Help Yourself
Inward kindness sets a path to understanding
By Dr. Justin Altschuler
May 2026
I was recently talking to a patient who started smoking again. He quit cigarettes for a while, then resumed during a period of high stress. “Why the (blank) would I do this to myself?” he asked me. “I know better. I hate these things. And here I am addicted again.”
It’s understandable. We all do things not in our best interest and end up frustrated and disappointed in ourselves. We berate ourselves for being stupid, weak or idiotic. We demand that we do better.
This approach rarely works. It’s not a helpful strategy for changing behavior.
The harsh approach tends to land us in a stuck cycle, where we scold ourselves, promise to do better, fail again and repeat. With each cycle, each failure, our self-recrimination and self-hatred increases. The new narrative is about our repeated failures.
A big part of the problem is how we talk to ourselves. I talk to many people who think to demonstrate seriousness or accountability to themselves, there must be harshness. The only way to change is self-flagellation.
Problems arise when we lean on patterns of shame and self-criticism. As a strategy for change, it’s not effective. Constantly berating oneself likely raises the risks of anxiety, depression, difficulties with emotional self-regulation, challenges with other medical problems and difficulties in relationships.
It’s hard to live a good life with punitive, judgmental thoughts floating around in our heads. It’s difficult to be kind, caring, compassionate and loving toward others while being cruel to oneself.
The alternative is to try to be kinder to yourself. Inward kindness can be a difficult, nebulous idea. Putting it into practice, especially if it’s not a habit, can be challenging.
The best advice I give is to talk to yourself as you would a friend. When friends fall short, our instinct isn’t to make them feel worse. Our first move involves support. We don’t want to ignore the failure—that’s patronizing. Instead, we offer understanding.
For example, if a friend starts smoking again, we might say, “That’s really frustrating, especially after you worked so hard to quit. I know this isn’t something you want to continue to do. The good news is that you’ve proved once already you can quit, which means you can do it again. I believe in you.”
If we can say that to a friend, we can say it to ourselves.
Some people express reservations about self-compassion because kindness is often conflated with a lack of accountability or seriousness. This isn’t the case. We are often acutely aware of our shortcomings. We don’t need to amplify them.
Kindness turned inward comes up all the time in the clinic. Weight is another example. We tend to be harsh when we talk to ourselves about weight. If we were talking to a friend about being overweight, we wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors by pretending weight is anything other than what it is.
Instead, we might empathize with the frustration that comes with being overweight. We might offer support. Perhaps we’d ask to become an accountability partner with exercise or healthy foods.
Accountability and seriousness are not antonyms to kindness. Quite the opposite. It’s difficult to be kind to someone without speaking the truth. But when talking to a friend, the goal is to be truthful in as kind a way as possible. That idea translates into how we relate to ourselves.
Looking inward with kindness allows us to build bridges with others and strengthen our relationships. When we view our own sadness, shortcomings, anxieties and difficulties not as failures but as a part of the human condition, we realize these feelings are universal parts of being alive.
Treating ourselves kindly is a skill like any other: fixing a car, riding a bike, throwing a ball. We don’t avoid those tasks because we’re somehow inherently bad, but because we never learned how.
Being kind to ourselves is something we can practice and improve on. Like any skill, the more we practice it, the better we’ll get.
Dr. Justin Altschuler, a physician certified in family practice and addiction at Sequoia MD, can be reached at (916) 668-7164. Follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
