A few times in this blog, I have written about
self-compassion. Self-compassion is the
degree to which you treat yourself with kindness. It differs from related concepts like self-esteem,
which is how good you feel about yourself.
Self-compassion determines how well you come back from adversity. If you get down on yourself when things go
wrong, then it is hard to bounce back from a problem. If you treat yourself with kindness, then it
is easier to recover from a bad experience.
An interesting paper in the July, 2013 issue of Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin by Meredith Terry, Mark Leary, Sneha Mehta, and
Kelly Henderson examined the relationship between self-compassion and health
behaviors.
A key question in health-care is what factors lead people to
seek help for medical problems. Every
year, some number of people avoid going to the doctor, even when they think
they might be sick. This avoidance can
be dangerous if the delay leads a treatable condition to get worse.
In a series of studies, the authors examined the
relationship between a measure of self-compassion and a variety of
health-related behaviors. To measure
self-compassion, the authors used a scale that described a series of bad things
that could happen in someone’s life like making a stupid mistake or having a
hard time doing something that other people find easy. They asked people to evaluate whether they
would be likely to do self-compassionate things like cheering themselves up or
uncompassionate things like judging themselves harshly.
One study found that people with health problems who have a
high level of self-compassion are less depressed about those problems than
people with a low level of self-compassion.
Another study found that people with a high-level of self-compassion
said they would see a doctor more quickly for health problems than people with
a low-level of self-compassion. The
authors found this relationship even after controlling for factors like how
good people are at planning for the future.
A final study looked at why self-compassion influences
health-related behaviors. This study
found that people with a high level of self-compassion also treat themselves
kindly. That is, they do not get down on
themselves for having an illness. They
also frequently remind themselves that many people have health problems and
that they do not deserve to be sick. The
combination of self-kindness and positive self-talk help to explain the
influence of self-compassion on health behaviors.
This study adds to a growing body of work demonstrating the
powerful effects of self-compassion.
Everyone is going to experience negative events in their lives. People
try a new venture and fail. They get
sick or injured. They get in
relationships that ultimately break up.
They have loved-ones who get sick or die. Nobody can escape the bad things that happen
in life.
The key is to find ways to deal with those negative events
in a positive way. It is fine to
experience the pain of a negative event.
But, after acknowledging the pain, it is also important to get up and
try again—to remember that failures and illnesses and bad relationships are not
a verdict on your worth as a person, but just another hurdle to be
overcome. Ultimately, you need to learn
to treat yourself with the same kindness you would show to others in the same
situation.
