Movember: Embrace Self-Compassion for a Healthier You

This Movember is a good opportunity to stop and think about what it means to be a “healthy man”.

The idea of health covers a lot of different domains – physical, emotional, social, and spiritual health. These four domains influence each other in obvious ways such as when you have an injury you don’t want to play sport with your mates, but they also intersect in less obvious ways.

Turning our kindness inwards

helps to reduce distress by using self-soothing skills.

When we feel down or flat, we might take a sick day from work, then we might feel guilty or ashamed for not being able to meet a deadline, and our emotional health suffers.

One important tool for maintaining health in each of these areas is self-compassion. If a friend or family member is having a bad day we might reach out to see how they are, listen to what’s going on, and offer our help or a shoulder to lean on. However, when we have a bad day it’s easy to focus on all of the mistakes we made, all of the things we could have done better, and engage in maladaptive coping strategies like drinking too much alcohol.

There are short-term benefits to this strategy such as not worrying about our bad day, but in the medium to long-term it doesn’t help. How are we going to cope the next time we have a bad day? Probably by repeating the same behaviours which can escalate over time.

A more adaptive coping strategy (adaptive means it helps in the short-term as well as the long-term) would be to use self-compassion. Turning our kindness inwards helps to reduce distress by using self-soothing skills, and allows us to make a plan of how to set ourselves up for success in the future.

If your physical health isn’t where you want it to be, instead of being upset when you see yourself in the mirror, you could try telling yourself “I am working hard so the progress will come”.

If you get angry easily, you could try telling your loved ones that you are working on finding better ways to use your anger rather than pointing it at them (and then do it!).

If you worry about going to social events, a self-compassionate approach might be to recognize that you are making an effort to attend and each time you do, you are building skills for the future.

If you aren’t sure if you are manly enough, remember that it takes all kinds of people to make the world function and you are doing what you can with the tools you have. Being true to yourself is more important than being what other people want you to be.

Be kind to yourself this Movember!

Guest Author: Alastair Walters (Mental Health Clinician - Amity Health)