Being self-compassionate is such a core component of resilience. How do you talk to yourself? You need to treat yourself in the way you treat the people you care about the most. The way you talk to yourself should be emotionally warm and supportive; as opposed to cold, harsh and critical. If you find yourself putting yourself down and being overly self-critical, this will lead to shame. Research has shown this can activate our sympathetic nervous system, which mobilises us for threat, releases cortisol and adrenaline in our bodies, and triggers our fight, flight, freeze, or flop response. When we criticise ourselves our heart rate and blood pressure increase, and our digestive system is negatively affected. Our brains just don’t work properly in these conditions as we can’t think clearly and we hone our attention to focus on threat, which builds anxiety and fear of failure. This means you are less likely to take risks, try new things and learn from past experiences – all important for resilience building. To be resilient we need to be mostly operating under our para-sympathetic nervous system. This is the nervous system that kicks in when we feel calm, safe and grounded and helps us to think clearly, make good decisions and healthy choices and have a flexible perspective. It also improves our immune system functioning and increases our heart rate variability – which means the heart can react to different situations, rather than be stuck in a high or low pattern.