Kristin Neff, Ph.D.: The power of self-compassion

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. I guess this week is Kristin Neff. Kristin's an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas here in Austin. She's the author of the book Self-Compassion, The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. She's widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on self-compassion, being the first one to truly operationally define and measure this construct basically over the past decade. Now, in addition to her research into self-compassion, she's also developed an eight-week program to teach self-compassion skills in daily life. She co-created this with her colleague, Dr. Chris Germer. It's called the Mindfulness Self-Compassion MSC. I stumbled upon Kristin's work in my own search for better understanding self-compassion. This is something that came up for me personally, as an area that needed enormous improvement. And in doing so, I realized I wanted to speak with her, reached out to her, and obviously the rest is history. In this episode, we talk about her own journey towards the discovery of self-compassion, which somewhat coincided with her discovery of mindfulness. And you'll see in this podcast, it's actually quite interesting, and it takes me until the very end of the podcast to truly appreciate the distinction between mindfulness and a practice of mindfulness in meditation. And so if you're listening to this, and you're an astute listener of podcasts where either meditation has been discussed or the concepts of mindfulness have been put forth, pay close attention and hopefully you won't make the same mistake I will. But basically, Kristin arrives at this conclusion that when she's going through a difficult time in her life, the best approach is to take a compassionate approach to herself. And that experience personally then basically shapes the remainder of her professional career and she does a great job here contrasting self-compassion from self-esteem and self-pity. And I think this is a very important thing. We get into sort of some of the concerns that people have with self-compassion, you know, hey, will this reduce my output or my productivity or my competitiveness? And I think you'll see that frankly, by the end of this, this is a very nascent field. Much of what we talk about here is not hard science. There are a lot of things here that we are speculating on. But I think what nobody will speculate on if they've put any of this into practice is that you feel better. And ultimately, that's probably the metric that matters more than anything else. So with that said, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kristin Neff.
Hey, Kristin, thank you so much for making time today. I know you're super busy and we're going to talk a lot about what it is that keeps you busy. I've wanted to speak with you for probably about four or five months now since I started to become interested in your work and the broader topic of self-compassion. But I think to understand how you came to study it, we have to understand more about you and what it is that sort of brought you on that journey. So I sort of know little bits of your story, but I kind of want to go back a little bit further. Maybe even starting in college. What did you study in college and what piqued your curiosity?

**Kristin Neff** (4:07)
Okay, so actually as an undergraduate, I was very much into issues of kind of culture and how culture impacts reasoning. I took a three-part series in cultural anthropology and I just fell in love with the topic, thinking of how culture in the larger cultural context may influence the way we think about the world and think about moral topics.
And so I went to UC Berkeley to study with a moral developmental scholar named Elliott Turiel who was just amazing. And I was again researching, I was really interested in things like how people balance concerns with autonomy and connectedness. It was a theme actually that's run through my entire research career. Kind of if you think about how they balance concerns with self and other. And I started getting interested in that in terms of moral reasoning, how people resolve moral conflicts, especially between self and other. I did my dissertation research in India, looking at, I think it was called, Reasoning About Rights and Responsibilities in the Context of Indian Family Life. So basically, I became interested in how, especially how gender hierarchy in very traditional place like India, impacted how people resolved conflicts between their personal needs and their other's needs. Some people had said that India is a duty-based culture, and it's all about meeting the needs of others. Whereas the United States is a rights-based culture, and it's all about meeting our own needs. I thought, well, is that really true? I mean, what about gender? It seems like with a lot of gender hierarchy, that yes, women really need to do their duty and meet their husbands' needs, but husbands have a lot of rights to do what they want. So you can't really separate out power and gender and culture from the way people think about things. By the way, I did find that. I found that they emphasize duties for wives and rights for husband, but the Indian women were like, but that's not fair. We'll do it because we have to, but we don't like it. It's not fair. Kind of showing the kind of also that we aren't totally dictated to by our culture, that we're individuals who can reason in and decide, actually, that's not fair. I think that should change. While I was in India, I started basically, I talk about it a lot in my book, but while I was in India, my life fell apart basically. I had been married and it was kind of a, I'll go ahead and say it right here, because we're talking. What had happened was I left my husband for another man, which is something that I was a very moral person. I never ever thought I would be in that situation, but it happened. So I left my husband for another man who was supposed to join me in India and he didn't. And basically, so the whole thing fell apart and I came back to Berkeley. And actually, when I came back, talk about trauma, he had brain cancer and he died within a year. The man I left my husband for, who didn't leave his partner for her. And so basically, I was a mess. I was feeling a lot of shame. It was very traumatic. I consider myself a very moral, honest person. And the fact that I got myself in that situation kind of was just really upsetting to me that I had allowed myself to get in that situation. Plus the fact that it really didn't work out so well, right? So he didn't come. And the guy left my husband before I ended up dying of cancer within a year. My husband, who had been divorced when I got back, hated me. And I was just a basket case, basically. And so I thought I would learn mindfulness meditation, because I had heard that mindfulness was good for stress and trauma and all this stuff, which I was going through. So I started learning about Buddhism as a way to kind of help me through what I was going through.