand to add the physical reassurance to the emotional.


Step 2 Feel Connected

The second step is to acknowledge that suffering is universal, that life is not perfect and no person is perfect. We have a deep need for connection and by feeling that we are not alone in our suffering, not other, can be soothing. As well as extending the circle of compassion to others, you can extend it to yourself. Fearne Cotton talks more about that in this bitesize episode of the ‘Feel Better Live More’ podcast: Self Compassion Matters.


Step 3 Be Mindful

Thirdly, mindfulness can play an important role in self compassion. Instead of trying to eliminate or ignore the negative aspects of life or yourself, acknowledge them whilst nurturing the positives. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross explains in Life Lessons: "we all have a negative side, or a potential for negativity: denying it is the most dangerous thing we can do… To admit we have the capacity for negativity is essential. After admitting it, we can work on and release it." 


Mindfulness is awareness of awareness. Being mindful involves pausing to notice your thoughts and feelings so that you can observe them objectively and choose how to respond to them. As Kristin Neff so beautifully describes in her book Self Compassion "We don’t need to lambaste ourselves for thinking those nasty thoughts or feeling those destructive emotions. We can simply let them go. As long as we don’t get lost in a story line that justifies and reinforces them, they will tend to dissipate on their own. A weed that is not given water will eventually wither and fade away. At the same time, when a wholesome thought or feeling arises, we can hold it in loving awareness and allow it to fully blossom."



To Conclude

If you would like to explore the subject further, I can highly recommend Kristin Neff’s work. The best way to access it is via her website Self Compassion, which has a variety of resources, including exercises and meditations.


Finally, I will leave you with the Buddhist meditation on self compassion, which I love and recite to myself almost daily. I hope that you will find it a helpful reminder too.

May I be peaceful, happy and light in body, mind and spirit.

May I be safe and free from harm.

May I be free from fear.

May I know how to look at myself with the eyes of love and understanding.

May I be able to recognise and touch the seeds of happiness and joy in myself.

May I learn how to nourish the seeds of happiness and joy in myself every day.

May I be able to live fresh, solid and free.

Ten Tips for Foot Health

We don’t really think about the health of our feet unless they are causing us pain or discomfort, but foot health can have a knock-on effect on the rest of the body, so it is definitely worth paying attention to. Here are ten tips for optimising your foot health and so your overall wellbeing:

  1. Choose ‘barefoot’ footwear
  2. Go barefoot at home
  3. Go barefoot outdoors every day
  4. Walk barefoot over a variety of textures
  5. Walk over uneven surfaces
  6. Try toe stretchers
  7. Give your feet a work out
  8. File away rough skin
  9. Moisturise and nourish your feet
  10. See a podiatrist regularly.


The toes should be the widest part of the foot, and the foot naturally splays on impact with the ground when walking or running, but the narrow nature of modern footwear often impedes that natural shape and movement. Added to that, the human foot is widening with the generations, possibly because we are getting heavier. The good news is that a growing number of companies, such as Vivobarefoot and Xero Shoes, are producing healthier, more natural shaped footwear.


To really allow your feet to be their natural shape and to move naturally, avoid wearing footwear at home. Go barefoot or wear slip-proof socks about the house instead. It will help to maintain the strength and function of your feet.


As well as going barefoot indoors, schedule some barefoot time outdoors every day to ground yourself and to support your health & wellbeing. The Earthing Movie: the remarkable science of grounding is a fascinating exploration of this.


Try walking barefoot on a variety of textures, such as grass, pebbles or sand, and on uneven surfaces to stimulate your nervous system and promote good balance. You can make it a mindful practice by really tuning in to the sensations under your feet.


Toe stretchers, also known as yoga toes, separate the toes to promote the natural shape of the foot and stretch out the soft tissues, which can prevent and treat various forms of foot pain. I would recommend using the softer gel stretchers, which are more comfortable to wear. You don’t need to walk around in them all day, just a few minutes every day can make a difference. They certainly helped me to get my feet back to a healthier, more natural shape.


Exercising the feet is as important as exercising the rest of the body. If our feet are not strong, it can cause imbalances and pain further up the musculoskeletal system. Foot strength can also help with balance. For that reason, we do a lot of exercises for the feet and toes in qigong. Standing up with your feet flat on the floor (ideally barefoot), try lifting one toe at a time from the ground starting with the big toe and moving out to the little toe, then lower them one at a time starting from the little toe and working back to the big toe. Then try stretching out all your toes at once before scrunching them up, repeat several times, imagining that you are trying to gather in a sheet under your feet using your toes. Finally, feel the contact of the base of the big toe, the base of the little toe and the centre of your heel in contact with the ground, like a tripod, and keeping those three points of contact, draw up through the centre of your foot, feeling your arch lift. Release and repeat a few times.


Regularly filing away rough, dead skin from your feet will help prevent the build up of calluses, which can cause pain and discomfort. Try making it a weekly self-care ritual.


To keep the skin on your feet soft and supple, apply a good quality foot cream daily (ideally after a bath at bedtime to optimise absorption). I like the Swedish brand CCS. Their Foot Care Cream makes my feet feel so alive and good!


Last, but not least, see a podiatrist regularly, like you do the dentist. It is important to have your foot health checked by a professional to prevent and treat any problems.


I do hope that this post has inspired you to give your feet the TLC that they deserve for all that they do for you. If you look after your feet, they will look after you...

Finding the Balance Between Activity and Rest

Overdoing it at the weekend and feeling overtired at the start of the week has left me pondering the balance between activity and rest. In the modern world, we focus so much on the doing and can view non doing as laziness, but that is counterproductive, as we will find out…


As I discovered, doing too much leaves us feeling tired, but doing too little can leave us feeling low in energy in a different way, sluggish, flat, ineffective. The sweet spot between doing too much and too little will vary from person to person and from day to day, so really tune in to how your body and mind feel moment to moment. Most of us are more prone to doing too much than too little, so plan rest into each day as well as activity, and enough of it for your level of activity. 


As John Munro explains so beautifully in Between Heaven and Earth “True health and wellbeing comes not just from rest, and not just from activity, but from alternating between these in healthy ways. We see this natural pattern throughout the universe. The alternating between day and night. The movement of the seasons from summer to winter and back to summer again. The coming and going out of the tide. Everything in nature alternates between activity and rest, full and empty, yin and yang.”


Meditating the other day, I had a sense of how I feel on holiday, and it made me realise how we can forget how it feels to be properly rested and relaxed, at our best. It would be good to feel like that all day every day, but realistically even a taste of that sense of deep wellbeing every day would be good. What could you do to make that happen? Go to bed earlier? Meditate? Have a hot bath? Make time to read or be creative?


Rest can be a fairly passive activity like sitting down in front of the TV or reading a book, or it can be a more active one, but still relaxing, like the creative process of cooking, gardening, art, crafts, writing or music. For an athlete, a rest week would be a lower intensity and/or volume of training, not complete rest. You could say that play is a form of rest, from work at least.


True rest, though, is about allowing the brain to be still as well as the body, which requires meditation or sleep. Most of us struggle to switch off our thoughts completely, but the act of turning the focus inward during meditation and away from external stimuli can give the mind some rest. To help settle my mind, I visualise a calm lake and imagine my mind as flat and still as the surface of the water. To help relax my body, I imagine floating on the surface of the water, fully supported. It is amazing how my breath responds to that by slowing and softening to almost nothing. Play with it and find what form of meditation works best for you; there are so many to choose from and plenty of guided practices online to start with. As the old Zen saying goes: "You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour."


Prioritising sleep rather than viewing it as a nice to have (or worse a weakness) will pay dividends in productivity as well as in mental and physical health in both the short-term and long-term. In Essentialism: the disciplined pursuit of less, Greg McKeown summarises that “In a nutshell, sleep is what allows us to operate at our highest level of contribution so that we can achieve more, in less time.” And, I would add, it allows us to enjoy the process more too. I talk more about optimising sleep quality and quantity in my post The Does and Don’ts for a Good Night’s Sleep.


I will leave you with a quote from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu:

We join spokes in a wheel,

but it is the centre hole

that makes the wagon move.


We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.


We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.


We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Why Keep a Journal and How to Go About It

Writing regularly in a journal has a surprising number of potential benefits, including: venting negative emotions, boosting positive emotions, reframing a bad day or experience, providing personal insights and inspiring creativity. It was learning more about the power of journalling during my training in wellbeing coaching and supporting clients on their recovery from chronic exhaustive conditions that inspired me to start a regular journalling practice. I have found that I feel much calmer for it and when the habit has slipped occasionally I have noticed a sense of dis-ease creeping back in, which has then motivated me to get back to it!


You may think that writing about negative feelings could make you feel worse, but studies have found that people who regularly write about their thoughts and feelings have better mental health than those who do not. To help you express yourself as fully as possible, keep your journal somewhere private so that you don’t worry about anyone else reading it. It is for your eyes only. You may choose never to re-read what you have written or you may wish to keep your journals to refer back to. It is up to you. I like to record the key learning points from each completed journal.


There is no right or wrong way to journal. Find what works best for your needs. It very much depends on what you want to get out of it. If you can, though, find a quiet place for your journalling and schedule 15-30 minutes every day for it. It is best to write your journal by hand, but typing it or recording it as audio are other options if you prefer. 


Lauren Ostrowski Fenton, who is a counsellor, life coach and meditation teacher, describes journalling as a tool to learn about your authentic self. (I can recommend her guided sleep meditations on Spotify by the way!) Journalling prompts that Lauren suggests are to describe the day, then talk about:

  • What are your goals and how are they going?

  • What gives you joy or what are you grateful for?

  • How did you care for your body today?

  • How did you care for your soul today?

  • What boundary have you set for yourself/what did you say no to?

  • What negative self talk has come up and how have you reframed it?

  • What did you learn today?

  • I am [fill in the blank] today.


In The Stress Solution, one of the tips that Rangan Chatterjee gives for reframing a negative experience is: “Write down the experience. When we write, we tend to automatically adopt a more rational and distant viewpoint. We’re able to give the situation context and clarity in a way that we can't when we replay it over and over in our head. And when we write, we tend to be kinder to ourselves.”


In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends journalling as a tool for boosting creativity. If that is your aim, she advises writing first thing in the morning “Three pages of whatever crosses your mind…. If you can’t think of anything to write, then write, ‘I can’t think of anything to write…’” The idea is that it gets you to the other side of what is blocking your creativity. These ‘morning pages’ as Julia calls them are simply a brain dump, they are not meant to be big or clever.


I hope this has inspired you to give journalling a go or to pick it up again if your regular practice has lapsed. If making the time for it is a barrier for you, try starting with just 5 minutes a day, perhaps listing the three things that you were most grateful for that day and see where that takes you…

Ten Tips for Having a Healthy Relationship with Information Technology

The subject of managing the barrage of information fired at us from our devices was one that came up in a discussion with a friend recently while we were out on a walk and it keeps coming up in my mind, so I thought it would be a good one to explore here. The internet also happens to be the theme of Men's Health Week (12th-18th June 2023) this year. I will start by looking at some of the negative impacts of information technology (IT) on health & wellbeing and finish with ideas for maintaining a healthy relationship with it.


Our devices can have many adverse impacts on our health and wellbeing, including mental health, productivity, relationships and sleep. Frequent checking of social media feeds and the internet can cause anxiety by shifting our focus from the task in hand and overwhelming us with information. As anxiety expert Wendy Suzuki says,“ We are surrounded by too much information to filter and too much stimulation to relax.” Comparing ourselves unfavourably with those we see online can lead to low self esteem, and over exposure to negative messaging can cause or aggravate depression.


Rangan Chatterjee makes a sobering observation in The Stress Solution “...Dan Nixon, a senior executive at the bank of England, went public recently, saying he was worried that digital disruptions were having a significant impact on our productivity… Studies confirm that when we complete a task but are distracted while doing it we perform it with an IQ that is ten points lower than if we had performed it without distractions. That loss of IQ is the same as the loss from missing a night’s sleep. Without phones at our sides we are going through our entire lives less intelligently than we might be.”


Studies have shown that just having a phone at a dining table even if you are not using it, can negatively impact the quality of the social interaction over a meal. That is why some restaurants are now offering a 10% discount to customers who stow their phones in a designated holder for the duration of their visit.


IT can negatively impact sleep in two ways: blue light exposure in the evening and mental stimulation. As Sachin Panda explains in The Circadian Code, “Staring at most screens at mid- to high brightness introduces more blue light to our retina and brain. The blue wavelengths - which are beneficial during daylight hours because they boost attention, reaction times, and mood - seem to be the most disruptive at night. Exposure to them reduces melatonin production and suppresses sleep.” Scrolling social media before bed can expose you to more than blue light, seeing or reading something that sets your mind racing is not conducive to a good night’s sleep either.


Ten tips for maintaining a healthy relationship with information technology:

  1. Track your non-work IT usage over a week so that you have an accurate picture of how long you are spending online.
  2. Be selective about what people or groups you follow to avoid overwhelm and to make your online experience a positive one.
  3. Schedule set blocks of time in the day to check feeds and surf the net so that it is a proactive task instead of a reactive habit. If you find that you tend to over run the allocated time, set a timer to remind you to stop.
  4. Leave your phone behind when you go for a walk so that you can mindfully focus your five senses on what is around you and make the most of the time outdoors. If you really want it with you, put it out of sight in a bag or pocket, preferably on silent.
  5. Try to have at least one day a week when you don’t use IT other than to speak on the phone with friends and family or to message someone that you are meeting up with that day if you need to update them on timings or location.
  6. And how about a tech-free holiday when you leave all IT behind (or at least out of sight) for a weekend break or longer trip? You can even find accommodation geared to support you in that, for example Unplugged.
  7. Give whoever you are interacting with your undivided attention and avoid checking your phone.
  8. Have phones out of sight and so out of mind at meal times if you value the experience of sharing a meal with others.
  9. Set your devices to night time mode after 6pm to minimise your exposure to blue light at the end of the day and so to optimise the quality of your sleep.
  10. Set a watershed time in the evening an hour or two before you go to bed when you turn off all devices to avoid the stimulation spoiling your slumber.


I hope this post will help you to navigate a safe passage through the sea of information and distractions out there. Do let me know if you have any other strategies that work for you, I would love to know.