BITESIZE | How to Silence Your Inner Critic (and Why You Should) | Dr Kristin Neff #589

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite-size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 163 of the podcast with one of the world's leading experts on self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff. In this clip, she explains why self-compassion is so important for our health. and shares some tips that can help all of us silence our own inner critic.

Something I've observed over the years is when you look at the patients who really transform and change their lives, not just in the short term, but also in the medium term and long term. I'm seeing that it actually is because of self-compassion. It's those ones who start to quieten down and then ultimately eliminate that inner voice, that nasty inner voice in their heads that actually starts to change things. So I feel that self-compassion is really important for health outcomes as well as our day-to-day well-being. Well, self-compassion is really the antidote to our more habitual way of being, which is harshly self-critical, right, or really cold to ourselves.

And talk about health, right? There's just a new meta-analysis that came out showing that self-compassion is linked to physical as well as emotional health, because of course, I'm sure as you know, our state of mind impacts our body, right, and how healthy and how well it's functioning. So when you're harshly self-critical or or cold to yourself, and and by the way, believe it or not, we wanna, we don't want to judge ourselves for judging ourselves. We don't want to beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up because really what's happening when we're really hard on ourselves is we're just trying to stay safe, right? We feel threatened in some way when we feel we're inadequate or we've made a mistake, we feel like, oh gosh, I better need to change this because it's gonna cause problems in my life.

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