Being best friends with yourself

In one of Oliver Burkeman’s talks on the Waking Up app, he discusses the idea of being best friends with yourself.¹

He explores why, for many people, this term is more powerful than self-compassion or self-love, which can evoke a certain kind of New Age narcissism or secular self-absorption.

Burkeman makes some important points about why this phrasing is useful:

Firstly, everyone has a model of friendship they can refer to. You know how you would treat your friends. If I ask you how you’d respond to a friend who’s just been through a break-up, or just completed a marathon, it’s no mystery.

And so translating this to yourself means applying something you already do to another relationship, not trying to adopt an alien standard of saintliness, for which you have no reference.

Burkeman also reminds us that friendliness isn’t always about saying yes. Sometimes, saying no is the better thing to do for a friend, like when they want to order that 6th cocktail. Friendliness easily accommodates this idea of being firm to be kind.

I think there are more profound depths to this practice—and it is absolutely a practice, not a one-off decision.

Cultivating a friendly attitude to yourself fosters inner alignment. I spend a lot of time as a coach helping people discover this kind of alignment, where their head, heart and gut are pointing in the same direction. (Instead of their head screaming one thing, their heart running in the other direction and their gut going queasy.)

Inner alignment unlocks a lot of the external impact we crave. A lack of alignment is like fretting a song perfectly on the guitar with 3 strings out of tune; no matter your technique, it’s going to sound like a train wreck.

Friendliness also affords a greater recognition that we are each multitude. I see people experience so much stress through trying to attribute all their thoughts and actions to one unchanging self, accountable for everything thing that has ever befallen them. And conversely, so much relief in recognising that there are different parts to each of us, with different origin stories and differing worldviews.

Lastly, I’ve found that there is a deep peace possible when you are not constantly clipping your own wings. Not the dreamed-up peace that arrives when the outside conditions finally align, but a weighty, inner coherence. This doesn’t mean things are always peachy, but that there’s a confidence in meeting life as an equal without some hawk-like, authoritarian oversight.

When it comes down to it, you’re going to be in your own company for the rest of your life. You spend hours talking to yourself each day. You wake up with yourself each morning and go to bed with yourself each night.

Why not try infusing a little more friendliness? It’s entirely possible that a small shift in attitude could do more for your self-understanding than years of overthinking and self-monitoring.