Happy Mental Health Awareness Month!

This mental health awareness month, I want to share with y’all one of the greatest things I have learned in my time as a therapist (and as a human!). “Self-compassion” is a concept/practice that has been around for over 2500 years, with buddhist origins, and has been popularized in the world of mental health due to ample evidence to support its efficacy in making people feel better mentally and physically (Neff, 2012).

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The practice of self-compassion releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids all over the body (numbing pain and providing comfort to the body). ✨

Whereas when we are hyper-critical of ourselves a massive amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) is released throughout the body. 😓

We cannot control if we have been programmed to be hyper-critical of ourselves; but we can choose to have compassion towards ourselves on that.

It is much better to have self-compassion than self-esteem. Ideally, we have both, but when we make a mistake, our self-esteem may abandon us, but self-compassion will never fail or leave us if we’re intentional in the practice. 🌸

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