The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion

by Christopher K Germer

  Most of us believe that our happiness depends on the external circumstances of our lives. Therefore, we spend our lives on a treadmill, continually arranging to have pleasure and avoid pain. When we experience pleasure, we grasp for more of it. When we experience pain, we avoid it. Both of these reactions are instinctive, but they’re not successful strategies for emotional well-being. The problem with pleasure seeking is that the pleasure will end at some point and we’ll become disappointed: we fall out of love, our bellies become full, our friends go home. The problem with avoiding pain is that it’s just not possible to do, and it often gets worse with our increased efforts to try. For example, eating to reduce stress can cause obesity, and working excessively to overcome low self-esteem can land you in the grave.

  It’s possible to be completely controlled by the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain. I know a man, Stewart, who took great pleasure in drinking alcohol when he was younger. He started drinking when he was 14 years old. By the time Stewart was 20, he routinely drank a case of beer (24 cans) per night. One evening he had a panic attack while he was drunk, and it so frightened him that he never drank again. Beer, the source of so much pleasure, had become terrifying overnight because he associated it with his panic attack. Stewart then stopped going anywhere or doing anything that could possibly trigger a panic attack, including other things he used to enjoy, such as driving his truck around town and going to baseball games. First the pleasure of alcohol dominated his life, then the fear of a panic attack did. Stuart was a hostage to these short-term states of mind: pleasure and pain.

  A new approach is to change our relationship to pain and pleasure. We can step back and learn to be calm in the midst of pain; we can let pleasure naturally come and go. That’s serenity. We can even learn to embrace pain as well as pleasure, and every nuance in between, thereby living each moment to the fullest. That’s joy. Learning how to spend some time with pain is essential to achieving personal happiness. It may sound paradoxical, but in order to be happy we must embrace unhappiness.

  Embracing Misery in Marriage

  For 14 years, psychologist John Gottman and colleagues at the University of Washington tracked 650 couples to discover what made marriages successful. He says he’s able to predict with 91% accuracy which couples will end up in divorce. They’re the ones who practice criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Gottman also observed that 69% of marital disputes are never resolved, especially arguments about core personality issues and values. Since couples don’t resolve most of their personal differences, successful couples somehow learn to accept them. Happy couples “know each other intimately and they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes and dreams.”

  Psychologists Andrew Christensen and Neil Jacobson developed an acceptance-based couple therapy: integrative couple therapy. This approach uses behavior therapy to address problems that can be changed and “acceptance” for problems that can’t change. Acceptance means embracing problems as a path to intimacy and relinquishing the need to change one’s partner. In a randomized, controlled study of 6 months of weekly couple therapy, two-thirds of couples that were chronically distressed before treatment remained significantly improved 2 years later.

  WHAT WE RESIST PERSISTS

  There’s a simple formula that captures our instinctive response to pain:

  Pain × Resistance = Suffering

  “Pain” refers to unavoidable discomfort that comes into our lives, such as an accident, an illness, or the death of someone we love. “Resistance” refers to any effort to ward off pain, such as tensing the body or ruminating about how to make pain go away. “Suffering” is what results when we resist pain. Suffering is the physical and emotional tension that we add to our pain, layer upon layer.

  In this formula, how we relate to pain determines how much we’ll suffer. As our resistance to pain is reduced to zero, so is our suffering. Pain times zero equals zero. Hard to believe? The pain of life is there, but we don’t unnecessarily elaborate on it. We don’t carry it with us everywhere we go.

  An example of suffering is spending hours and hours thinking about how we should have sold our stocks before the market collapsed or worrying that we might get sick before a big upcoming event. Some amount of reflection is necessary to anticipate and prevent problems, but we often get stuck regretting the past or worrying about the future.

  Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. It seems that the more intense our emotional pain is, the more we suffer by obsessing, blaming ourselves, and feeling defective. The good news is that since most of the pain in our lives is really suffering—the result of fighting the experience of pain—we can actually do something about it. Let’s take a look at four common problems—lower back pain, insomnia, anxiety about public speaking, and relational conflict—and start to consider how they can be alleviated by acceptance and letting go.

  The Benefit of Worry

  Why can’t we seem to stop worrying? Tom Borkovec at the Pennsylvania State University asked 45 students who were afraid of public speaking to imagine a scary scene 10 times. “Imagine you are about to present an important speech to a large audience…. As you stand there, you can feel your heart pounding fast …” Before doing that, Borkovec had three different groups engage in relaxed, neutral, or worrisome thinking. Then, while they imagined the scary scene, he measured the students’ heart rate. Surprisingly, the group of students who were instructed to worry beforehand had no increase in heart rate compared to those who didn’t. This means that worrying actually stopped the body from being aroused by fear, which unconsciously encourages us to worry more. Unfortunately, those participants who worried in advance actually felt more afraid while actively visualizing a scary situation, even thought the heart rate didn’t increase.

  Chronic Back Pain

  Chronic back pain is a debilitating ailment. Unfortunately, it’s very common in the United States, affecting at least five million people at any given time: 60–70% of Americans get lower back pain sometime in their lives. Surprisingly, two-thirds of people without chronic back pain have the same structural back problems as those who experience pain. So what’s going on in the bodies and minds of those suffering from chronic pain? Resistance. Let’s consider the case of Mira.

  Mira is a 49-year-old yoga enthusiast with a successful business career. She is not the kind of person you’d expect to have back pain, except that she pursues all her activities with uncommon zeal. During a particularly strenuous yoga session, Mira felt a twinge while doing a forward bend. She then felt her sciatic nerve tingle right down to her calves. Almost any position except standing straight up or lying flat gave her back pain. An MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) diagnosed her with a herniated disk, a painful condition where the bones of the spine squeeze the disk out against a nerve.

  Mira stopped doing yoga and saw a physical therapist who taught her to lift objects in such a way that her back stayed straight and didn’t give her any pain. But over time, her back hurt more and more. She was also deeply unhappy that she couldn’t exercise vigorously, her primary way of relieving work stress. She envisioned a lifetime without mountain climbing, bicycle riding, or yoga. Mira also blamed herself for causing her disk to herniate in the first place. The combination of worry, self-criticism, mounting tension from inactivity, and increasing back pain convinced Mira to turn to surgery.

  Prior to her operation, Mira did some research and learned that the long-term success rate of back surgery for herniated disks was no better than having no surgery at all. She also read Ronald Siegel’s book Back Sense, which explains that for most sufferers the most valuable treatment for a herniated disk is to reduce anxiety about the pain and resume normal activities as soon as possible. That meant lifting objects in roughly the same manner as always so that the back muscles don’t atrophy from inactivity. Mira found out that persistent muscle tension, not structural abnormalities, causes most chronic bac
k pain. And muscle tension increases both when the muscles are not used and when we worry. On top of this, worry amplifies pain signals, further adding to our experience of pain.

  Mira took these messages to heart. She got massage therapy for her sore muscles, used a heating pad every evening, and began exercising in moderation. Her anxiety decreased as her pain subsided, and her back pain diminished by 50% in less than 2 weeks.

  Most people who suffer from chronic back pain will say that Mira was just lucky, an exception. Actually, she’s the rule. Ironically the prevalence of chronic back pain is lowest in developing countries, where people do more backbreaking work than in industrialized countries. An injury is usually the trigger for a back problem, but injury isn’t what sustained Mira’s back pain. Her resistance to the pain, especially fearing that she wouldn’t be able to continue her vigorous lifestyle, pulled Mira deeper and deeper down into her health crisis. Acceptance of physical pain, and working with it, returned Mira to her normal life.

  Job Dissatisfaction Predicts Chronic Low Back Pain

  Low back pain is one of the most common and costly reasons for workplace disability. Psychosocial factors seem to predict disability more than physical problems. In a study by Rebecca Williams and colleagues, 82 men between 18 and 52 years old with back pain for 6 to 10 weeks were assessed to see if job satisfaction predicts pain, psychological distress, and/or disability. Six months later, workers who were satisfiedwith their jobs had less pain and disability from back pain, and there was a tendency toward less psychological distress. Social status and the type of work did not affect the results of this study. These findings suggest that when employment is a source of satisfaction, people are likely to continue working despite low back pain. They resume normal behavior.

  Insomnia

  Most of us have suffered from insomnia at some point in our lives. Up to half of the adult population in the United States reports having insomnia in any given year. The physical causes are numerous and include trying to sleep beside a snoring partner, consuming caffeine before bedtime, napping too often, exercising too little, taking medications like cold tablets, and having sleep apnea. Regardless of the causes, many of us find we make matters worse by trying too hard to fall asleep. How does this happen?

  Try to remember the last time you had an important meeting scheduled early the next morning and you found yourself lying awake late into the night. Perhaps it was a job interview, or perhaps you had to make a presentation at work. As you lay there, you couldn’t stop thinking that every hour of wakefulness would be translated into a more distracted and sluggish mind. You became increasingly annoyed with yourself with each passing hour, perhaps concluding that you had entirely lost the ability to sleep normally. And every time you looked at the clock, you felt an annoying surge of adrenaline in your chest or the pit of your stomach.

  The source of this problem is that the nervous system moves into “fight-or-flight” mode when you battle to fall asleep. It’s a vicious cycle: trying to sleep stresses the body into wakefulness. We need to break the cycle by abandoning the fight. There are a number of ways that people try to accomplish this:

  Remember how well you actually function on less sleep; most people do. This may soften the feeling of urgency.

  Notice that lying peacefully in bed is a form of valuable rest in itself, whether or not you fall asleep.

  Remember that the body will demand sleep when it really needs it, which isn’t in this moment.

  Dedicate 30 minutes to being fully awake, which might be enough time for the mind to shut off and begin to sleep.

  Reinforce your intention to accept sleeplessness by emphatically saying “I don’t care!” whenever you discover that you’re still awake.

  Count your breaths.

  However, as any insomniac will tell you, even these tricks don’t work much of the time. Why? Because you can’t fool the mind—it knows that you’re doing these things to fall asleep. There’s a big difference, for example, between “counting your breaths” and “counting your breaths to fall asleep.” At a subtle level, when your agenda is to fall asleep, you can’t help getting upset with yourself when you realize you’re still awake. Every passing hour makes you feel more desperate and confused. To solve the problem, your relationship to sleeplessness has to shift. Once you begin to truly, genuinely accept not sleeping, your body will finally get a chance to rest.

  Fear of Public Speaking

  Jerry Seinfeld quipped, “According to most studies, people’s number-one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

  Fear of public speaking is indeed very common—at least a third of us feel that our anxiety is “excessive” when we’re in front of an audience. One out of 10 people find it has interfered markedly in their work. I’ve also struggled with public-speaking anxiety. Here’s what happens to me.

  If I have an important speech scheduled, I can feel tension in my abdomen—a little surge of adrenaline, a little muscular contraction— whenever I think about it. This predictable annoyance happens especially when I’m planning to speak on a new topic and I haven’t prepared what I’m going to say yet. I imagine myself clearing my throat too many times, fumbling for words, making jokes no one laughs at, and watching the audience’s distress on my behalf. Maybe someone in the audience, trying to be helpful, yells out something like “Take a breath!” (That scenario actually happened to me.)

  Suppress It!

  The young Dostoyevsky is said to have challenged his brother to not think of a white bear, leaving him puzzled and confused. In 1987, Daniel Wegner and colleagues asked students to do the same thought suppression task for 5 minutes, ringing a bell each time they thought of a white bear as they simultaneously verbalized whatever came to their minds. Thereafter, this group was asked to intentionally think of a white bear and perform the same tasks. (A comparison group was asked to think of a white bear for the entire 10 minutes.) Not only was the first group, the suppression group, unable to suppress the thought of white bears during the first 5 minutes, but this group also thought of white bears even more during the second 5-minute period than the group that never suppressed. This classic study shows that suppression creates the very preoccupation that it’s directed against. Clinical researchers speculate that a similar process may underlie psychological disorders such as posttraumatic stress, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder—the thoughts we push away come back to haunt us.

  In another study, this time on emotional suppression, researchers at Florida State University asked students not to cringe while watching a slaughterhouse movie and not to laugh during a Jay Leno comedy clip. They were then asked to complete a difficult finger-tracing task. The attempt to control emotional reactions to the films made blood glucose levels decrease, and students with lower glucose levels gave up earlier on the finger-tracing task. When the same participants were given sugary drinks to reverse glucose depletion, they persisted longer with the task. Emotional suppression seems to reduce will-power, and lowered glucose may be one reason for it.

  These two studies help to explain why trying to resist a chocolate cookie is such a difficult, and often unsuccessful, task.

  Behind my fear is the desire to be liked: to appear intelligent and charming and not to bore the audience. I have the false notion that if everyone in the audience approved of me, I’d be truly content. But there’s another reason to give public speeches: to communicate something of value to others. One strategy I’ve used to overcome public-speaking anxiety is to reorient myself toward the actual message I wish to deliver. For example, if the subject is brain science, I’ll commit myself to delivering a few useful points about brain science before the speech is over. Taking the focus away from “me” seems to help.

  Regrettably, this technique is only a partial solution if I harbor an underlying wish not to look nervous in fro
nt of an audience. Joseph Goldstein, a meditation teacher, says “Life occurs at the tip of motivation.” What am I trying to achieve while speaking? Not looking nervous? If so, there will be a small monitor in my head that asks, “Are you nervous? … Are you nervous now?” That nagging question evokes the very anxiety I’m trying to suppress, and once I’m anxious I become anxious about being anxious.

  The only lasting solution to public-speaking anxiety is simply to be anxious. We must stop shielding ourselves from anxiety—be willing to tremble and speak at the same time. My anxiety doesn’t last very long if I do that. Even far in advance of a public talk, my willingness to be anxious stops the whole negative feedback loop.

  Relationship Conflict

  Relationships go through good times and bad as the tide of connection ebbs and flows. If we want a feeling of connection—feeling seen and heard, resonating, “on the same page”—and it isn’t forthcoming, we feel pain. All couples have painful periods, sometimes for extended periods of time:

  Suzanne and Michael were going through “cold hell.” Cold hell is a state in which couples feel resentful and suspicious of each other and communicate in chilly, carefully modulated tones. Some couples can go on like this for years, frozen on the brink of divorce.

  After 5 months of unsuccessful therapy, meeting every other week, Suzanne decided it was time to file for divorce. It seemed obvious to her that Michael would never change—that he would not work less than 65 hours a week or take care of himself (he was 50 pounds overweight and smoked). Even more distressing to Suzanne was the fact that Michael was making no effort to enjoy their marriage; they seldom went out and had not taken a vacation in 2½ years. Suzanne felt lonely and rejected. Michael felt unappreciated for working so hard to take care of his family.