Self-Compassion Can Protect You From Feeling Like A Burden When You Mess Things Up For Your Group

By guest blogger Itamar Shatz It feels bad to know that you’ve messed up, especially when other people have to pay a price for your actions. Unfortunately, this feeling is something that most of us end up experiencing at one point or another — when we’re placed on a team with other people at school or at a job, for instance, and make a mistake that forces our team members to do more work as a result. However, recent research, published in Social Psychology by James Wirth at Ohio State University and his colleagues, shows that there is a trait that can reduce those negative feelings, called “self-compassion”. Self-compassion is composed of three components: self-kindness, which involves showing kindness to yourself, mindfulness, which involves keeping your emotions balanced, and common humanity, which involves recognising that everyone experiences challenges. Past work has shown that self-compassion can be beneficial from an emotional perspective, for example by protecting people who write about their emotional pain, and by helping people with chronic pain lead happier and more active lives. To see whether self-compassion could also protect people from the negative feelings that occur when they perform poorly in a way that hurts their group, the researchers conducted a series of online experiments, each with around 160 to 300 participants. In the first experiment, participants imagined playing a trivia game as part of a team. Some imagined that they perform...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion guest blogger Personality Social Source Type: blogs