"At the end of this thing, I'll still be my own friend"

If you feel the urge up to turn over a new leaf or two on New Years Day, one bad habit you should consider ditching is excessive self-criticism.

That's according to counsellor and Irish Times columnist Padraig O'Morain, who speaks with Roísín Ingle about "self compassion" on this week's Roísín Meets podcast.

Padraig explains how facing a challenging personal situation helped him realise that his own harsh self-criticism was preventing from taking action.

"It occurred to me that what was making me so nervous was the sense that maybe I will not do this thing right, maybe I'll come into criticism," he said. "Then I realised that the critic I was fearing most was myself."

"So I made a kind of decision or a pledge or an assertion to myself that at the end of this thing I will still be my own friend".

If you want to understand how bad a friend you can be to yourself in difficult times, says Padraig, think of how a good friend would advise you.

"A good friend might say to you, you really blew it that time, you need to get that fixed. You need to go and talk to that person and sort it out. A person who is kind of an enemy might say, you're a complete waste of space, here you are you've done it again, what a terrible person you are. So they're both addressing the issue - but the friend is addressing it in a way that leaves you still standing at the end of it".