Stepping Away from Self-Criticism to Self-Care
An Important Pathway to Health: Being “too hard” on Yourself, and the Alternative
When I first started my life yet to live, self-kindness was not part of my health equation. I was just researching and experimenting with anything I could find that might improve my health and provide long-term disease and disability prevention as I headed into my 60s and beyond. And while my 2 very young daughters were the main focus of my developing health practice, other dynamics going on in the background have since come to light. The biggest of these is how I was treating myself and how those attitudes affected my health and my health practice. I have come to realize that taking care of myself by improving and maintaining my health is an act of profound self-kindness.
As much as I’d like not to admit it, to myself above all, I haven’t liked myself all that much during my life. This inner self-criticism and self-judgment goes back to my childhood and is the subject of much of my current inner mind-body health focus as I connect with the trauma I went through back then. The reason I focus on it so much is two-fold: First, I believe issues like this can physically affect health, as has been documented by many notable practitioners and researchers, such as Dr. John Sarno, Dan Ratner, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, and Jo Marchant, among others. Second, my experience of life itself improves the more I understand how I work and come to accept myself in better regard. Perhaps most importantly, I find that working at health, whether it is movement, nutrition, research, psychotherapy, or other related work, is easier and more enjoyable if I am allowing myself the full benefit of that work.
My Most Important Lesson
The most important lesson I have learned in dealing with self-criticism, is that it is not the natural order of things, it has to be learned. We are not born critical of ourselves, in fact just the opposite. How does it get learned? As children, by people, mainly our parents, who criticize us. Coming to terms with these hard lessons and beginning to heal from that trauma is the work of psychotherapy and other emotional healing work.
We all know about cancer, heart attacks, dementia, and diabetes, what Dr. Peter Attia calls the “Four Horsemen” of later-life terminal disease in his groundbreaking book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Yet let’s step back and zoom out for a moment and consider how these diseases even get started in a world where their causes are becoming more well known every day. They get started by a combination of chronic low-level inflammation and lower immune system function, much of which we have found is preventable by practicing healthier habits. Lower immune system function causes the body to grow old more rapidly than it ought to. And most chronic inflammation and lower immune system function, especially in later life, is caused by too much and poor-quality food, and lack of adequate movement. Enough said.
So, why is it that, despite ample evidence everywhere, as a society we are not changing our movement and diet habits to avoid the fate of the “Four Horsemen”? We face earlier death and more disease by not doing so! That ought to be enough motivation, but it’s not. The answer lies in the “why” we’re not moving more and eating better, and that answer is inside us, not outside. I scratch my head sometimes as to the simplicity of fixing our health and the great measures some people go to avoid leading a healthier life. But the true answer to the question of why we’re not moving more and eating better is much more complicated. In my case, it involved taking into account my entire life story, my attitudes toward myself, and my newly felt profound love for my then infant daughters to motivate me to practice healthier habits. Consider for a moment a key reason why someone may not be motivated to do so.
Profound Self-Care
At the very top of the list, taking care of yourself and your health means loving and caring for yourself, being kind to yourself. As I’ve written, wanting to be healthy is different from practicing every day to be healthy. I’ve found that there is a direct line between self-worth and practicing healthier habits. In short, self-worth influences self-care.
For much of my life, loving or even liking myself was not the case. Beginning in childhood I spent much of my life under a cloud of unconscious self-criticism. The only solution to overcome this relentless “you’re not good enough” was to achieve ever-greater success or prestige or make more money. And whether it was a successful Broadway show, or a great business deal, or new girlfriend, these triumphs were enough to keep me going because others would admire me for them. But my self-esteem was for the person who kept on succeeding, the person in the outside world I perceived myself to be, not for the whole person, warts and all, underneath that shell. You can profess to have good self-worth and self-esteem all you want. As I am learning, there is a wonderful, decent, caring and vulnerable person underneath that exterior, one who is craving health, wholeness and connection.
The more I care for that whole person the more I want better health, and the more I want better health the more I care for myself. The two dynamics are synergistically linked and support each other. We need to feel that better health is achievable and that good health is worth putting in the effort to get there.
Add to this the ample evidence that being hard on yourself, as in self-criticism and self-judgment and their offshoots of worry and anxiety, can actually cause increased inflammation, increased blood pressure, and other notable risk factors for later-life disease. Essentially, being hard and judgmental on yourself lays the path for the Four Horsemen right to your front door!
What Worked for Me
When I began this later-life chapter of my life, which I write about in my book, my attitude toward myself also began changing. It took a while, but paying attention to my visceral body, moving more and eating well, and working at fixing my health from the inside out started a healing process that has only grown since then. Eventually, this health and healing journey pointed me to my own attitudes toward myself. The birth of my daughters caused me to feel a deep kind of love I had never felt before. And as much as I love them, over time my journey also pointed me toward the fact that I wasn’t loving myself, my health, and my life as much as I could. I began taking steps to broaden the healing process from just the physical to other aspects of my life. My psychotherapy and spiritual practices reflect this broadening of how I now define health and health practice for myself.
Some Dalai Llama Wisdom—Health IS Wealth
A classic quote from the Dalai Lama captures the interdependence of our attitudes, our health, and our life. When asked what surprised him the most about humanity, he said: “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
Health is life. Life is this finite amount of time we have to experience it as living beings on this planet. In the end, it won’t matter how successful I am or how impressive my resume is. What will matter is the energy I create in my life that will survive me. That energy can be supportive and productive or judgmental and critical. In my case, those dynamics, and the place to work on healing them, are much more inside of me than outside.
