Treating yourself the way you'd treat a friend.
18 articles tagged “Self-Compassion”
Trauma doesn't always announce itself with a clear memory or a named event — sometimes it shows up as chronic guilt, people-pleasing, or a constant low hum of dread. This post looks at the quieter ways trauma reshapes everyday thinking, and why changing the question you ask yourself can change everything.
Sometimes the ache in your chest isn't about one specific thing — it's the accumulated weight of carrying too much for too long without enough support. This post looks at what emotional burnout actually feels like, why rest isn't optional, and what tends to help when being strong has stopped working.
Some of what's weighing on you isn't actually yours — it's borrowed worry, absorbed expectation, or energy spent managing things that were never in your hands. This post breaks down the simple but easy-to-forget distinction between what you can genuinely influence and what you'd be better off putting down.
Sometimes the thing you actually need isn't a solution. It's just a place to say the thing out loud. This post is about why being heard without judgment does something that advice never quite can.
Sometimes a feeling is too big or too vague to put straight into words. This is a short practice for those moments — a multi-step way to name, locate, express, and eventually release an emotion so it becomes something you can work with, not just something happening to you.
Self-trust isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. It's built one small kept promise at a time — the accumulated behavioural evidence that you can rely on yourself. Which also means it's built, or eroded, in the tiny everyday choices most people don't notice they're making.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is one of those things everyone learned in school and no one applies. Used as a real check-in — 'which level of need have I actually been meeting?' — it solves a surprising percentage of the mystery bad days people otherwise try to think their way out of.
Most people picture emotional maturity as always being calm, always being right, never getting overwhelmed. That's not maturity — that's suppression pretending to be maturity. The real version is messier, more honest, and much more useful.
The RAIN method — Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture — is one of the more useful things to come out of the mindfulness-and-self-compassion literature. It's simple, it fits in a couple of minutes, and it doesn't require you to already be good at meditating. Here's the honest read on what it does and when to reach for it.
The wellness internet has mostly ruined 'gratitude' as a word — turned it into forced positivity you're supposed to feel about a bad day. The actual research on it is more interesting and much less annoying. Here's the honest version of what gratitude practice does and doesn't do.
Nobody wakes up one day and decides to neglect themselves. It builds slowly — a missed meal here, a lost hour of sleep there, one more thing added to the load. Then months later everything is a little harder than it should be and you can't quite say why. Here's where the damage actually happens.
Motivation is what you feel on the good days. Discipline is what shows up on the medium and bad ones. Most of the meaningful things people build in a life get built on the medium and bad days. Here's why, and what to do when the motivation isn't there.
Most of us treat self-care the way we'd treat a spa day — a reward for surviving something hard. Actually it's more like brushing your teeth: the routine, unglamorous version prevents the emergencies that make people think self-care is dramatic in the first place.
Most of what feels personal at work isn't. It's other people's pressure, deadlines, and internal weather showing up in your inbox. Learning to tell the difference — without becoming callous — is one of the highest-leverage career habits there is.
This piece looks at why painful memories stick more vividly than good ones, what the research actually supports about memory and emotion, and gentle approaches to healing that don't require erasing what happened.
This piece looks at what imposter syndrome actually is (and what it isn't), why the people most likely to feel it are often the ones least likely to be missing anything, and the practical shifts that quiet the voice without pretending it will disappear.
Something happened this week and I can't stop thinking about it. Maybe it was a person, maybe a job, maybe just the drift. There's a specific ache in the chest that has no medical name. Below are the five things that helped me — and thousands of people I've listened to — put weight back on their feet.
Most emotional-resilience advice is a list of things you do by yourself — meditate, journal, breathe, be grateful. All useful. All also missing the strongest predictor of actual resilience, which the research keeps pointing at and most content keeps skipping. Here's the honest version.
Topics that show up alongside Self-Compassion across the LissnUp blog.