The Experiment I Do Every Day, Without Fail
Loving Myself, Productively
It all started, as so many things do, with trying to fix a “broken” thing. That broken thing being me.
My to-do list never seemed to end. I wasted too much time. I rarely felt “done” or “accomplished.” I didn’t feel like I was progressing on my goals. Basically, I didn’t feel “good” and I thought that this was obviously because I needed to use my time better so I could accomplish more and then I would, surely, finally, feel good.
I spent years searching for solutions. Listened to approximately 317 hours of podcasts on improving “productivity.” Bought book after book about “time management”. Started innumerable new systems and habits, most of which didn’t stick.
No matter how much I “learned” or which new system I tried, I got the same dismal results: Keep getting the same disappointing amount of things done. Keep feeling bad about how I’m not using my time well.
Then, one day in 2019, I was standing at my sink washing dishes, listening to yet another productivity podcast that might somehow help me “fix” the gap between my mushrooming to-do list and my tortoise-like progress, when I heard this author, Nir Eyal, discussing his book Indistractable. He said, “The only way to learn to handle distraction is to learn how to handle pain.”
Eyal defined “pain” broadly as the unpleasant emotions—boredom, discomfort, uncertainty, anxiety—that can so often mire us down and take us in the opposite direction of our goals and dreams. He then went on to suggest that one of the best ways to learn to handle such emotions was to develop a daily self-compassion practice.
This idea seemed too good and too weird to be true. How could loving myself be related to productivity?
I looked up Kristin Neff1, the researcher he mentioned who’d developed the idea, and read about a practice called a Self-Compassion Break, which involved taking a minute to put a hand on one’s heart, experience whatever was happening in that moment as fully as possible, and then to offer compassion to yourself, saying something like, “This, too.” Or “I, like other humans, feel X. May I be kind to myself.”
It seemed simple enough. And though I wasn’t clear how putting my hand on my heart would help me check off chores on my to-do list or reach my life goals, I definitely had a minute every day to try it. So I set an alarm on my phone to go off every afternoon at the same time with the label “SC Break”.
And what happened was… surprising.
To start, there was the sheer variety of feelings I happened to be experiencing when that ding-dang timer went off at 1:40 pm each day:
Irritated. Angry. Confused. Distracted. Despair. Hyper-focus. Anxiety. Struggle. Vulnerability. Scheming/plotting. Overwhelmed. Self-critical. Scared. Defeated. Frantic. Defensive. Judgmental.
Or just plain lost. Turns out that on many, many days, 1:40 is the time that I can be found lost in either a fantasy future (imagining some conversation I want to be having with a friend, or how I should start a book club, or cook more soups from scratch) or, even more likely, ruminating about the past:
Why didn’t I ask my mom how she felt about that hard thing that happened to her?
Why didn’t I give my kid the space he asked for instead of pressing and pushing and insisting he follow my unwritten manual for how things should be done?
Why didn’t I just recognize my husband was exhausted and give him grace instead of snapping at him when he was grumping about not being able to find his keys?
But no matter what I was thinking or feeling at 1:40 pm for the last three years, my hand has found its way to my heart, and my lips have murmured some variation of, “Yes, my love. This feeling, too,” with as much kindness as I could muster.
And now I am a productivity goddess.
Ha! Okay, maybe not. But engaging in this work has absolutely helped me with my pain-in-the-ass to-do list. Just not exactly in the way I thought.
You see, when I started the experiment, I thought the goal of the SC Break was self-acceptance. It’s okay that I’m flawed and feeling all these awful things! I guess I just have to learn to accept this yucky thing that I hate about myself!
Which is hilarious because hating anything about yourself is pretty much as far from self-compassion as you can get.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the most helpful part of the SC Break, for me, anyway, isn’t practicing self-compassion for my feelings. It’s finding compassion for the seven-and-a-half tons of self-judgment I heap on myself the moment I discover I have a negative feeling.
Slowly, over time, my inner voice throughout the day has transformed from that of an unhinged Marine drill sergeant, to more of a wise, mellow bestie, “Okay, overwhelm. I see you. I know you. We’ve done this dance before. Let’s hang out a bit and then you can be on your merry way.”
I finally recognized that hating and judging myself for being distracted or scared, an approach I hoped would help me get rid of those feelings, was actually keeping me stuck in them.
And I realized that it’s awfully hard to get all the things done when you’re stuck under seven-and-a-half tons of self-judgment.
Ultimately, taking a daily self-compassion break has been a training in remembering. Remembering that this moment, this feeling, is just one of the millions that will makeup this lumpy, lovely life. That soon enough, if I’m lucky, this moment of frustration, exhaustion, or ambivalence, will flow on and be followed by something else and then something else again.
I’d gotten the whole story wrong. This flow of thoughts and feelings isn’t the tale of something, or someone, that’s broken. It’s the story of what it means to be a fully flawed, wholehearted human making her way through this lumpy, lovely life.
It’s the story I’m living, and learning to love.
If you’re interested in trying the SC Break, here’s some more info. (Maybe we should start an SC Break club??): https://self-compassion.org/exercise-2-self-compassion-break/
Beautiful writing Marika! really appreciate this :)