Self-Compassion and Its Importance to Overall Health

Self-compassion is the act or practice of kindness towards oneself. Compassion begins when a person recognizes suffering within another person, they feel a desire to respond to their pain in a caring heartfelt way. Self-compassion is this very same acknowledgment for oneself.

Experts define the elements of self-compassion as using self-kindness rather than judgment, common humanity, and mindful attention.

Some of the benefits that self-compassion can provide are: increased feelings of general well-being, positive health effects, promotion of healthy relationships, supportive of mental health, and lower levels of anxiety and depression. Self-compassion is also linked to a lowering of perceived stress and a positive correlation to physical health. This is partially due to decreasing negative affectivity. Negative affect is generally described as experiencing frequent negative emotions; guilt, fear, anger, disgust, and poor self-concept.

An important takeaway, self-compassion is a learned behavior and can be practiced at any time, starting at any point in life.

Self-compassion practices:

• Creating an affirmation or reminder
• Taking a rest or break
• Putting a hand on the chest over the heart to soothe the nervous system
• Listening to a guided meditation or sitting within meditation
• Mindfully accepting a painful moment then letting that moment pass
• Thinking about how one may treat a friend in a time of struggle and treating one’s self with that same advice
• Journalling or writing about the experience
• Attempting to change negative self-talk
• Taking care of those one love’s can help to open up the heart to one’s self as well
• Thinking about what one truly wants and using that voice as a guiding tool

What science says about practicing self-compassion:

• “Study 1 found that self-compassion (unlike self-esteem) helps buffer against anxiety when faced with an ego threat in a laboratory setting. Self-compassion was also linked to connected versus separate language use when writing about weaknesses. Study 2 found that increases in self-compassion occurring over a one-month interval were associated with increased psychological well-being, and that therapist ratings of self-compassion were significantly correlated with self-reports of self-compassion.” (Self-compassion and adaptive psychological functioning, Neff et al., 2006)
• Research by Baldwin and colleagues (Baldwin, 1992; Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996) suggests that individuals develop cognitive schemas for self-to-self relating based on their prior interpersonal interactions with attachment figures, so that experiences with others who are accepting or critical become internalized and expressed as self-acceptance or self-criticism.
• Further, more is becoming known about the beneficial role of self-compassion in terms of health (e.g., Biber & Ellis, 2017), body image and disordered eating (e.g., Braun, Park & Gorin, 2016), motivation (e.g., Breines & Chen, 2012), interpersonal relationships (Neff & Beretvas, 2013) and physiological functioning (e.g., Arch, Landy & Brown, 2016).

Practicing self-compassion can improve or increase overall health.