Self-compassion helps to downregulate the threat response. … When we practice self-compassion, we are deactivating the threat-defense system and activating the care system. Oxytocin and endorphins are released, which helps reduce stress and increase feelings of safety and security.

Mindfulness or Self-Compassion? Actually, Both
Given that mindfulness is a core component of self-compassion, it’s worth
asking, “How do mindfulness and self-compassion relate to one another?”
Mindfulness focuses primarily on acceptance of experience itself. Selfcompassion focuses more on caring for the experiencer.
Mindfulness asks, “What am I experiencing right now?” Self-compassion
asks, “What do I need right now?”
Mindfulness says, “Feel your suffering with spacious awareness.” Selfcompassion says, “Be kind to yourself when you suffer.”
Mindfulness and self-compassion both allow us to live with less resistance
toward ourselves and our lives. If we can fully accept that things are painful, and be kind to ourselves because they’re painful, we can be with the pain withgreater ease.

The Physiology of Self-Criticism and Self-Compassion

When we criticize ourselves we’re tapping into the body’s threat-defense
system (sometimes referred to as our reptilian brain). Among the many ways we can react to perceived danger, the threat-defense system is the quickest and most easily triggered. This means that self-criticism is often our first reaction when things go wrong.
Feeling threatened puts stress on the mind and body, and chronic stress can
cause anxiety and depression, which is why habitual self-criticism is so bad for emotional and physical well-being. With self-criticism, we are both the attacker and the attacked.
Compassion, including self-compassion, is linked to the mammalian care
system. That’s why being compassionate to ourselves when we feel
inadequate makes us feel safe and cared for, like a child held in a warm
embrace. Self-compassion helps to downregulate the threat response. When
the stress response (fight–flight–freeze) is triggered by a threat to our selfconcept, we are likely to turn on ourselves in an unholy trinity of reactions. We fight ourselves (self-criticism), we flee from others (isolation), or we freeze (rumination).
When we practice self-compassion, we are deactivating the threat-defense
system and activating the care system. Oxytocin and endorphins are released, which helps reduce stress and increase feelings of safety and security.

Self-compassion provides emotional resilience because it deactivates the threat system. 

Mindfulness and self-compassion are resources that give us the safety needed to meet difficult experience with less resistance. Just imagine how you would feel if you were overwhelmed and a friend walked into the room, gave you a hug, sat down beside you, listened to your distress, and then helped you work out a plan of action. Thankfully, that mindful and compassionate friend can be you. It begins by opening to what is, without resistance.

In a moment of struggle, we don’t practice to be free of our pain—we practice compassion because sometimes it’s hard to be a human being. Radical acceptance is like a parent comforting a child who has the 48-hour flu. The parent doesn’t care for the child to try to drive the flu away—the flu is going to leave in its own time. But because the child has a fever and feels bad, theparent comforts her as a natural response to suffering while the process of healing occurs. It’s like this when we try to comfort ourselves, too. When we fully accept the reality that we are imperfect human beings, prone to make mistakes and struggle, our hearts naturally begin to soften. We still feel pain, but we also feel the love holding the pain, and it’s more bearable.

Together, mindfulness and self-compassion form a state of warmhearted,
connected presence that strengthens us during difficult moments in our lives.

Whenever you find yourself using self-compassion to try to make the pain goaway or to become a “better person,” try shifting your focus away from this subtle form of resistance and practice compassion simply because we’re all imperfect human beings, living imperfect lives.

In other words, practice being a “compassionate mess.