Compassion can help to regulate negative feelings or emotions by using caring behaviours to facilitate feelings of kindness, safety, and support. You can build and use self-compassion as a tool to help respond to negative thoughts, self-talk, or self-criticism with kindness and compassion. Building your self-compassion can help you to cope better with setbacks or failures, lower your levels of negative emotions and self-criticism, and can help to increase positive emotions such as happiness or optimism.
The activities on this landing page can help you to build or work on your self-compassion. They can help you overcome feelings of anxiety, negative thoughts, or negative feelings towards yourself by practicing confidence-boosting poses, working on creating more kind and supportive self-talk, and positive visualizations.
Raise your confidence
Your body posture and the way you carry yourself throughout the day can have an impact on the emotions you feel. Keeping yourself in a closed-off, tight, or small (hunched) body posture can create or increase feelings of being overwhelmed, anxious or negativity towards yourself. Practicing expansive, open, and more upright body postures instead facilitates breathing, can help communicate a feeling of calm confidence to your mind, and can help overcome feelings of anxiety or negativity towards yourself.
The videos below will walk you through the steps to set yourself in confidence-boosting poses, including both a standing and a seated variation. The videos are roughly 2 minutes in length. You may listen to them anytime and as many times as you want.
Create kind and supportive self-talk
Negative self-talk is learned behavior and the impact is a reduction in your confidence and self-esteem. This kind of self-talk sounds accusatory, loud, or threatening in your mind. You can practice applying kind and supportive voices, adjusting your self-talk to help shift your mind toward being more compassionate and away from negative thoughts.
The videos below, will walk you through scenarios that will demonstrate how to practice applying kind and supportive voices to your self-talk. These videos are roughly 2-4 minutes in length. You may listen to them whenever and as many times as you want to.
Please know that practicing using a more kind and compassionate inner voice won’t stop negative self-talk from occurring; it will help reduce it. By taking a moment to pause and change the way these thoughts look and sound in your mind, you may ease some of the harm negative self-talk can cause.
Positive visualizations for when you’re feeling anxious, stressed, or depressed
Imagining positive images has the power to stimulate positive feelings. You can practice intentionally thinking about or imagining positive images to help shift your mind away from a negative feeling and into a more positive mindset.
The video below will walk you through a visualization exercise. Find a space where you feel comfortable, somewhere you won’t be disturbed. The video is roughly 2 minutes in length. You may listen to it whenever and as many times as you need.
References
- Heriot-Maitland C, McCarthy-Jones S, Longden E and Gilbert P (2019) Compassion Focused Approaches to Working With Distressing Voices. Front. Psychol. 10:152. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00152
- Irons, C., Heriot-Maitland, C. (2021). Compassionate Mind Training: An 8-week group for the general public. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. 94, 443-463. DOI:10.1111/papt.12320
- Ji, J. L., Heyes, S. B., MacLeod, C., Holmes, E. A. (2016). Emotional Mental Imagery as Simulation of Reality: Fear and Beyond—A Tribute to Peter Lang. Behavior Therapy. 47, 702-719.
- Leaviss, J., Uttley, L. (2015). Psychotherapeutic benefits of compassion-focused therapy: an early systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 45, 927-945. doi:10.1017/S0033291714002141
- Naismith, I., Duran Ferro, C., Ingram, G., & Jimenez Leal, W. (2019). Compassion-focused imagery reduces shame and is moderated by shame, self-reassurance and multisensory imagery vividness. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 22(1), 113-122. doi: 10.4081/ripppo.2019.329
- Pyszkowska A and Rönnlund M (2021) Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion as Predictors of Well-Being: Mediating Role of a Balanced Time Perspective. Front. Psychol. 12:671746. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.67174
- Suh H and Jeong J (2021) Association of Self-Compassion With Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors and Non-suicidal Self Injury: A Meta-Analysis. Front. Psychol. 12:633482. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.633482