Compassion and Well-Being

We know that compassion helps us to help others, but how is it beneficial to us? In many religious and philosophical traditions, including Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Stoicism, among others, being able to feel and do for others is central to achieving the good life. For example, in Confucian teachings, compassion is part of the concept of jen (humanity), and is said to encapsulate all other virtues. In Buddhism, compassion, or karuna, is a virtue on the path to transcendence; compassion means being able to transcend preoccupation with the centrality of self. These traditions teach that compassion gives us an other-than-self focus, which many believe is needed to transcend personal suffering.

In the modern day, compassion has been shown to be related to a host of important factors indicative of personal well-being. For example, higher levels of compassion are associated with decreased anxiety and increased calmness (Jazaieri et al., 2017), increased caring behaviors toward oneself (Jazaieri et al., 2016), reduced mind-wandering to unpleasant topics and increased mind-wandering to pleasant topics (Jazaieri et al., 2016), increased mindfulness and happiness, decreased worry and emotional suppression (Jazaieri et al., 2014), making more ethical decisions (Shih et al., 2013), increased hopefulness and decreased generalized anxiety (Reddy et al., 2013), and decreases in depression (Desbordes et al., 2012). For an others-focused construct, it's impressive that compassion is associated with so many benefits to personal well-being!

Here are a few representative research studies demonstrating the benefits of compassion and that compassion can be improved with training:

Jazaieri et al. (2017) had 51 adults complete a 9-week compassion training program. Twice a day, they provided ratings of 4 affective states (feelings): anxiety, calm, fatigue, and alertness, as well as their desire and capability to regulate these states. Participants gave weekly responses about five specific regulatory strategies. An analysis of their experience showed a decrease in anxiety and an increase in calmness over the course of their participation in the training program. It also showed that participants were more likely to choose to accept what they were feeling instead of trying to influence or change it. The training made them more capable of meeting their regulatory goals.

Reddy et al. (2013) conducted a study involving youth in foster care. Often these youth aren’t willing to accept psychological or psychotropic treatment because it feels pathologizing; however, many of them need interventions of some sort to help them cope with trauma or with uncertainty in the present. Seventy adolescents in foster care were assigned to a wait-list group or a group that completed a 6-week Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) intervention. Those in the intervention were actually willing to participate in CBCT. Qualitative results showed that the youth found CBCT helpful for dealing with stressors. The majority of participants said that CBCT was “very helpful” and that they would recommend it to a friend. They described specific times when they were able to use the strategies they learned to regulate emotions, manage stress, and/or be more compassionate to others.

In a fascinating recent study, Weng et al. (2018) were interested in how compassion training might change people's ability to be more compassionate and calm when witnessing others' suffering. They randomly assigned 56 participants to either a compassion meditation group (lovingkindness/metta meditation) or a comparison group that learned cognitive reappraisal skills; each group practiced 30 minutes a day for 2 weeks. The researchers scanned participants' brains before and after the trainings using fMRI procedures, and used eye-tracking techniques to learn if there were differences in the time participants spent viewing images presented of people in distress or neutral images. They found that participants who had practiced compassion meditation tended to look more directly at suffering in the negative images while also showing decreased activity in the amygdala and other areas of the brain that are usually more active when experiencing emotional distress. These results were not observed in the reappraisal training group. Overall, the results suggest that compassion training can help people be more attentive to the distress that others are experiencing, while at the same time retaining a sense of calm and equanimity in the face of others' suffering. These findings have many important implications, including the possibility of minimizing "compassion fatigue" among professionals like nurses, doctors, law enforcement officials, social workers, and others who routinely work with those in distress. [Weng and colleagues have made this compassion training available for free using this link; this would be a great resource to use during your 21-day personal experiment with compassion!]       

In summary, the benefits of becoming more compassionate can be two-fold: it can benefit the people around us, but it can also benefit us! Learning to relate to others in compassionate and empathetic ways is vital to a life of flourishing. Compassion and altruism will not just make us happier (though research has shown that they will do that!), but they will also improve our emotional intelligence, our engagement with life, the quality of our relationships, and the lives of those we encounter. Additionally, compassion relates to so many other things that lead to flourishing—-mindfulness, supportive relationships, self-compassion, and recognizing our interconnectedness with others. We want to lead lives of flourishing, and we want want lives of flourishing for those around us. One of the best ways to work toward that is to cultivate our capacity for compassion.