The Importance of Self Compassion

One of the things that has made the biggest improvement to the daily lives of me and my clients has been practicing self-compassion. It’s a concept that makes many people incredibly uncomfortable, if that’s you I’d urge you to read on.

Being kind to yourself when living with ADHD isn’t always easy despite the huge benefits. When you’re faced with having to tackle the fallout from the latest ADHD related disaster it’s all too easy to slip into beating yourself up.

Research suggests that in general up to 80% of people are kinder to others than they are to themselves, I can only imagine that figure is even higher in the neurodivergent community.

As it turns out, being unkind to ourselves actually worsens ADHD symptoms. It creates stress which is proven to reduce our ability to focus, manage impulses and regulate our emotions.

This makes mistakes more likely to happen in the first place, while robbing us of the abilities we need to fix them. This leads to a downhill spiral that gets worse and worse over time.

As I’m writing this I realised I had forgotten wet clothes in the washer. I need them to go out in a bit and will probably be a bit late as a result. Before I’d have been thinking a much more explicit version of “what an idiot, can’t even get something simple right”.

It would have been easy for that to spiral into “how am I supposed to run a coaching business if I can’t even do my washing”. At that point emotional regulation would be out of the window and the creative part of my brain would go offline.

I’d have to abandon writing and maybe even have a cry in the corner. Not finishing this post would have been further evidence of my inadequacies. I also just remembered I forgot to cancel a meeting today, even more evidence.

Fortunately today when I realised I chuckled to myself and thought “of course I did” in a lighthearted way and put the dryer on. I might be a little late but that’s probably not going to be a surprise to anyone. I messaged to cancel the forgotten meeting, apologised and got back to writing.

I appreciate this example is relatively minor and sometimes the stakes are much higher. But the fact still remains that beating yourself up is never going to make things any better, quite the opposite.

Given that it’s easier to be kinder to others than to ourselves it can help to think about how you’d talk to a close friend in the same situation. Even if you’re not able to do this in the heat of the moment doing it retrospectively can help with being easier on yourself.

At the end of the day the important thing is trying our best, mistakes are going to happen. All you can do is learn from them as much as possible and take responsibility for fixing things when needed. Some practical ways to practice more self compassion will come in a future post.