"Being kind to yourself is soft"

When people are advised to be kinder to themselves, many feel a kind of recoil. It sounds indulgent. It brings to mind scented candles and bubble baths. For someone who prides herself on high standards and not making a fuss, it's faintly embarrassing, and it can seem dangerous too, as if any kindness to yourself would let the standards drop.

Psychologists have studied this recoil. Paul Gilbert and colleagues developed a questionnaire about what they called fears of compassion, which included fears about being kind to oneself. The items were statements such as the fear that if you became kinder to yourself, your standards would drop, or you'd become weak, or you'd become someone you didn't want to be. They gave it to 222 students and 53 therapists. Fear of being compassionate towards oneself was strongly linked to self-criticism. The people who were hardest on themselves were the people most afraid of stopping. Both went with depression, anxiety and stress.

So if you recoil, that's typical of the habit, and the recoil doesn't show that kindness is unsafe for you in particular.

It helps to be clear about what I'm recommending, because the word kindness covers a lot.

I'm not recommending that you think highly of yourself. You don't need to believe you're talented, attractive or special. The friend test doesn't ask what a flatterer would say. When Anna rang about the dentist, you didn't tell her she was the most organised mother in the county. You told her it happens to everybody and helped her fix it.

Nor am I recommending that you make excuses. A good friend doesn't say "it wasn't your fault" when it was. She says, "Yes, you forgot. It's fixable. Here's what I'd do."

Self-pity is no part of it either. Self-pity says "poor me, nothing ever goes right". A friend says "this is hard, and plenty of people find it hard".

And it doesn't mean letting yourself off the things you've decided to do. There's evidence on that. Fuschia Sirois and colleagues pooled fifteen samples, with more than three thousand people in all, looking at whether people who are kinder to themselves take better or worse care of their health. If kindness to yourself meant letting yourself off, you'd expect the self-compassionate to exercise less, eat worse and skip the dentist. It went the other way. In every one of the fifteen samples, people who were kinder to themselves reported more healthy behaviour. The link was modest in size, and these are self-reports at a single point in time, so they can't show what causes what. But the evidence points away from the fear. The kind of kindness in question seems to go with looking after yourself, which includes doing things you'd prefer not to do.

That makes sense if you think about what kindness to a friend involves. If you care about Anna, you want things to go well for her. Sometimes that means telling her something she doesn't want to hear, or encouraging her to do the hard thing. Wanting good things for someone means having standards for them, and it means going on caring about them when they fall short.