The research behind Self-Compassion
Being hard on yourself can feel productive. If you make a mistake, miss a goal or behave in a way you aren't proud of, criticism can seem like evidence that you're taking the problem seriously. Telling yourself that it wasn't a big deal might feel dangerously close to lowering your standards.
This creates an understandable concern about self-compassion. If you respond to your own failures with kindness rather than criticism, what stops you from becoming complacent? Perhaps feeling bad is exactly what prevents you from making the same mistake again.
Psychologist Kristin Neff began developing self-compassion as a psychological construct in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers have studied its relationship with well-being, coping, motivation and behavior. One particularly interesting question within that research is whether treating yourself less harshly after failure actually reduces the desire to improve.
Experimental evidence suggests that assumption deserves a closer look.
THE RESEARCH
In 2012, psychologists Juliana Breines and Serena Chen published a series of four experiments examining whether self-compassion after mistakes and weaknesses affected people's motivation to improve themselves.
The researchers deliberately tested the idea in several different situations rather than relying on a single type of failure. In one experiment, participants were asked to think about a personal weakness they believed could be changed. Some were instructed to write about the weakness from a self-compassionate perspective, while participants in comparison conditions approached it in other ways. Afterwards, the researchers measured how motivated they were to address the weakness.
Participants encouraged to respond with self-compassion reported greater motivation to improve than those in the comparison conditions. They were also more likely to believe that the weakness could be changed.
Another experiment examined a more uncomfortable situation: something participants had done that they felt was morally wrong. Again, some participants were prompted to respond to the experience with self-compassion. Afterwards, the researchers measured their motivation to repair the harm. Those in the self-compassion condition reported greater motivation to make amends and avoid repeating the behavior.
The researchers then tested the idea using academic failure. Participants completed a difficult test and received disappointing feedback. Before being given an opportunity to study for a second test, some participants received a self-compassion intervention. The researchers measured how much time participants subsequently chose to spend studying.
Those encouraged to respond self-compassionately to the failure spent more time studying for the next test.
Across the experiments, self-compassion did not appear to remove the motivation to improve. In several different contexts, it was associated with more willingness to try again, correct a problem or change future behavior.
THE FINDING
The studies challenge a common assumption about self-criticism: that making yourself feel worse about a failure is necessary to make yourself take it seriously.
There is an intuitive logic to that belief. If doing something badly feels sufficiently unpleasant, perhaps you will work harder to avoid experiencing that feeling again. Self-criticism can therefore seem like a form of internal discipline.
The problem is that criticism introduces another psychological task. You are no longer dealing only with the original mistake. You are also dealing with the threat that the mistake creates for your view of yourself.
A poor performance can become evidence that you are incompetent. An awkward interaction can become evidence that you are socially inept. A bad decision can become evidence that you are fundamentally irresponsible. Once the judgment expands from what happened to what this says about me, protecting the self can begin competing with learning from the experience.
Self-compassion offers a different response. It allows a person to acknowledge that something went badly without requiring the failure to become a broader verdict on who they are.
That distinction may make it easier to look directly at what happened.
THE THEORY
Neff's model of self-compassion consists of three related components: self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness.
Self-kindness refers to responding to yourself with understanding rather than immediately becoming hostile or contemptuous when something goes wrong. This does not require telling yourself that your behavior was acceptable. It concerns the tone and stance you take towards yourself while evaluating it.
Common humanity involves recognizing that failure, inadequacy and difficulty are normal parts of human experience. This is particularly relevant because mistakes can become strangely isolating. When we fail at something important, it is easy to experience the failure as evidence that something is uniquely wrong with us rather than as an experience that occurs, in different forms, to virtually everyone.
Mindfulness refers to holding the difficult experience in awareness without either ignoring it or becoming completely absorbed by it. In practical terms, this means being able to recognize that you are disappointed, embarrassed or upset without allowing the emotion to become the entire interpretation of what happened.
Together, these components create a way of responding to failure that neither dismisses the problem nor turns it into an attack on the person experiencing it.
NOT THE SAME THING
Self-compassion is not letting yourself off the hook
This is probably the most important distinction in the research.
Self-compassion doesn't require deciding that everything you do is fine. If you hurt someone, the compassionate response isn't to conclude that you shouldn't feel bad because everyone makes mistakes. If you repeatedly fail to prepare for something important, self-compassion doesn't require pretending that preparation doesn't matter.
In fact, the Breines and Chen experiments are interesting precisely because participants became more motivated to correct problems after responding self-compassionately.
Accountability and self-attack are separate things.
You can acknowledge that you handled a situation badly, apologize, change your behavior and put systems in place to prevent it from happening again without adding the conclusion that you are an awful person. You can recognize that you were underprepared for an exam without spending the rest of the day telling yourself that you are lazy or incapable.
Removing the attack doesn't require removing the standard.
WHY IT MATTERS
Self-criticism can be difficult to question because it often appears alongside achievement. Someone who has spent years pushing themselves may reasonably conclude that the pressure is part of why they succeeded. If every missed target has been followed by an internal lecture, it is difficult to know what would have happened without it.
But there is a difference between having high standards and using hostility towards yourself to enforce them.
The Breines and Chen research suggests that self-compassion can preserve the desire to improve while reducing some of the threat associated with admitting that improvement is needed. That matters because learning from failure requires a reasonably accurate view of what happened.
If protecting your self-image becomes the priority, you may make excuses, avoid feedback or stop attempting things that could expose you to another failure. If punishing yourself becomes the priority, you may spend more energy on the emotional consequences of the mistake than on figuring out what to do differently.
A less defensive response leaves more room for useful questions. What actually went wrong? Was the goal realistic? Did I prepare properly? What was under my control? What wasn't? What would I change next time?
Those questions can be uncomfortable. Self-compassion isn't designed to make them disappear. It may simply make them easier to answer without turning every mistake into a referendum on your worth.
TRY THIS
Think about a recent mistake or failure that you're still criticizing yourself for. Describe what happened as accurately as you can, without minimizing it and without adding judgments about what it proves about you as a person.
Then consider what you would say to someone you respect who had made the same mistake. You probably wouldn't tell them that nothing mattered or that they should ignore the consequences. You would be capable of acknowledging what they did wrong while still speaking to them like a person whose entire character cannot be determined from one event.
Try applying the same standard to yourself.
Then ask the question that criticism is supposedly there to answer: What would actually help me do better next time?
If there is something to repair, repair it. If there is something to practice, practice it. If there is a lesson worth carrying forward, identify it.
The point of self-compassion isn't to make failure feel good. It is to make it possible to deal with failure without spending unnecessary energy fighting yourself at the same time.
References
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133-1143.
Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85-101.
Neff, K. D., Hsieh, Y.-P., & Dejitterat, K. (2005). Self-compassion, achievement goals, and coping with academic failure. Self and Identity, 4(3), 263-287.