When I first started teaching this class, this was the research people argued with.

Like literally I couldn't get them to be quiet in the classroom because they were so convinced this couldn't possibly be true.

This particular study I'm gonna talk about in a little more detail brought in people who were trying to manage their weight and eat healthy.

And they gave them an immediate willpower failure.

They showed up for the study and they were forced to eat a donut.

And they even had to choose the flavor of donut they were gonna eat so they would feel really complicit in this willpower failure.

And they had to drink a whole glass of water too so they'd feel a little bit uncomfortably full.

And the next part of the study is a taste test where they are given a lot of different types of candy and they are said, you know, we want you to evaluate all of these candies so please just eat as much as you need to, as much as you want so that you can evaluate these candies.

So they wanted to create an intervention that would basically get rid of the guilt and shame that people feel when they make a mistake.

And so in this study, half the dieters were randomly assigned to receive a special letting themselves off the hook message.

So between the donut eating and the taste test, an experimenter came in and said, by the way, we've realized now that some people in this experiment feel guilty after eating the donut.

So there was an opportunity for people to recognize they might be feeling guilty.

Second part of the message, we want you to remember that actually everyone indulges sometimes and we ask you to do it.

So there's a kind of putting it in a broader perspective.

And the last part of the message was a simple plea.

Please don't be too hard on yourself about it.

Okay, so very simple.

You might be feeling guilty, remember everyone does it, don't be hard on yourself about it.

And then they went on to the taste test and what the researchers found was that the women who had been given self-forgiveness message ate less than half as much candy as women who had not been told, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal, which is exactly the opposite of what most people think.

Most people think you make a mistake, you have a willpower failure and you start saying nice things to yourself about it, that this could only lead to disaster.

It would lead to licensing even more indulgence.

And yet that's exactly the opposite of what was found in this study.

This is one of the strongest pieces of theory we have in willpower research right now.

That is the harder you are on yourself when you have a willpower failure, the more likely you are to have the same failure again and the bigger it's gonna be when you do.

For example, one study took a look at problem drinkers and had them keep track of how much they were drinking and how bad they felt the morning after.

What they found is that the people who were the most self-critical and felt the most ashamed or guilty about drinking the night before wanted to drink more immediately when they woke up and also drank more that night and the next.

There was something about the self-critical nature, the shame and the guilt that was driving people back to the very thing they felt bad about.

Same has been shown for addictions including quitting smoking.

You know, you have that first relapse and the more you beat yourself up about it, the more you now need to be comforted with something because that's probably why you do it in the first place.

Same has been shown for gambling.

The more people feel guilty and self-critical about losing money, the more likely they are to borrow money and try to win it back and end up losing more.

And even for procrastination, research shows that the harder someone is on themselves for putting something off, the longer they procrastinate the next time.

And all of this has to do with the basic fact that when we are feeling stressed out and guilty and ashamed, that is a state that puts us into the version of ourselves, the mindset, that is much more susceptible to immediate gratification, temptation and anxiety.

So I just wanted to give you a sense of what it would be like to give yourself a self-compassion message.

So the three steps of this message is the first is mindfulness of what you're thinking and feeling.

Noticing that you're feeling guilty or noticing that you're feeling self-doubt or self-critical because a big reason that people go from feeling guilty to giving in again is that they just wanna get rid of that feeling.

It's so kind of overwhelming and they wanna distract themselves from it with something that is gonna get them into further trouble.

And then the second step is this common humanity.

One of the reasons that it is hard to find our motivation and our willpower is we start to feel like there's something uniquely broken with us.

There's something about who we are that is wrong and weak and that mindset makes it very difficult to tap back into your motivation or your strength.

This message of common humanity is basically saying to yourself, you know what?

This is part of the process of change.

This is how things get done.

Sometimes we procrastinate.

Sometimes we fall off the wagon.

Everyone is imperfect.

And to recognize that this is not saying anything about who you are.

It's saying something about the process and what matters is how you respond afterward, not the fact that it happened at all.

And then this last step is encouragement over criticism.

And if you were to think about someone you were mentoring, you know, some of you probably have mentees here, or you think about a child that you care about or a dear friend, what would you say to them when they had a setback?

And to say that to yourself, it might be reminding yourself of your goal.

It might be reminding yourself of the big picture rather than the sort of the micro picture in which you feel like a failure.

And to do that rather than the voices we often have in our head that are saying things like, why did you do that again?

You're so stupid, you're never gonna change.

And to actually start to talk to yourself a little bit in the second person as if you were a good friend.

And research shows that this particular approach, learning how to talk to yourself in this way, is more effective, for example, at quitting smoking than nicotine replacement therapy.

That's how powerful being able to respond to setbacks with self-compassion can be.