When people think of kindness, people often think of being kind toward others. A random act of kindness, for instance, might be giving up your seat for a pregnant woman on a train, or paying for someone’s coffee behind you in line. On a deeper level, kindness can manifest by listening to a friend in need, or helping a family member out who is struggling with his or her health. While recognized in society, kindness is often something that is undervalued in Western society, at least compared to other virtues such as ambition, beauty, intelligence, success, or popularity.

Yet there’s an aspect of kindness which is less talked about, and that is kindness towards oneself.  Although it may seem like a difficult place to start, kindness towards oneself can often be a prerequisite for being kind to other people. If your heart is full of negativity and criticism towards yourself, then it is easy, even expected, that the negativity will pour back out to others.

Kindness towards oneself is something with which I have always struggled. In my previous blog posts, I talked about my history of depression and anxiety. One of the roots of my depression was the criticism and unkindness that I constantly unleashed onto myself. When I was growing up, I was extremely unkind to myself. I thought that I was a failure, that I was not good at anything, that I had failed to succeed in both a personal and a professional lens.  I remember the earliest roots of unkindness forming its tendrils in middle school. In middle school, when I was made fun of by my peers, I internalized their unkindness, allowing their opinions to form my sense of self. I continued to echo their criticisms onto myself long after they had left.

During high school, my self criticism and unkindness remained. I talked previously about how I was very high achieving in high school. When I failed to achieve, I believed myself to be a failure and engaged in negative and self-destructive self-talk. The unkindness extended to social spheres: such as when I went to college, I considered myself a failure if I was unable to fit in socially.  My lack of unkindness to myself led to many unhealthy situations: mental fatigue, burnout, staying in jobs which required 90 hour work weeks, becoming involved in unhealthy romantic relationships. My lack of kindness permeated out towards me: I often felt that my friends and I were unkind to each other, and I extended my negativity and criticism to those close to me.

My journey to being kinder to myself was quite complicated. In many ways, it was and is the most difficult part of my mental health journey. The first time that I had considered being kinder to myself was when I went to therapy during my junior year. I remember during therapy telling my therapist that I felt that I was damaged, that I felt like something was wrong with me. When she challenged the belief, asking me — what if nothing is wrong with you? — it took me several minutes before I was even able to understand what she meant. She introduced me to CBT, to challenge my basic thoughts of self criticism and unkindness to myself. Through working with her, and later with my current therapist, I have learned to create a kinder and less critical inner mind. One particularly effective way at fostering kindness towards yourself is to view yourself as a small child, the way you were at 5 years old. It’s to remember that even though you are an adult, you are still that five year old child. How would you like that child in you to be treated?

Kindness is also something I practice extensively in meditation, a habit that I picked up a year and a half ago. With kindness, it often starts with a visualization; visualizing warmth, light, and happiness inside yourself. The idea of self kindness is a cornerstone of meditation: if your own heart is filled with kindness and love, it will more easily spill over to other people in your life.

Kindness means prioritizing yourself and self care. It’s about treating yourself with gentleness, about treating your failures carefully, about celebrating your successes without arrogance. It’s about reframing the critical voice inside your head into a voice of comfort and respect. If you fail an important exam, or get rejected by a group of friends, or get passed up for the promotion, shift that inner voice from one of criticism to one of gentle comfort and of healing. Kindness in the face of failure is treating yourself like you would a five year old child who just fell down and scraped her knees: you’d comfort her to get up and gently remind her to try to walk again.

It is a lifelong journey to learn how to be kinder to yourself, but more than anything else, it is essential for mental health. It’s the difference between having criticism and negativity in your core instead of a core full of love, care, and generosity. If you are struggling to feel kind to yourself, we highly encourage you to seek a therapist and begin to practice activities in your life: whether it’s exercise, friendships, hobbies, gratitude journeys, or meditation, that enable you to be in touch with your kindest self.