Aug. 22, 2005 -- If life is a journey, we all run into potholes, and new research shows that those jolts might not be so bad if you treat yourself with compassion.

In other words, lighten up on yourself when failure comes your way. Self-compassion might even help more than high self-esteem, report researchers from Wake Forest University.

"Although Western society has emphasized the importance of high self-esteem, the more important thing may be to have self-compassion -- the ability to treat oneself kindly in the face of failure, rejection, defeat, and other negative events," says researcher and psychology professor Mark Leary, PhD, in a news release.

Secrets of Self-Compassion

Leary and colleagues presented three self-compassion studies in Washington, D.C. at the American Psychological Association's annual convention. All studies were done on college students.

In the first study, students were asked to imagine themselves in certain situations, like causing their team to lose a game or forgetting their role in a play.

Self-compassionate students reacted with statements like, "Everybody goofs up now and then," or "In the long run, this really doesn't matter." Those who were harsher on themselves were more likely to fret with statements like, "This is awful," or "I'm such a loser."

In another study, self-compassionate students coped better with unflattering feedback. Lastly, students in the third test boosted self-compassion by recalling a failure from their lives and writing about it as if they were writing to a friend who had gone through the same thing.

After all, if you wouldn't call a friend a loser, why should you dump that label on yourself?

Facing Failure

The self-compassionate students looked failure right in the eye and didn't flinch. They took responsibility for their role in the flop, and then gave themselves a break.

They also reported being happier and less angry than participants lower in self-compassion. Self-compassionate students were also less likely to dwell on negative events and to view neutral feedback positively, the study showed.

Self-Compassion, Self-Esteem

Students who didn't have great self-esteem were still helped by self-compassion. They handled failure better if they were kind to themselves about it, even if they had low self-esteem.

"A self-compassionate mindset may be particularly beneficial for people with low self-esteem," states Leary in the news release. He and his colleagues mention several reasons for that:

Raising low self-esteem doesn't bring new coping skills if people still beat themselves up for failures.
Self-compassion should promote positive self-feelings, so better self-esteem may follow self-compassion.

Plus, it may be simpler to learn to be kind to yourself than to raise your self-esteem.

"It should be easier to teach people with low self-esteem to be self-compassionate than to teach them to have higher self-esteem," write the researchers.

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