How to Develop a Compassionate Mind

Image by Hari Nandakumar/Unsplash

How do you feel about the person you see in the mirror? Do you like them, love them – or loathe them? Are you kind and compassionate to yourself, on a consistent basis, or do you treat yourself harshly, jumping on every perceived flaw and failing? If you’re like most of my clients, very sadly you are probably more prone to harshness than healthy self-appreciation. And if that’s true, how do you go about changing it? Is it even possible to develop a kinder, more compassionate way of relating to yourself?

These thoughts have been uppermost in my mind recently, as I research the chapter on self-compassion in my new book. As well as bringing in all the techniques and ways of thinking I have used with hundreds of clients, I am re-reading some brilliant psychology books and drawing on the wisdom and richness of leading figures in the field. As part of this highly enjoyable research I just re-read The Compassionate Mind, by Professor Paul Gilbert. It’s a brilliant book and I strongly recommend reading it, if you haven’t already.

Prof Gilbert is the founder of compassion-focused therapy, a warm, wise approach that combines the best of Western psychology with the 2,500-year-old healing methods of Buddhism, especially the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan school. In Buddhism, compassion is just one of a number of positive mental states that can be generated, along with metta (loving-kindness) and equanimity (having a sense of resilience and balance). This idea, that these are skills which can be learned and then developed over time, is such a positive, hopeful one. It helps us all remember that compassion – for yourself and others – is always accessible, if you learn to mine the rich seams of your heart and mind.

Old brain vs new brain

Prof Gilbert draws on evolutionary psychology to explain that one reason we end up so self-critical, depressed or anxious is because we all struggle with an old vs new brain battle inside our skulls. Your old brain is ‘subcortical’ – structures that are not dissimilar from a lizard’s, or cat’s brain. The new brain is your cortical layer, which is uniquely well-developed in humans. As I wrote about in my last post, much of the world’s current volatility can be explained by what Prof Gilbert calls old-brain emotions and drives being implemented by new-brain capabilities.

For example, if you feel jealous rage at some guy speaking to your girlfriend, that’s old-brain stuff – powerful, territorial, protect-what’s-mine emotions and drives. If you then go on Facebook, find out the guy has a small business and leave a bunch of one-star Google reviews, that’s your complex new-brain capabilities doing the old brain’s dirty work!

But we can also use all the wonderful skills and capabilities of your new brain to do what Prof Gilbert calls ‘compassionate mind training’. Because your miraculous, sophisticated, high-powered cortical brain also has seeds of kindness, altruism, love, prosocial behaviour and compassion, which can be nurtured so they grow and become ways of thinking and feeling you can use all the time, especially when you need them most.

Compassion in action

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you get some bad news, like hearing a beloved old friend has a life-threatening illness. It comes out of the blue and is a real shock – this is a young, healthy guy so you feel like a rug has been pulled out from under you. And you’re feeling some mixture of sad, upset, shocked and anxious about his chances of getting well again. If you have been developing a compassionate mind, you might pause and do some deep, calming breathing. You could mindfully scan your body and notice what you’re feeling.

You could then gently place a hand over your heart, feeling the soothing, supportive touch. And then think kind, compassionate thoughts like, ‘I really feel your suffering right now – this is hard, isn’t it? And that’s totally understandable, you really love your friend and are worried about him, of course. Just let yourself feel whatever you are feeling right now, that’s OK – but know that you’re not alone. I’m here, I care about you – and I’ll help you get through this.’

And using the power of your compassionate mind, you may just notice yourself feeling a little calmer, a bit steadier and more grounded. Those painful, contracted feelings may soften a little. Soothing brain chemicals like endorphins and oxytocin might start flowing into your bloodstream. Tight muscles may start to relax. These are all science-backed benefits of practising self-compassion in this way. And then, of course, you would be much better resourced to call your friend and offer him love and support in his hour of need. Compassion for you leads to greater compassion for him.

I hope you find that helpful. Self-compassion is such a wonderful, healing skill that it’s a key strand of my integrative trauma therapy approach. And I have developed many self-compassion practices for my Insight Timer collection, which will help you develop it. The Compassionate Friend Meditation is one of my favourites, so do click the button below if you’d like to practice now.

Love,

Dan ❤️

How is Trauma Passed Down Through Generations?

Image by Markus Spiske

As someone who specialises in helping people with childhood trauma, I have long told my clients that trauma gets passed down from generation to generation. This always made sense to me, when I heard someone’s story about the trauma or neglect they experienced in childhood, and the painful experiences of one or both of their parents, their grandparents, and so on. The pain clearly cascaded from one generation to the next.

Heartbreakingly, we can see this trauma being created before our eyes in war zones around the world, as well as countless angry, chaotic, impoverished, substance-abusing, harsh, cold or otherwise unhappy families all around us. As much as humans can be kind, loving, altruistic and compassionate, we can also treat each other with great cruelty. Sadly, these two forces – light and dark – do constant battle in our minds and souls. Too often the dark side wins.

But it remained a mystery to me to understand exactly how trauma moved between generations, until I read a brilliant book by Mark Wolynn recently – It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Wolynn is a family therapist and explains the various mechanisms through which trauma passes along a human chain, from parent to child, through the ages.

Some of these mechanisms are common sense – for example, if your father had a terrible childhood and grew up to numb his pain with alcohol, his drinking will almost certainly inflict suffering on his own family, especially his children. He might come home from the bar in a drunken rage, being violent to his wife and children, smashing up the living room before passing out in a stupor. Clearly, his traumatic childhood shaped the man he became, who then inflicted suffering on his poor, traumatised wife and kids.

The genetic inheritance of traumA

Wolynn also explains the way trauma gets expressed through your parents’ genes, which is somewhat mindblowing but also makes sense if you think about it. Let’s say your mother grew up in a high-stress, high-conflict family environment. Her bloodstream would have been awash with stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, her fight-flight-freeze response would have been triggered on a daily, if not hourly basis, her brain and nervous system would have been dysregulated and on high alert for danger, all the time. Then she grew up, traumatised child becoming a traumatised adult, got pregnant and passed her genes (as well as your father’s) on to you, as you grew from a collection of cells into a baby in her womb.

In evolutionary terms, to optimise your survival your gene expression (which of those inherited genes were switched on and off) would have prepared you for a stressful, hostile world. It’s like you were born ready to survive, prepared for a dangerous environment, not a calm, placid, happy one. And that is how trauma gets handed down genetically, because it shapes us to be hypervigilant, on alert, pre-stressed before we even encounter anything stressful. Your genes created a little human born ready for battle, not peace.

You can break the chain

Something I also tell my clients is that, although their trauma was passed down a long chain of ancestors, they have the power to break that chain. And you do too. Because if you get help from a skilled trauma therapist, you can heal the wounds of your childhood trauma, so you choose not to pass them on to your children and grandchildren. This is vitally important, because we can help the forces of light in our world flourish, bringing an end to senseless war, violence and cruelty, by healing the world’s trauma – starting with our own.

Like a ripple in a pond, your healing profoundly shapes your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and on through the generations, forging a chain of healing, not harm. We live in a time of such enormous challenges – escalating war, rampant inequality, climate change and more – that it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to promote peace, harmony and flourishing for every human on this planet.

Let’s all break that chain, starting today.

Love,

Dan ❤️

What is the Point of Anxiety?

Image by Francesco

If you struggle with high levels of anxiety you may, understandably, wish you could never feel anxious again. If there was a big switch marked ‘Anxiety’, you would probably flick it to the OFF position and hope it stayed that way for the rest of your life. And no wonder – anxiety is a horrible feeling, especially when you experience it intensely and on a regular basis. No-one likes feeling anxious.

But when I am helping my clients with chronic anxiety, one of the first things I do is explain why humans experience anxiety, the function of this uncomfortable emotion both in terms of evolution and neurology – how it shows up in your nervous system, including your brain. The first thing to understand about anxiety is that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. That’s so you can’t just ignore it and carry on with your day.

To understand this properly, let’s jump into a time machine and journey back 10,000 years, to meet one of your ancestors living on the African savannah. She would be living with a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, in a village surrounded by a fence constructed from the spikiest branches they could find. Why? Because outside that fence would be very large, very hungry animals who wanted to eat them.

Anxiety is an alarm signal

Let’s say your ancestor left the village with two other women to forage for berries, roots, plants and whatever they could find to feed their families that day. As she walked across the savannah, she noticed the grass to her left start rustling. And she froze, as the threat system in her brain first detected the threat and then – in split seconds – decide how to respond. Thinking it might be one of the lions that often hunted near this spot, her brain cycled through the options of fight, flee or freeze and decided fleeing was her best chance of survival.

So her amygdala – a small structure in the brain whose primary job is mobilising the rest of the brain and body to deal with threats – gave her a massive jolt of anxiety to signal, Run! At the same time, the amygdala engaged with other parts of her brain to give your ancestor a shot of adrenaline and cortisol, quicken her breathing and heart rate to pump oxygenated blood to the major muscles in her arms and legs. And she ran, fast, until the potentially-a-lion threat was far behind her.

And this is what anxiety is for – to tell you that:

1. There is a threat.

2. And you should do something about it, urgently.

For your ancestor, this whole mind-body process might just have saved her life. And even in our 21st-century world, which is far safer than the one she lived in, anxiety will probably have saved your life, or the life of a loved one. This is why we should never try to get rid of anxiety completely, even if we could, because it can quite literally be a life-saver.

Calming your nervous system is key

I hope that gives you some idea of why you feel so anxious – and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is, for most of us, our anxiety is not triggered by lions in the grass, but by a nasty email from your boss, warning letter from the bank or critical comment from a family member. These are all threatening, hence the spike of anxiety they trigger, but not in the life-or-death way those rather primitive parts of your brain are designed to save you from.

So rather than trying to shut down your anxiety, or get rid of it, the key is first learning to accept this normal, healthy and in fact vital emotion. Then finding tools and techniques to bring your dysregulated nervous system back into balance, calming, soothing and reassuring parts of your brain like the amygdala that are yelling ‘lion!’ when there is none.

If you are really struggling with your anxiety, I would encourage you to find a skilled therapist to help heal whatever wounds from your past are making you feel so anxious right now. And this therapy, as well as any other healing tools you employ, should focus on helping calm and soothe your overheated nervous system. You can do that right now, using this Compassionate Breathing technique I recently blogged about.

I would also recommend anything that feels calming or soothing for you, like self-help books and podcasts from therapists/other healers you trust, yoga, tai chi, hugs from your beloved pet/partner/kids/close friends or family members, relaxing massage or soothing music/TV shows/movies. Really anything that helps you feel calmer, safer and more at peace will be good for your anxious brain. Over time, this will reduce the flow of stress hormones like cortisol into your bloodstream, while increasing pleasurable, calming hormones like oxytocin and endorphins.

If you would like to know more about anxiety and how to manage it you may also find my latest Insight Timer course, Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems, helpful – if so, just click the button below to find out more.

And my Insight Timer collection has a wide range of meditations, breathwork techniques, guided imagery, sleep stories and much more to help with problems like stress, anxiety and depression.

I hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Feeling Anxious or Stressed? My Colour Breathing Practice Will Help

Colour Breathing is a highly effective technique to help when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, upset, angry or any other negative emotion. In this short video, I guide you through the practice, which will help you feel calmer, more relaxed and at peace. Used daily, Colour Breathing will help calm your mind, body and nervous system.

I hope that helps – for more techniques like this, including breathwork, self-compassion, IFS and mindfulness techniques, visit my Insight Timer collection by clicking on the button below.

Love ❤️

Dan

Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

Image by Giulia Bertelli

I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Feeling Stressed? My Compassionate Breathing Practice Will Help

Here is a video of my Compassionate Breathing practice. You can use this any time you're feeling stressed, anxious, upset, agitated or if you're dealing with any kind of difficult emotion.

I hope you find it helpful – you will find this practice, as well as many other breathing techniques, mindfulness, self-compassion and IFS meditations, as well as guided-imagery techniques, in my Insight Timer collection: insighttimer.com/danrobertstherapy

Love ❤️

Dan

If You Struggle With Climate Anxiety, this Book Will Give You Hope

Image by Margot Richard

How do you feel about climate change? I’m guessing that, like most of us who take this problem seriously, you might find it worrying but try not to think about it too much. You do what you can – eat less meat, try not to fly, sign endless petitions – but try not to let it dominate your day-to-day life.

On a good day, this is how I deal with it too – doing what I can but trying not to get too freaked out. But I have to be honest, on bad days it really scares me. We are already seeing major impacts like melting glaciers, climate change-intensified hurricanes, forest fires, droughts and flooding. And unless humanity wakes up soon, we are in big trouble.

I think one of the less-reported aspects of climate change is its impact on our mental health, especially among the young. In a YouGov survey last year, one in three young people in Britain reported feeling scared (33%), sad (34%) or pessimistic (34%) about climate change, with 28% feeling ‘overwhelmed’. This breaks my heart for those young people, but it’s not surprising, because they will be most affected by climate change throughout the course of their lifetime. If you are a parent or grandparent, you may also be deeply worried about the kind of planet we will bequeath the next generation and the one after that – this is one reason why so many eco-activists are grandparents. They get it and feel compelled to act.

Reasons to be hopeful

So far, so gloomy. Which is why I am happy to tell you about the book I am currently reading, Not the End of the World: Why We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie. She is a data scientist at Oxford University and tells the story of feeling so freaked out as a student studying Earth Sciences, that she almost changed career. The onslaught of anxiety-provoking lectures on her course – and especially the stories about climate disasters she obsessively read in the media – were just overwhelming.

But this is a profoundly hopeful and optimistic book, because Ritchie argues that when you look at the actual data and key trends in energy use, pollution reduction, and so on, the real story is very different from the one we see in the media.

Let me be clear: Ritchie is no climate denier. She is a scientist who understands and accepts the prevailing scientific view – that climate change is real, it’s happening now, is man-made and unless we act fast to limit rising temperatures, humanity and all life on Earth is in big trouble. It’s just that she makes a compelling case that we have already made huge strides, at unprecedented speed, for example in decarbonising our energy production. In many industrialised countries we have virtually phased out the most polluting/carbon-emitting coal-fired power stations and rapidly developed green energies like solar, wind, hydroelectric and (somewhat controversially) nuclear.

Clean energy is now cheaper than its fossil-fuel alternatives and this will accelerate the more we adopt it at scale. This change is inevitable – as is the switch to electric cars/buses/trucks. As the cost of these green energies and modes of transport plummets, there is literally no reason not to make the switch, despite the increasingly devious and desperate tactics of the fossil-fuel industry. Sorry folks, this change is inevitable, whether you want it to be or not.

We have solved global problems before

Another argument I found really powerful and persuasive is that the global community has overcome two major environmental challenges before: acid rain in the 1980s and the ozone hole in the 1990s. In both cases, these were serious problems that required the global community to work together, despite resistance from the polluting industries that were causing the problems. And what led to the changes? Intense pressure from the public.

This led politicians to act, global treaties to be signed, industry to grudgingly change its polluting behaviour and, in both cases, drastic reductions in the harm to our environment. Now, climate change is a much bigger and more complex problem, but Ritchie argues – and I strongly believe – that if we all put enough pressure on our politicians, as well as using our consumer power to boycott the most climate-wrecking corporations/energy sources, we can solve this problem.

So if you or someone you love is struggling with climate anxiety, I strongly recommend you buy this book. It’s also packed with suggestions about how we, as individuals and communities, can make changes in the way we eat, shop and travel that can make a big difference. I am feeling hopeful about this problem for the first time in years, so I hope it will help you feel the same way too.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Ease Your Stress with Colour Breathing

Image by J Lee

How are you feeling, right now? Sadly, for many of us the answer would be anxious, agitated, irritable, frazzled – and, most of all, stressed. That’s because we live in a very stressful time, with challenges to our mental and physical health that our ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.

One of my recent posts was all about exercise – and why it’s such a crucial element of looking after both mind and body. But, as we all know, many of us don’t get enough exercise or simply move our bodies enough, throughout the day. We also consume too much caffeine and alcohol, as well as eating excessive amounts of sugary, processed and otherwise unhealthy food. This idea – that, for those of us in industrialised countries like the UK, the most damaging thing to our health is excess – is a very new one, because for most of human history we didn’t have enough, of anything.

Your ancestors, and mine, spent large portions of their day walking for mile after mile, hunting prey or searching for seasonal fruits, seeds and edible roots. They often had to endure periods of hardship and even famine. Life was dominated by not having enough food, rather than too much of it.

So it’s a weird time to be human. Too much stuff. Too much sitting. Too much junk food, constantly within reach, that tastes good but damages your body.

Busyness as a badge of honour

The other weird thing about being a 21st-century human is just how hectic and stressful day-to-day life is. We are all (myself included) so damn busy these days, aren’t we? Everyone I know spends most of their waking hours rushing around, meeting one deadline after another, working long days – in fact, working all the time, because work follows us home now, in a way it never used to. And, weirdly, this busyness has become a badge of honour – it’s something to be proud of, a goal in itself to fill our days with being ‘productive’, allowing no time to rest and be still.

I’m currently reading a brilliant book about how our attention has been hijacked by the goals, values and imperatives of capitalism in general and Big Tech in particular. And how to resist the constant pressure to be busy, distracted, hopping from one screen to the next from the moment we wake until we fall into a restless, fitful sleep. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by writer and artist Jenny Odell, champions time spent doing very little. Taking a break from the endless scrolling. Allowing yourself to be offline. Time to think, muse, daydream. It’s so important for the health of your brain, but so hard to do these days.

So, if your answer to the above question was ‘a bit stressed’, here’s a practice I created just for you. As regular readers will know, I am a big fan of mindfulness, as well as breathwork and other body-based practices to help manage tricky emotions and experiences. I love this practice because it combines those three things will adding an imaginary, visual element – which will provide a ‘healthy distraction’ if your mind is currently scattered and racing from one stressful thought to the next.

The practice

• Start by finding a comfortable sitting posture, on a straight-backed chair. Let your feet be flat and grounded on the floor. Gently roll your shoulders back and feel your chest open up, your lungs feeling expansive and open. This will help you breathe freely and deeply

• Close your eyes, if that feels comfortable for you, or soften and lower your gaze

• Scan your body and notice what you’re feeling, emotionally. You might be upset, angry, hurt, shocked, scared, threatened, agitated or feeling some other negative emotion

• Just let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling, for a few seconds

• Now focus on your body and mindfully scan your face, throat, arms, hands, chest, back and belly

• What do you notice? Perhaps tense, tight muscles. Maybe a sense of heat or rising energy in your chest. You might feel a tight knot, churning sensation or butterflies in your stomach

• There is no right or wrong way to feel, so just lean into whatever somatic sensations you are experiencing right now

• Check in with your posture, again rolling your shoulders back and letting them drop. Make sure you are sitting in an upright but relaxed posture

• Start slowing and deepening your breath, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your breaths be slow, deep and even, counting to four on the in-breath and four on the out-breath

• Keep breathing – slow, deep, smooth and steady, for a minute

• If you find yourself distracted by thoughts, memories, plans, worries or anything else, that’s perfectly normal. Your mind might keep circling back to whatever stressful situation you’re dealing with right now, which is fine. But when you notice you are distracted, just keep gently bringing your attention back to your body, back to the breath

• As you breathe in, know you’re breathing in. As you breathe out, know you’re breathing out

• Keep breathing deeply for another minute

• Now let’s add another element to this practice – as you breathe in, visualise a soothing colour. For some people that might be pink, purple, blue, green or gold, but just pick a colour that seems soothing for you

• And as you breathe in, imagine you are breathing in your soothing colour. See it travel in through your nostrils and down your throat, as it fills your lungs, chest, back and belly

• See your whole torso light up with this warm, gently soothing colour. Enjoy that for a minute

• Then on the out-breath, imagine you are expelling all that stressful energy – again, pick a colour that best represents your stressful feelings, which might be black, grey, red or some other strong colour

• As you breathe out, imagine exhaling every molecule of stress, blowing it out through your mouth like smoke, so it leaves your body for good and vanishes into the atmosphere

• Breathing in your soothing colour, breathing out your stress… Stay with that for a minute

• Again, if you get distracted it’s fine, just gently bring your attention back to your body, back to the breath, back to those colours flowing in and out for another minute

• Now you can let go of visualising the breath in this way and allow your breathing to find its natural rhythm

• Let go of all efforts and just sit, peacefully, feeling a sense of calm, ease and relaxation in your body and mind. Just enjoy that for a minute

• Then bring your focus to the weight of your body resting on the chair. Your feet on the ground. Sounds reaching your ears from all around

• Then when you’re ready, slowly open your eyes

• Now re-engage with the external world, carrying these feelings of calm, contentment and peace into the rest of your day

I hope you find that helpful – I will record this practice soon and add it to my Insight Timer collection, so you can listen whenever you need to de-stress and find a little calm and peace in your day.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan