Break the Twitch Building Blocks of Self-Compassion
The idea of self-compassion is a pretty tough sell for most people, including me. It took me about seven years of writing here (and about a year of therapy to dig even deeper) to begin understanding its role. Even now, understanding is one thing, but actively practicing it is something else all together. It’s a skill that requires building to be effective.
This self-compassion skill is particularly challenging to learn because the way we respond to mistakes and challenges often happens entirely inside our heads. If you’re like me, you might not even fully “hear” the negative self-talk that happens when the pressure turns up. It took me years to get to a place where I’d be aware of it at all. But, the negative self-talk is there — especially if the classic ‘Twitch’ symptoms start popping up. These are the moments where you might feel stuck on the Instagram timeline, find yourself opening the refrigerator even though you just had lunch, or pulling up your favorite online deals website.
These are the physical manifestations that can give you little hints when something deeper is going on. Over time, paying attention to those hints allows you to make changes to solve the underlying patterns that cause them.
Self-compassion is the keystone that allows you to both see and adapt to the circumstances causing the need to cope, or in my own language here, Twitch. The human brain is fascinatingly powerful in its ability to protect you from painful experiences. So powerful, that it can completely block the reality right in front of you.
Your Attention Is Speaking To You
Have you ever noticed how the Twitch seems to get stronger as you try to push yourself into work that carries some importance? As a deadline approaches, you might fight harder and harder to sit down at the computer and start writing. When you do, your brain fires up the distraction engine to prevent you from stepping into what it believes is a dangerous situation.
All of the sudden, distractions start popping up — even positive ones!
You know what, that load of laundry needs to go into the dryer. Where did I put my notebook? Did I close the garage door when I came home?
These are some of the same types of thoughts and urges that tend to come up when sitting down to meditate. But why does this happen? Well, your brain doesn’t feel that this situation is safe.
Either one or many experiences in the past created pain — embarrassment, shame, guilt, or feelings of failure. Sometimes these experiences are not from the situation itself, but instead from the emotional reactions of others. Intense criticism from an adult during your formative years, for example, tends to increase the pressure you’d put on yourself as an adult when trying to accomplish similar tasks.
When mistakes are punished, the pressure to not make mistakes increases; when we don’t feel like it’s safe to make mistakes, creative (and other) work suffers. You’re much less likely to put yourself out there and take risks if it’s not safe to screw it up. The really unfortunate part of this is, even once the actual danger is gone, we continue the avoidant patterns on our own! (Isn’t that fun?) This is effectively trauma, and really an area that I’m not qualified to dive into beyond this point.
What I can do, is share my perspective on how self-compassion makes the core themes of Break the Twitch work. I can share my fledgling experience on how without self-compassion, we’re destined to repeat the same unhealthy coping patterns over and over again. Definitely qualified on that one.
The Self-Compassion Keystone
Let’s look at specific examples of how self-compassion makes the core themes of Break the Twitch and intentional living work.
Attention is the foundation of awareness
You can’t change or adapt to what you don’t see. Primarily, this is why the “Love Your Attention” line exists: to remind you that when you learn to love your attention, you’ll be able to hear what it’s telling you.
There’s a concept called nonjudgmental awareness, that simply means seeing things for what they are without judging them. With self-compassion, it is psychologically safer to see things for what they are. This slowly and steadily builds self-awareness, which means experiencing emotions, thoughts, and stopping the cycle of ignoring what is going on below the surface.
Self-compassion allows you to pay attention to what’s going on without creating a situation where your brain has to cope and distract itself.
Minimalism becomes less intimidating
All that stuff didn’t get there by accident, and self-compassion creates the circumstances to clear the space you need to get what you actually want. If you have acquired a lot of stuff over the years, maybe you feel guilty about not using a lot of it. Perhaps it feels wasteful, and dealing with the clutter is a painful reminder of things you didn’t follow through on.
I experienced this with a myriad of items, but one of the big ones was unread books. There was a lot of false first stepping with books. I’d buy them, hoping to absorb the information and skills through the power of osmosis alone. It’s not that I didn’t intend to read them, I absolutely did. I just couldn’t keep up with all the things I wanted to learn. My Twitch finger far outpaced my reading speed.
When I finally faced the shame of a bookshelf full of aspirational clutter, I let myself sell and donate all of those books that I simply wasn’t going to get to. I didn’t realize this was an act of self-compassion, but forgiving myself for buying all those books absolutely was.
Self-compassion allows you to face perceived shortcomings and make the changes that will allow you to create space for what you need going forward. Instead of holding onto the past, being kind gives you permission to step into the now and adjust going forward.
Habits are more sustainable
There are entire books written about this, so while I can’t cover everything, I can share some perspective here. One of my personal pandemic outcomes was the prolific failure at transferring my six-day-per-week gym routine to one that worked at home. When the gym closed, Amy and I bought some home workout equipment and I tried my best to use it. I didn’t do very well.
In retrospect, I don’t believe that I ever adjusted my expectations from what I had when the gym was open. I’d built an 18-month-long gym habit by affirming that as long as I made it to the gym about six days per week, I could call it a success. It worked, and very much became my identity.
In that way, I never felt like anything I could do at home was enough. I’d work hard, but for some reason it never felt like I could truly “check that box”. It never felt satisfactory, and I have a better sense of why now.
When circumstances change, self-compassion allow you to take things in as they are and adjust accordingly. Self-compassion gives you permission to still feel good about the workout you’re able to do when the one you’re used to isn’t available.
The other side of this is what happens when things fall off, which as we are all human (I assume?), they will. There are so many things you can’t control about day-to-day circumstances. When you’re not able to follow through with your habit, self-compassion helps prevent a shame spiral from sabotaging your efforts all together.
On the days when things don’t go as well as you expect them to, or you’re not progressing as quickly as you’d like, self-compassion lets you accept reality. If you can honor where you are and do what you can, you’ll always be better off than doing nothing at all. Some days, you’ll need to do nothing at all — and that’s okay.
By giving yourself the same compassion you’d give another person if they needed a break, you prevent burnout and potentially even prevent yourself from quitting all together. Self-compassion makes habits flexible, approachable, and enduring. You’re more likely to try things that you might fail at, allowing yourself to expand your comfort zone rather than sticking to what you know.
Creative Flow is easier to get into
“Our best work happens when we contribute something new, something generous, something that makes an improvement.” - Seth Godin
When pursuing the focused flow of creativity, self-compassion plays a critical role. It takes time to get to that glorious state when distractions seem to fade into the distance and the work is exciting-yet-challenging. Any time you do something new, you’re stepping into vulnerability. You don’t know what the outcome will be because you’ve never done it before! Seth Godin suggests that this is where we’ll always be doing our best work: on the edge of what we know — where our experience lies, and where we want to go.
Self-compassion plays a critical role in overcoming the resistance that gets in the way of creative flow. As "the Father of Positive Psychology," Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, “The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” If you punish yourself with negative self-talk and self-inflicted pain whenever you approach the bounds of your limits, your brain will make sure to avoid that place like the plague. (You’ll be Twitchin’).
So lacking self-compassion, according to the combined words of Seth Godin and Mr. Csikszentmihalyi, literally prevents us from doing our best work and enjoying the deepest satisfaction that life has to offer.
Self-Compassion Makes It Safe
In so many ways, self-compassion makes it possible to see what’s there, accept what is, and step into making potentially uncomfortable changes. Without self-compassion, we make things harder on ourselves than they need to be.
It may feel like you’re letting just letting yourself off the hook, but really you’re giving yourself space to step into challenges you may not attempt otherwise. When failure isn’t something to punish, we can push the boundaries of what is possible and, as many have said before, do our best work in life and career.
I hope you've enjoyed this overview of how self-compassion plays a key role in all things Break the Twitch. For additional resources, Dr. Kristen Neff’s book, Self-Compassion is a good resource to dive even deeper.