A guide to self-compassion ☁︎

Self-compassion can literally change how we process pain.

When you’re in pain, what thoughts run through your head?

Do you start to panic? Spiral into stress? Critique your body? Shame your sensitivity?

Chances are, at least one of the above. And it might be making your pain even worse.

The stress-pain cycle

Pain is stressful. Stress causes inflammation. And so the vicious cycle loops.

It goes like this: when you’re stressed, you send fear-driven messages to your brain. Your limbic system (that’s the part of the brain responsible for fear, memory & emotional + physical responses) jolts into action, which sends more messages to your brain that you're in real danger.

This causes nervous system sensitization, which increases our sensitization to pain. But another way, it lowers our pain tolerance and a causes a sensation that would otherwise feel like a 5/10 pain response to feel more like a 9/10.

It also leads to inflammation, hormonal imbalance, and a whole host of other physiological shifts that can worsen pain.

Your nervous system is listening

Your nervous system is paying attention to all of your thoughts and perceptions. All the times you judged your body? Shamed your emotions? Spent the week before your period absolutely dreading your cramps? Your nervous system heard that.

Now this is a really intelligent survival mechanism! And, it can create trouble.

When you are in a constant state of overwhelm or stress (about your body, your pelvic pain, etc), your nervous system shifts, and that chronic stress starts to become your default state.

But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck like that. Your brain and nervous system are incredibly adaptive. When we change our relationship with our default state (in this case, with our stress response) we can change our default state.

Remember, your nervous system is listening — when you start to tell yourself different thoughts, it hears those too.

You’ve probably heard that trauma can rewire the brain. But you know what else can? Self-compassion.

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion isn’t just positive thinking. It’s about recognizing your own pain and creating awareness around what you need in moments of stress & pain, and then meeting your needs without judgment.

In Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Dr. Kristen Neff notes that the first step is to actually recognize our pain and how it affects us. She writes, “we can’t be moved by our pain if we don’t actually acknowledge that it exists in the first place.”

It sounds simple, right? But this first step can be the hardest.

We are so often afraid of fully confronting pain - both individually and collectively.

Pain is uncomfortable. Pain can be scary. Pain can feel isolating, confusing shameful...

So we numb it, suppress it, hide it, anything but what we actually should be doing: feeling it!

Though it might be overwhelming at first, recognizing our pain is the first step.

From there, we can start to get curious.

The magic questions

Self-compassion in action is asking yourself “what am I experiencing? What do I need right now? How can I give that to myself?”

These questions activate the compassion centers of the brain. They literally signal to your nervous system & physical body that you’re cared for, that there is an internal caregiver who is aware and supportive and present.

Your nervous system can then start to calm down, leading to lower inflammation and calmer pain responses. Old patterns begin to break and over time, your default state will shift.

Say you wake up in the morning to find that you’re spotting and that your period is about to come. In the past maybe you start imagining how much pain you’re about be in, trying to figure out how to cancel your plans for the next couple days, judging yourself for how bloated you feel, wishing you could just power through, feeling isolated and alone.

By the time the cramps come, you’re in such a heightened state of stress and tension that they’re even more painful.

But self-compassion responds differently.

Say you wake up in the morning to find that you’re spotting and that your period is about to come. You start to stress, but gently tell yourself “it’s okay, I know you’re scared right now, I know it’s painful, but I’m here. What do you need?” Then you put on your coziest sweatshirt, make some raspberry leaf tea, order groceries so you won’t need to worry about it while bleeding, and let your partner know you’ll need some extra tlc.

You’ll probably still feel some pain, but you’ll be better equipped to handle it. You’ve got yourself, all the way through.