Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.
Think back to the last time you failed or made an important mistake. Do you still feel embarrassed and blame yourself for having been so stupid? Research has shown that this response can often have negative consequences. Besides increasing our unhappiness and stress levels, it can increase procrastination, and makes us even less able to achieve our goals in the future.
Instead of chastising ourselves, we should try to practice self-compassion or, in other words, forgive our own mistakes if possible and take good care of ourselves throughout times of disappointment or embarrassment. “Most of us have a good friend in our lives, who is kind of unconditionally supportive,” says Kristin Neff, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas. “Self-compassion is learning to be that same warm, supportive friend to yourself.” In her studies, Neff examined how it related to people’s overall mental health and wellbeing and found that this trait can be linked to increased life satisfaction and decreased risks of depression and anxiety.
Self-compassion has now become a blossoming field of research, attracting interest from more and more researchers. Some of the most intriguing results concern people’s physical health, with a recent study showing that people with high self-compassion are less likely to report different ailments like back pain, headache, and nausea. A research from 2012 also found that people with high self-compassion show greater motivation to correct their errors. For instance, they tended to work harder after failing an important test. So it seems that self-compassion can also create a sense of safety that allows us to confront our weaknesses and make positive changes in our lives. This is solid evidence against the idea that self-compassion would lead to lazy behaviour and low willpower.
And if you would like to gain some of these benefits, there is now abundant evidence – from Neff’s research group and many others – that self-compassion can be trained. Popular interventions include “loving-kindness meditation”, which guides you to focus on feelings of forgiveness and warmth to yourself and others. In one recent experiment, Tobias Krieger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland designed an online course to teach this exercise alongside lessons about the causes of self-criticism and its consequences. After seven sessions, they found significant increases in the participants’ self-compassion scores, along with reduced stress, anxiety and depressive feelings.
More than ever, we need to stop seeing self-compassion and self-care as a sign of weakness, says Neff. “The research is really overwhelming at this point, showing that when life gets tough, you want to be self-compassionate. It’s going to make you stronger.”
