Why Compassion Might Just Save Your Life

More self-care with an information-packed discussion with meditation researcher, Kirsten McEwan. Did you know you have an ‘old’ primordial brain and a ‘new’, updated nozzle? We also have three innate brain systems that make us utterly brilliant problem solvers and kind and caring — but also make us horribly critical and unhappy. Kirsten demystifies these complex systems so we can understand why we sometimes behave in the ways we do — and how compassion is the key to managing it all.

Transcript

Welcome to Finding Your Right Mind with me,

Vanessa Potter.

I think we all know I'm a meditation advocate.

I have used these practices for over eight years and I know what impact they can have on my life.

But I'm starting to realise that just knowing that meditation can help you isn't enough.

You need to know how and why and what that really means is you need to understand how your brain works.

We actually have an old brain and a new brain and this is something that scientists have been investigating more and more and more over the years and these two different brains need to work in tandem and so today's episode is all about understanding the inner mechanics of our brains and by that I mean this older brain we've had for millennia and then this new,

More funky problem-solving brain that's much more cognitively driven.

But these two systems,

When they get out of kilter,

Out of balance,

If one dominates the other then that's when we get into trouble and that's how we suffer stress and worry that can lead to illness.

So learning about our brains is crucial if you're going to learn to meditate because otherwise it's a little bit like being given a car and looking at the gears and not really knowing which gear does what or what pedal is the accelerator and which is the clutch.

You've got to know the mechanics of your brain in order to navigate a meditation practice.

So let me ask,

How many of us have got stuck in a thought,

Stuck reliving an event or a situation or conversation quite often and going over and over and it's often a stressful one isn't it?

It's one that is niggling you and that you just,

It's like it's sticky,

You can't get it out of your mind and quite often the emotions attached to that event,

Whether you are scared or angry or frustrated,

That is your threat system and this is a really crucial system to understand.

Our threat system is amazing,

It saves your life if you are being chased by a mugger but let's face it,

That doesn't happen very much in life.

So we need that system but what we need to be able to do is to turn it off when we don't need it anymore.

So much about meditation is about education.

It really isn't just sitting down with your eyes closed.

Kirsten McEwan and I talk about how meditation and compassion can live together and some of the enormous misconceptions we have.

Really it is worthwhile,

It's not just about making your life smoother,

More balanced and easy,

It can be about saving your health.

We'll also get into how compassion can help relationships and creativity and why compassion is a particularly good meditation to help that.

So today we're talking about how tricky our brains are.

Compassion meditation is not being selfish,

It's not a pity party,

It's not feeling sorry for yourself,

It's not weak,

It is in fact one of the strongest most powerful things you can do.

But if we don't understand the configuration of our brains and how much it works against us and how we can change that,

Then compassion doesn't get a look in.

So enjoy today's episode,

If you like what you hear,

As always I'd love a review.

Drop me a line,

Ask me a question and subscribe for more.

Hi Kirsten,

It's really brilliant to have you on the show today.

Maybe you could introduce yourself and tell us who you are and a little bit about your research area.

Hi Vanessa,

Yeah my name is Kirsten McEwan and I'm a researcher at the University of Derby.

I've been researching mental health for about 17 years.

I'm really interested in how people try and create the conditions for a really good quality of life,

So I'm interested in reducing self-criticism and trying to promote self-compassion.

So a lot of my researchers looked at compassion focused therapies and how these are effective for different patient groups and for members of the public as well.

An absolutely fascinating area of research and one that I am particularly interested in.

I think it would be really helpful having done a show on kindness and got really into the nitty-gritty of the loving kindness practice.

I think we can tease apart what compassion actually is.

It's a word we use all the time and I think sometimes we use it very correctly but I think there's a lot more to it.

So maybe you could just dig into and identify what compassion actually is and maybe that would help by separating it out from empathy and sympathy and even kindness just so we really can understand it.

Yeah it's quite a tricky concept to get hold of actually and quite a lot of patients struggle with this concept at first and their misunderstanding of it can mean that they're a bit resistant to developing it but really compassion developed with the mammalian caring system so it kind of comes from this stimulus response algorithm.

So if for example if a baby's crying then the parent goes and soothes the baby so the stimulus is the baby crying,

The response is the parent soothing it and that's really where compassion emerged from and it's a two-step process.

So the first step is being sensitive to and engaging with another person's distress or your own distress rather than avoiding it or dissociating from it and then the second step is to take part in the appropriate action to try and alleviate that distress and that really requires a bit of wisdom because for example I saw somebody drowning I would be able to be sensitive to their distress and immediately see that they're in trouble but then I need to take part in the appropriate actions to alleviate that distress and if I didn't know how to swim then jumping in to try and save them would be completely the wrong thing to do.

So there are two sets of competencies there's being able to notice and engage with distress and then the second step is having the wisdom to know what's the appropriate action to alleviate that distress and in that respect it's a bit different to empathy and sympathy because they're really the first step of compassion there that sensitivity to and that response to distress but they don't involve any action to alleviate it and then kindness is different as well because often with kindness we're giving it to somebody we know and like and it's all about positive emotion it's about seeing somebody else experience joy and growth or flourishing because of something kind we've done for them whereas compassion always involves an element of distress or suffering and you can give compassion to people you don't like as well.

If we saw somebody that we didn't like and we saw them fall over in the street we would go and help them up we'd still be able to be compassionate to them but we wouldn't normally be able to be kind to them so we wouldn't pay them a compliment for example.

Gosh there's a whole bunch of things there that I'm really interested in and as you were talking I was very aware of how nervous these emotions make me feel and I've done some work on this and I think this is perhaps one of the problems that we know we've got all these emotions in us but we've got this resistance to them there's this kind of barriers in the in the way and like I think there's a there's often a will but then there's this fear is that right there's fear associated with these emotions.

Absolutely and that fear is definitely heightened in people who have issues with self-criticism,

Depression,

Anxiety.

It can come from different places it could be that people feel that they don't deserve compassion that it's not for them and we often get that in patients or it could be that it's such an alien concept for some people that they've just never had that those caring compassionate relationships that it's frightening to them when they get a taste of it and also people are very scared of letting go of their self-criticism.

We've had a lot of workshops where we at the start ask people if all your self-criticism could just disappear you could wake up tomorrow and it's gone what would be your greatest fear and there's a big list that comes out of people saying things like oh well if I wasn't self-critical then my standards would drop and I'd just become this lazy person who never achieved anything and I wouldn't be able to obtain the perfectionistic standards I'm used to aspiring to or I could just become this really selfish person and people wouldn't like me so there's this worry that as soon as you lose self-criticism you're just going to become this lazy terrible person which really isn't accurate because there's lots of research to show you that if you can increase people's self-compassion they actually become more conscientious but just in a healthier way it's more growth orientated it's more wanting to learn things for the fun of it and to see your own personal development rather than that striving to avoid inferiority that you get with performance related striving.

Yes and I still myself have resistance to this perfectionism element was something that came up an enormous amount in my book and my beliefs around that are really deeply rooted they're so strong and even with knowledge and even with work they're still there and I constantly have to battle with this need to be doing the need to be achieving and it's amazing how I then spread that out to those around me as well that you know you pass it on and I can see myself doing it and I do find the compassion practice is great at a circuit breaker it's definitely a circuit breaker but I find maintaining it really difficult so I use it as a constant reining in method but then I find that those old habits and and it's society as well and I'm very aware that in my house you know I can do this stuff and it makes sense to me then I go out in the real world and people you know make comments and they ask what you're doing and also if you're changing the way you've always been you're in your entire life that's a model that you subscribe to and that everyone else subscribes to so to start shifting that it's a monumental job because everybody believes you are that way and so to change it I think is is really difficult I'm very sympathetic to anybody who endeavors to do this it is absolutely worth it but it's not an easy job to do is it no not at all and I really agree with your point about society putting this pressure on us to constantly be on the go it means that we're we're often in our what we call our drive system where we're striving to go out and achieve things and gather resources and then you kind of collapse into exhaustion at the end of it or into the threat system and feel like you're not doing well enough and I think it's even worse at the moment because of social media it's a whole new audience of people with which you can socially compare yourself and say am I doing as well as this person they seem to be having a better time than me I think it's really unhealthy the way we live at the moment with that pressure for perfectionism and ironically it is even there within the spiritual world there's quite a lot of we won't necessarily get into it now on spiritual narcissism which is really interesting I sometimes have this oh I'm not being compassionate enough and I'll listen to some passion tracks and I'll often get to the end and I have to watch out for the voice that's berating myself for not doing this regularly enough okay you're doing it now but that's not enough you know and then you think you rein yourself in again and go oh my goodness this is so deeply entrenched and then I think actually for me I have to have a bit of humor here when those moments happen and laugh at myself and laugh at the world because otherwise I think I would go a little bit crazy now I've mentioned I listen to a compassion track what I think would be really helpful is if you could just explain if you were to do a compassion practice what does that look like what is a compassion practice well we start with a lot of psycho education with people so we explain really how tricky our brains are and how they've developed over time to adapt to different environmental challenges but actually they're really quite a poor design and they come into a lot of problems so we have this really old part of our brain which is adapted to help us respond to threats and opportunities so it's the part of our brain that tells us oh there's a there's a danger that there's a threat maybe it's a snake in the path and we need to pay attention to it and either run away or freeze or do something to prevent being harmed and this part of our brain can also alert us to opportunities so if we it alerts us to go out and gather resources or form relationships with people that can be productive and lead to reproduction and genetic success but then we also have this new part of our brain that as far as we're aware we're the only species to have this and that's the level of conscious thought that we have and this is a bit of a blessing and a curse because it means we've got we've got creativity we can have fantasy and imagination but we can also use that to go to quite dark places so we can ruminate and start replaying old events that we found shameful and start regretting the past or we can become anxious and start worrying about the future and what's going to happen in the next few days or the next few years and as far as we're aware other species don't do that and there's a there's a book out there called why zebras don't get ulcers and the example given is that if a zebra got chased by a lion it doesn't after it escapes it doesn't think to itself oh my god can you imagine if i was eaten alive by that lion and how terrible that would be and what would happen to my children a zebra doesn't have those thoughts as far as we know it just goes back to eating whereas we can keep the threat going we can replay it in our mind so if we have an interaction at work where our boss criticizes us we can go home and think about that for hours and replay the event so our brains are very tricky in the sense that we can keep an original threat going for a long time and that's one of the things that we explain to people when they're doing compassion focused therapy and the other thing is that we've got these three systems we've got a threat system that helps keep us safe and alerts us to danger but we've also got this drive system that helps us to become motivated to go after resources and often i think society encourages us to bounce between those two systems so if we're feeling threatened we often try and calm our threat system through drive so we start distracting ourselves and trying to achieve more things and actually there's this third system which is really really linked to mammalian caregiving called the soothing system and that's where we want to be spending a lot of our time and that's all to do with rest and digest it's our recuperation system and it's about feeling connected to other people connected to ourselves and just calm and soothed and content so we explain to people that this is the system we're going to try and focus on and a bit like physiotherapy for the brain we're going to try and strengthen up this muscle we're going to try and stimulate those feelings of soothing and the primary way that we do that really is through compassionate mental imagery so we know we've got these fantastic imaginations we can fantasize about holidays in the future and what a romantic relationship might turn out to be like given that we know this one of the ways that we can stimulate compassion in our brains and in our bodies is by merely imagining another person being really compassionate and caring towards us and that will have the same effect on our bodies as if the real person were there it's really powerful so a very simple exercise would be to imagine your ideal carer your ideal nurturer and for a lot of our patients that can be quite difficult they've not had many experiences of people being kind to them so often their images are of animals or nature being accepting and kind and having wisdom non-judgment and completely accepting them for who they are and when we're doing this imagery we really get people to visualize what that might look like if they can imagine a person or an animal what would their facial expression look like what would their tone of voice be what would their body posture be like we really try and get them into the moment and imagining what it's like to receive compassion from another person that's so powerful when you were talking i'm just thinking the whole time how we're fooling our own brain aren't we we're making it work to its own advantage which is to take your own imagination and because of the way our brains are set up we can picture that person and i know i've done this firsthand if you go into that image go into that feeling and smells and evoke all of your senses and particularly i found if i imagine a particular scenario something maybe that's even happened and i put that person in it you get this flood of emotion which is really powerful and real because your brain doesn't know that that's not happening and i just think it's this brilliant mechanism where we can catch ourselves out where we can fool ourselves but fooling ourselves in the good way rather than the way that we fool ourselves 90 of the time in a negative way so i think there's something really lovely about that and again i'm smiling because i can feel some humor that we have to learn about ourselves we have to forgive ourselves for being human for thinking and for getting wrapped up and we also have to think about society just going back to that and social media it's designed to capture our attention it's designed to make us compete it is designed to trigger neurochemicals that make us want more of it i did an interview all about this about social media in the way that it hooks in children in particular and it was very interesting that we talked a lot about being compassionate about ourselves during that process because you're fighting an uphill battle there because scientists and developers and researchers it's research informed we know psychologically how we work and what we look for and a lot of social media is absolutely designed to to capitalize on that so i think we have to stand back a little bit not beat ourselves up for getting sucked in in the first place but then also the this idea you talked about about educating yourself on now what's the implication of that how does that lead to your thoughts how does that lead to your feelings and what does that make you do and behave i really like this idea of educating for me that's been one of the most fundamental parts of of even buying into a compassion practice which kind of brings me to this idea that i know if i've mentioned kindness practices or compassion practices i get a lot of eye rolling it seemed as a little bit inconsequential there doesn't seem to be much payoff i think you described it as low ranking can you talk a little bit more about why why do we see that because it's crazy yeah this really comes from the misconception about compassion people think that it's a low position in the in the human hierarchy that if you have compassion you're somehow inferior to others that it's a weakness or that it's associated with pity or letting yourself off the hook and i've heard many people say oh i don't want to have a pity party but it really does come from a misconception of compassion that it's a weakness but it takes an enormous amount of courage to have compassion because you're engaging with distress whether it's somebody else's or your own you're engaging with it rather than avoiding it or dissociating from it and you're taking part in an action to alleviate it and that really does take courage i mean if you think about firefighters that's a compassionate act they don't know the people in the burning building they're not running in to save them for any other reason than they see somebody in distress and have to perform they know it's their job to perform that appropriate action and to go in and alleviate that distress and that takes a lot of courage but i think this is why it's devalued and one of the things we've found with our research is that really competitive people and narcissists really devalue compassion and they're the ones who see it as this weak fluffy thing that's self-indulgent that's fascinating and i'm interested is there a divide between the sexes as well because i'm interested in that because my gut tells me that perhaps women are more wired towards this is that perhaps because of the nurturing side i don't know the answer to this i'm curious and my instinct is that if i talk to men about this they get instantly very uncomfortable it's not seen as a male emotion it's not seen as their job and and very much a weak practice absolutely that's a really accurate instinct we've had to work a lot to adapt the compassion model for men so that they're more accepting of it and a good example is i have a colleague who works in the american prison system and when he first tried to do compassion work with the prisoners they just laughed it off and said do you know how tough i've had to be to survive in this environment i can't be showing emotion i can't get into all that soft stuff so he really had to reframe it for them as courage and as being a strong male role model this protective figure who sees distress in others and is motivated and has the wisdom to go and alleviate that distress i love that you have the two words together courage and compassion and i think compassion really needs a lot of rebranding i think from those that know about it there's this big gap where a lot of people fall down between with their misconceptions lead the way and actually at the front you almost need to have courage before compassion because you have to be to go there one good side about social media is that you know men are getting more of a voice mental health people with anxiety feel at least they can voice it and i think that's stepping in that direction of compassion certainly i love the idea of it being associated with the word courage and also i'm going to pick up on the word friendship now we talked about this before christine neff has done a huge amount of work within in fact she coined the phrase didn't she self-compassion in her research work i'll put some notes about her in the show notes and perhaps you can flesh it out a bit more but she talks about being a friend to yourself and i love this concept perhaps you can explain it better than me yeah this is a really clever and simple concept where if you're struggling to be compassionate to yourself because our kind of routine is to usually be self-critical when something goes wrong and start calling ourselves names but if you're really struggling to be self-compassionate then an excellent way to get into this is to just imagine for a moment if a friend were going through the same thing as you what would you say to them how would you treat them what would your whole manner be towards them and usually people are able to imagine this really easily and then you can suggest that well can you direct that to yourself can you give that to yourself so it can be a really good way to facilitate people who are a bit resistant to self-compassion to helping them to experience it and know what that should look like i found that instantly relatable i'm taking away the focus from myself you know so we always we're always much more comfortable with that it appealed to me because i felt i could be useful i was being helpful and that put a different slant on it so i kind of got this whole angle of being a friend to yourself because it somehow takes away it feeling too close to me it was one step away if that makes sense it was a really clever concept like you say and i think that's one that perhaps men would relate to because most people like to be seen as loyal trusting friendly caring and if you think all those attributes are instantly there with friendship particularly close friendships so you've got those emotions first and then you say well just apply that yourself it's easier to do it through the friendship model than it is just by going and doing that to yourself because i do think that other voice jumps in very quickly with uh you're being selfish you're indulging yourself and actually i quite like to talk about our little inner critics our inner voices i have become on first name terms with mine over my meditation experiment and sharon solsberg i think does some great work around this and in one of her books she suggested naming it and i was like wow oh my god that totally appeals to me mine instantly had a name uh she's a she and she's called cruella deville and she has a first stole and she flicks it and she has a cigarette holder and she's awful actually but i found with the inner critic that sometimes the voice is very front and center and it's very loud but the more practicing that i did with the different meditations the more i realized that there were voices much deeper down and i described them as whispering and i think it can be very insidious and actually i think they can be very hard to identify so perhaps you could just talk a little bit about your patience and inner critics and how you deal with that yeah it's it's pretty hard to really erode away that self-critic because it is so automatic we all do it and there are two different forms of self-criticism that we engage in as well there's the much more common version that most people will be familiar with is a sense of feeling inadequate and this type of self-criticism has a self-correcting function so we might be driving somewhere and lose our way and be late for a meeting and we might start to say oh gosh you're such a fool you never look at the maps and you need to do more preparation for these kind of things and you've got to do better next time and there's always a sense of feeling inadequate but it's about self-correcting and trying to improve upon the performance for the next time and then we've got this much more self-hating self-persecuting style of self-criticism which is really about destroying parts of the self and that's where you might start swearing at yourself calling yourself horrible names telling yourself that you're useless at everything and they yeah they have two different functions and it's the self-correcting one that people really find difficult to let go of because they believe it's helpful they think it's the type of self-criticism that keeps them on their toes that keeps them ahead of the competition keeps their standards up and so it's really pervasive and hard to let go of that self-correcting form of self-criticism.

How can we do that?

Is there something that we can do to just start softening the voice maybe?

I think it comes partly from mindfulness from a mindful awareness of actually noticing when you're doing it because for so many people it's utterly automatic I've seen a lot of clients go through the compassion therapy who say I'm not a self-critic I don't do that but when you actually get them to connect with their critical voice like you've said to imagine their Cruella de Vil and to imagine it in detail what does she look like what's her posture like what does she say to you when things go wrong then they go oh I do have a critic and for people who are more in the sort of harsh self-critic zone theirs can look like this horrible monster or this black mess in their head whereas for people who are more in the inadequate self-criticism style it could be more like the demon headmaster from the children's television programme or something but once they realise it's there I think it makes a big difference and once you contrast that as well with compassion if you get people to imagine that critical self and say okay you've just imagined your critical self how do you feel now how do you feel in terms of being able to address that failure that you experienced and move on from it you go well I feel knackered I'm exhausted I don't have any motivation I just feel like I'm on the floor and for people who've got the really persecuting style they just say I feel like utter rubbish I just I can't get up there's no point there's no point to me even trying when they try and go into their compassionate self and you take them through the same imagery experience you know imagining what it looks like the voice tone they come out of it and you say okay how do you feel now about this problem and the contrast is amazing and people really say wow I feel motivated I've actually got energy and I kind of feel like I could move on and solve this problem they just feel a lot more able to deal with issues if you come at it from a compassionate rather than critical stance so I think having that awareness doing those kind of mindfulness exercises and even if it's hours after the event even if it's several hours later and you've been replaying it if you can just catch yourself and say oh I'm doing that thing that's my self-critic let's try and reframe this and spend some time with self-compassion and see how I feel differently that's really helpful and I'm just aware of a wonderful phrase that gets used in mindfulness I haven't heard it so much recently but the thought train you know get realizing that thoughts are kind of like trains and sometimes they are high-speed bullets and they're off so fast that you don't you can't see the landscape passing but actually being able to jump off that thought train and just stand and I think also the idea of the critic you don't necessarily get rid of your critic do you and I'm quite aware that for me sometimes I had to almost change my relationship to my critic so my critic was still there Cruella was still around but it helped me to be to have a bit of concern a bit of empathy and a bit of curiosity about Cruella why is she being like that you know you know you're really a horrible person and you flick around and you put on this act and I can see that act you know what's why what's behind that I mean maybe it's a bit strange to start doing some weird psychology job on your own self-critic but it was really helpful because it stops the thought it stops the nastiness and it gives you a pause button it also allows you because of course at the same time you're being kind to yourself because you're allowing yourself that space between you and some event that's and your reaction to that you're just creating air between all of it where you can like you say perhaps reassess and then I think that's where the rational mind rather than this emotional mind constantly driving us the irrational mind gets a look in and then can be reasonable and and I just find what happens with Cruella she just kind of disappears she kind of fades again so she comes forward and backwards in my mind and and but having a relationship and as you say noticing I think is absolutely crucial to that because otherwise you're driven by these thoughts and these these critics without sometimes even realizing and I think that must happen a huge amount so we really got into the nitty-gritty of inner critics and compassion what I think would be really helpful is to talk about the benefits we know that this is quite hard to do quite hard work but there are really good reasons for doing it one of them is improving relationships maybe you could talk about how compassion in your life and towards yourself could improve your relationships well I think the the more you're able to self-regulate through compassion the more you're able to tone down that threat system and those critical voices the better your relationships become because you you kind of get out of that threat or competitive mode of thinking and social comparison comparing yourself with others if you step out of your threat system and into your compassion system you're much better able to engage in more collaborative and supportive relationships and we've even seen this with patients who've undergone compassion focused therapy that at the start of therapy people who they thought were good for them who they thought they had a supportive relationship with once they begin to learn about real compassion and what that looks like quite a few of them realize oh these relationships aren't that supportive they're not that good for me and at the end of therapy they've kind of put some distance between themselves in those relationships and said no these this is not the compassionate choice for me to be friends with these people I'm gonna seek out more nurturing relationships with with others and I think just having that compassionate mind frame and being in that that sort of caring system allows you to really appreciate the people that you're with be more tolerant and patient when when they are struggling or when they are showing signs of distress so I think all around it just encourages better quality relationships.

I totally agree and I'm also curious because I found my creativity peaked a lot during certain practices and I found there was definitely links between being compassionate and I suppose open perhaps and creativity could you talk a little bit about how this can spark creative thinking?

Yeah well if we're in our threat system we're pretty much gonna be rubbish at everything because threat really narrows our attention our attention becomes completely soaked up in the threat itself how to deal with it we've got to keep monitoring it making sure that we stay safe and if your attention is narrowed like that you really can't engage in creative thinking or be open to new experiences and so being able to move from your threat system into a more soothing caring compassionate system it opens up your attention again and you're much more likely to be able to think up creative solutions and an example of this is an exercise that we do where we get people in pairs and we get them to talk to each other about a problem they're having and for the first two minutes one of the pairs will just talk freely about this problem that they're having and the other person listens and then for the next two minutes they imagine what if I was at my absolute compassionate best I had all these qualities of wisdom non-judgment acceptance and they talk about the problem again and the person listening to them is is shocked because it's like looking at a different person and they usually feed back afterwards and say wow you came up with loads of practical solutions to that problem in that second compassion session and you would seem so much more calm and accepting and and realistic about what could be done so I think it really does open up a lot more creativity and possibilities and some of Kristin Neff's research has shown this as well in terms of academic achievements that if you are able to train students in compassion they move to this more growth focused style of learning where it's all about personal development and they actually achieve better results academically than they weren't to do that training and they were more driven by trying to strive to avoid inferiority in comparison with other people.

I wish there would be more of this in our education and in fact you know even with parents when children come home and the you know the push push push with homework and achieving scores and grades passing exams and keeping up it is an enormous pressure I can totally see how compassion can be a brilliant antidote to that but more than just an antidote like you're saying an actual benefit and can open you up because and I find this all the time if I when I come into that much more nurturing state which is often when I walk I go outside I do kind of walking meditations but I do the meditations at home as well but particularly the ones when I go outside I just get this flood in fact it's it's sometimes overwhelming and it's like my brain has stored up all of its great ideas all of its intuitions all its insights all of its book ideas and oh my goodness and it comes flooding out when I'm in this state in fact I now have to take a look I have to go into my phone and like just say all these things down so I capture it so that my brain can then calm down but it's amazing how it opens a floodgate of creativity going into that state and I suppose also because I'm conditioned a little bit so I've got the habit now so it's almost like my brain waits it's like oh we're going for a walk now now what I'm going to do is flood you with ideas and and they're not crazy things it's great ideas you know I think there's definitely something in there that I wish we could sort of capture and bring into education you know teaching children outside all of these things I think would be great anyway we're onto a slightly different topic there but I know that you're a supporter of forest bathing and nature and and in fact actually I'm quite interested you've done some work recently haven't you with nature and forest bathing and compassion and seeing how people's state of mind changes when they're in those environments I thought that a lot of the theory behind compassion it's really evolutionary theory and a lot of the examples used in the psycho education come from animals like the the zebra example and both compassion focused therapy and forest bathing what they're trying to target is getting you into that soothing system so I thought the two would really complement each other so last year we had a go at combining compassionate mind training with forest bathing and had pretty good results people definitely seem to get into their soothing system and we could see that not just from their questionnaire responses but also we measured their heart rate variability which is an indicator of how much you're in your threat drive or soothing system and a lot of people's heart rate variability increased showing that they were more in that soothing system so I think being outdoors and doing any kind of therapy really is quite complementary because you know we've spent most of our history as a species in the outdoors it's only relatively recently that we've become urbanized so we're really adapted to respond to natural stimuli and there's quite a few studies showing our attention is better when we're outdoors so I'm not surprised that you're experiencing all these creative ideas as soon as you step outside and get into nature.

And I find as well it's a cyclical thing it becomes sort of mildly addictive in a really nice way because of course all the positive you know neurochemicals that get released and so of course that makes me want to do it even more and I think it's really good to just say that you know meditation doesn't necessarily and doing a compassion practice doesn't have to be hard work I mean it can be challenging because of the emotions you have to deal with perhaps but you don't have to sit beat yourself up the critic again you must sit on your sofa you must do this for 20 minutes I think we're a bit hard on ourselves even when it comes to the meditation and actually it's totally legitimate to do practices outside and to incorporate it into if you're already going for a daily walk.

I think it's also worth mentioning because I didn't know what forest bathing was when I first heard this term it's not lying down necessarily in the middle of a wood which is what I instantly had this picture of a person lying kind of spread eagled in a in a forest and whilst of course you know connecting with nature in the ground there's lots and lots you know of good stuff from that it's more about walking in nature and slowly observing and being mindful of your environment and allowing your senses to absorb it rather than actually lying down.

I'm interested in other research as well because there's been some quite interesting compassion studies is there anything that you found particularly fascinating in your work?

Yeah I think really it's moving away from questionnaire measures with people and measuring the way their body reacts to compassion because I think a lot of us if we're honest we don't have that great an insight into how we're feeling at any given time because it's not like we ever experienced just one emotion in isolation it's usually a combination of different things and it's how tuned in a person is to that as to how able they are to say how anxious they're feeling in a given moment so questionnaires are helpful but they're maybe a bit limited by people's insight and what I've been really enjoying is measuring people's physiological responses to compassion.

The most common way I do this is by looking at heart rate variability because that's an indicator of what we call our parasympathetic nervous system or in other words our rest and digest or soothing system and I recently did a study with bipolar patients and bipolar patients are a classic example of people who bounce between their threat system and their drive system and that's where you get the lows of depression and the highs of ania it's they're just bouncing between those two systems and really their soothing system is so undernourished and underactive so the compassion focused therapy was aiming to get that soothing system really online in patients with bipolar disorder and to move them away from their threat competitive system and more into their collaborative affiliative caring system and we were able to show this through heart rate variability we got bipolar patients at the start and the end of the study to really imagine a scenario where they felt really competitive and they felt like they'd lost out on this competition maybe it was a job interview or something that they failed at and then we also got them to imagine a scenario where they felt really connected to other people and like socially they were doing really great and we compared their heart rate variability while they imagined these two scenarios at the start and the end of the therapy and at the start of the therapy you could see a huge shift in heart rate when it came to the competitive scenario people's heart rate went right up and their heart rate variability so their soothing system crashed it went right down showing that they'd really gone into that drive threat system and when we tried to do the compassionate imagery with them they didn't really have much of a response but at the end of 12 weeks of therapy the pattern had completely shifted so there when they did the competitive imagery not much response this time but when they did the compassionate imagery huge increase in heart rate variability and for some of those patients they'd had what we call a clinically at risk profile of heart rate variability at the start of the study where you're at risk of cardiovascular disease and in a couple of them that had completely shifted and they were showing a healthy profile so that's really exciting to see in reality how a person's body changes in response to you know several weeks of compassion focused therapy and the real impact it has.

That's extraordinary and you're right the physiological measures are real and you know they're measurable aren't they?

I think we're becoming much more somatically aware and really paying attention to the emotional responses in the body rather than always you know rationally trying to figure stuff out.

I'm thinking of Peter Levine's work which I'm sure you've come across his trauma work with the trauma cycle and I'm remembering what you said about the zebra because of course when a zebra's attacked they don't go off to their zebra mates and go oh blimey they do the shaking thing don't they they they complete the trauma the stress cycle and their whole bodies you know just you see them do it and dogs do it and all animals do it yeah they shake and they and then they snort a bit and then they look around they're still alert and then they gradually come down and then they start eating grass again and of course as humans we don't allow ourselves to go through those whole cycles allowing that physical that somatic manifestation of that alert that driving that dangerous moment so that's great that research is kind of being much more conscious of that as well.

Yeah and what's happening in the body I think that's a fascinating point that you make as well because that really does show one of the conflicts between our old and new brain is that animals are so much in their old brain there is so much in either their threat system or their kind of seeking out opportunities system that they're much more in touch with their immediate needs whereas I think we've got this conscious new brain that can make us override or ignore our immediate needs and yes if we're feeling threatened we probably should do what the zebra does leap around snort go for a run but we often don't and I do when you were telling me about that I was remembering one of those tv programmes about tribes and whilst they were filming they came across a snake in the path and the snake slithered off but the tribe started kind of leaping about the path jumping back and forwards and they said it was a ritual to get rid of the fear of the snake and to move on from the incident and I just thought how similar that seemed to the strategy that other animals adopt when they encounter a threat and how you see them sometimes collapse onto their side and just running on the spot on the floor just to get rid of that adrenaline.

So miss a trick we think we're so clever and intellectual you know when when a child has an accident we pick them up don't we they start shaking we're like they're there that's okay we try and suppress the bodily response and we suppress it and also we kind of do this looking around we're embarrassed so there's a shame attached to it and all of this silly silly societal nonsense all these stories that we've told ourselves about how we need to respond to things.

My son had an injury last year quite a bad one on his knee and I'm we're only becoming kind of trauma literate I think now it feels like every day I seem to learn a little bit more about it and even then looking back I can realise that you know he was shaking we were shocked and everybody was trying to mask it we all hide those emotions and we say it'll be okay whereas actually it should be more we're here you're going through this you're going to shake that's normal that's expected it's your body's response but we're here with you and that's the compassion isn't it we're alongside you we're not going to try and deviate from this cycle of emotion we're not going to stop it because it needs to process but of course society you know we didn't do that we went there there it'll be fine no no you don't need to shake you don't need to cry it's it's like oh we're kind of our own worst enemy yeah very much especially when we get into the somatic side I get very excited about that but perhaps you could bring us back to reality have you got in your compassion toolbox a little practice that we could do if people have been listening to this going a lot of this chimes a lot of this makes sense to me I want to walk away and do something today have you got something you could share for us yeah I think probably one of the most simple exercises that people might be able to incorporate into their daily practice would be when you experience some kind of threat you're going to go into yourself critic but when you're there as soon as you're able to break that thought process and go oh here's my self-critic just take a moment to think what would be the compassionate thing to do right now for myself and you might want to use some of the imagery just imagine if I was at my compassionate best if I would have wisdom and courage and non-judgment what would be the best compassionate thing to do for myself right now and just asking that question I think will help lead into more compassionate thinking and away from that self-criticism even if it's hours after the event it's still that brings in that curiosity again you know when you stop questioning curiosity comes alongside that and I think that's a really helpful framework it's a helpful place to have yourself in I'm open now I'm open to suggestion because I think if we try and take away crit well not even take away critics but suppress them I don't think that helps because that for me never worked I had to just allow but then be curious and be kind and it's amazing how it makes it fade it does work yeah and it gets better over time I mean these are life skills they need daily practice really but if you keep practicing it does get easier and that critical voice will become a bit more quiet made a very good point it's training and I think it really helps to see this you know we we're trained for a five or a 10k run we go and exercise our body and our body gets better at it you know we go to the swimming pool we get faster we can do 10 lengths and then 20 lengths and it's exactly the same with compassion training I think it really helps to see it like that rather than just a random thing that you do every so often there is actually purpose and motive and outcomes that come from a compassion practice yeah and you wouldn't just use it in a crisis that's a bit like trying to learn how to row a boat in stormy waters if you practice every day you're really preparing your mind and changing it and preparing it for more compassion and helping you get out of your threat system a bit quicker it's not that we're trying to get rid of the threat system at all because it's helpful to us it's what's kept us alive and safe all of our lives it's just about being able to move out of it quicker so we don't keep that threat going for longer than is necessary and just move back into the soothing system and give ourselves give ourselves a break from being us sometimes when people say why do you meditate it's like I need a break from being me and actually yeah I gotta stick with that because well I know what it means it's been absolutely fantastic talking to you today Kirsten that's been just so much information and so helpful and thank you for sharing that little practice I think that's totally doable I've really enjoyed talking to you yeah me too you're welcome you

Reviews

I’m just now learning about self compassion and how to DO it. This answered many questions I had, provided understanding of the brain and offered new techniques to try. Thank you

So much helpful information, am going to listen again incase ive missed anything. Thank you.