Self-compassion — what the research says

“If I go easy on myself, I’ll slack off.” That is many people’s intuition, and it is why self-compassion looks suspect: it resembles complacency. Research describes something different.

What are we talking about?

The term refers to treating your own failures the way you would treat a friend’s: acknowledging the difficulty, remembering that imperfection is shared by everyone, and not piling on disproportionate self-blame. It differs from self-esteem, which concerns how much worth you attribute to yourself and tends to rise and fall with success.

What the studies show

• A meta-analysis of 20 samples from 14 studies found a strong association between self-compassion and psychopathology symptoms (r = −0.54): the higher the self-compassion, the milder the symptoms of depression or anxiety (MacBeth and Gumley, 2012).
• Lab experiments suggest it does not switch motivation off. In Breines and Chen’s (2012) work, participants invited to take a compassionate view after a failure were more motivated to improve than a control group.

What to keep in mind

• The first finding is correlational: it cannot show that self-compassion reduces symptoms. Someone who is less depressed probably treats themselves more kindly too.
• The lab experiments look at short-term effects, often in student samples. They say little about what happens over several months.
• Measures rely on self-report questionnaires: they reflect what people say about themselves, not their actual behaviour.

In practice: kindness towards yourself is not at odds with high standards. The useful question after a failure is not “Am I hopeless?” but “What can I do differently?”.

Sources

According to PubMed:

• MacBeth A., Gumley A. (2012). Exploring compassion: a meta-analysis of the association between self-compassion and psychopathology. Clinical Psychology Review. DOI
• Breines J. G., Chen S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI