Why Is It So Hard to Be Kind to Yourself?

Compassion, self-compassion and the evidence

What compassion is and what it is not, why caring for others can wear you out, what it means to be kind to yourself, why so many people manage one and not the other, why kindness can feel uncomfortable, what actually helps, and what nobody knows yet

Written by Ivana, psychologist and psychotherapist

18 minute read  ·  4,085 words

Think about the last time a friend told you they’d messed something up. You probably didn’t tell them they were an idiot. You probably said something like: that sounds really hard, anyone could have done that, you’ll sort it out. Now think about the last time you messed something up, and what you said to yourself.

For a lot of people, those two voices sound nothing alike. If that’s you, you’re far from alone, and that gap is what this article is about. Compassion is something most of us recognize the moment we receive it, and something researchers have spent the last twenty years trying to pin down: what it actually is, why it can wear you out, what happens when you try to point it at yourself, and why that’s so much harder than it sounds.

The short answer to the title is that compassion means noticing that someone is struggling and wanting to help. The longer answer is more interesting, and it has a surprise in the middle.

Noticing, and then doing something

Researchers don’t agree on one definition of compassion, but most of their definitions come down to two moves. The first is noticing that someone is suffering. The second is wanting to do something about it. Paul Gilbert, the British psychologist who developed compassion-focused therapy, puts both in one line: being sensitive to suffering, in yourself and in others, and committed to trying to relieve it.

Both halves matter. Noticing without any wish to help is closer to watching. Helping without really noticing is closer to duty, the kind of help that ticks a box and leaves the other person feeling like a task. You’ve probably been on the receiving end of both. Even the World Health Organization, in a recent report arguing that compassion belongs at the heart of everyday health care, describes it in three words with the same shape: awareness, empathy and action.

Catching a feeling, sharing it, and caring about it

It helps to think of it as three steps.

The first is catching a feeling without quite noticing that you caught it. One baby starts crying because another baby is crying. You walk into a tense room and feel tense before anyone has said a word. Researchers call this emotional contagion.

The second step is empathy. You feel some of what the other person feels, and you know that it’s theirs. Your friend tells you about their breakup and you feel a heaviness that is really their heaviness.

The third step is compassion. You’re no longer only feeling with them; you’re feeling for them, and something in you turns toward helping. You stay a bit longer. You ask what they need tonight.

You can reach the second step and stop there. You can feel someone’s pain very clearly and still, in the end, look away from it, because it’s simply too much. If you’ve ever done that and felt bad about it, that’s human. That gap between the second and third steps turns out to matter a great deal, and part two comes back to it.

What the people receiving it say

The clearest way to tell these apart comes from people on the receiving end. Researchers in Canada asked people with advanced cancer what sympathy, empathy and compassion felt like when someone offered them.

Sympathy was the one nobody wanted. It felt like pity, from someone looking at their situation from the outside without really understanding it. Empathy was better: someone trying to feel what they were going through. But compassion was what they wanted most. It had the understanding of empathy, and then it did something, often something small that went beyond what anyone was obliged to do. It’s the kind of thing you remember years later.

Where kindness fits

Kindness and compassion overlap all the time, but compassion always starts with someone struggling. You can be kind to a stranger who is having a perfectly nice day. You can’t really be compassionate toward them, because there’s nothing to be compassionate about.

That’s why compassion can feel heavier than kindness. It asks you to look at somebody’s pain and stay with it long enough to help.

An exhaustion that is real

If you look after other people, as a nurse, a carer, the parent of a sick child, or simply the friend everyone calls, you may know a particular kind of tiredness. It builds up slowly. It can make you numb, or short with the very people you care about. And it usually comes with guilt, because it feels like proof that you’ve stopped caring.

Most people call this compassion fatigue. The tiredness is real, and you’re not imagining it. What researchers have started to question is the name, because it suggests you ran out of compassion, and that may be the wrong way round.

Too much sharing, not too much caring

When researchers looked across dozens of studies of compassion fatigue in health care, they found something odd. The questionnaire most of those studies used doesn’t measure compassion at all. It measures stress and burnout. And nothing in those studies showed that the most compassionate carers were the ones who burned out.

Two neuroscientists suggested a different explanation, and it goes back to the three steps. Sharing someone’s pain, step two, is costly. Watching someone in pain activates some of the same parts of the brain that respond when you’re hurt yourself. If you keep taking in pain and never get to step three, where it turns into caring and doing something, that pain turns into distress of your own. And people protect themselves from distress by pulling away.

So they suggested a better name: empathic distress fatigue. Seen this way, compassion isn’t the thing that runs out. It may be what protects you.

Can you practice the part that protects you?

There’s some good evidence that you can. In a large German study, people were randomly assigned to months of different kinds of mental training. Only the training built around compassion and kindness made people feel less upset when they looked at pictures of other people suffering. Training attention didn’t, and neither did training people to see things from someone else’s point of view.

Only a handful of studies have tried self-compassion training with people in caring jobs, and they look promising: in one trial with psychologists, a six-week online course eased stress and burnout. Whether it protects nurses and carers over years of the work hasn’t been tested yet, but it points somewhere hopeful.

If this is you

If you recognize that tiredness, none of this means that you cared too much or cared wrong. It suggests the draining part may be the pain you take in and have nowhere to put, and that the part that turns it into care is something you can practice.

The article on this site about boundaries looks at the other side of this: what happens to your own needs while you look after everyone else’s.

Three things, each with an opposite

Self-compassion is the same thing pointed inward: noticing that you’re struggling, and treating yourself with some care instead of contempt. The psychologist Kristin Neff, whose model most research uses, describes it as three things, each with an opposite.

Self-kindness, instead of self-judgment, means being understanding with yourself when you fail, rather than tearing into yourself.

Common humanity, instead of isolation, means remembering that messing up, struggling and feeling awful are part of being a person, not proof that something is uniquely wrong with you.

Svjesna (puna) prisutnost (eng. Mindfulness), instead of over-identification, means noticing that you feel terrible without letting the feeling become the whole story of who you are.

A simple way to find out which side you’re on is to ask what you’d say to a friend in exactly the same situation, and then compare it with what you actually said to yourself. Try it next time. The difference can be quite a shock!

It is not the same as self-esteem

Self-esteem is about how good you think you are. Self-compassion is about how you treat yourself when you’re not doing well, and that’s where the two come apart.

Self-esteem rises and falls with how things are going. It feels great when you succeed and can vanish when you fail, which is exactly when you need something to hold on to. At its extreme it can shade into narcissism. In a large Dutch study, self-compassion went with a steadier sense of worth that didn’t depend on how things were going, and unlike self-esteem, it wasn’t linked with narcissism.

The two aren’t rivals. People who have one often have the other, and both go with being happier. But self-esteem asks whether you are good enough, and self-compassion does not need the answer to be yes.

It does not mean letting yourself off

You might worry that if you stop being hard on yourself, you’ll stop trying. The inner critic can feel like the thing that keeps you going.

The research points the other way. In a set of experiments at an American university, students who were encouraged to be kind to themselves after failing a test went on to study longer for the next one than students who were simply encouraged to feel good about themselves. People who thought kindly about a mistake they had made felt more motivated to make amends and not to repeat it. Being kind to themselves made it easier to face what they had done, not harder.

Those experiments are small and come from one lab, so they’re a hint rather than proof. But the wider research points the same way: people who are kinder to themselves tend to deal with problems more actively, avoid them less, and look after their health a little better.

Being less harsh may matter as much as being warmer

Researchers have argued for years about how self-compassion should be measured, and the argument holds one very practical lesson. The questionnaire most studies use asks about two sides: how kind you are to yourself, and how harsh. The team that built it finds it still works as one overall score, while critics say the two sides behave quite differently. Either way, when the two sides were looked at separately, it was mostly the harsh side that went with feeling low and anxious: the self-judgment, the sense of being alone with it, and being swallowed up by it.

So if being warm and gentle with yourself feels fake right now, you don’t have to start there. The first step may simply be turning down the harshness. The article on this site about overthinking reached the same place from another direction: the harm in going over things seemed to lie less in the thinking than in judging yourself while you do it.

The two barely go together

You might expect that people who are warm and forgiving with others would be warm and forgiving with themselves. It sounds like the same skill.

Researchers recently put that to the test by combining almost 200 studies from around the world that had measured both. The link between the two turned out to be weak. Knowing how kind someone is to other people tells you very little about how kind they are to themselves.

What this means if it describes you

If you’re the person who always has time for everyone else’s problems, who forgives your friends without thinking twice, and who talks to yourself in a way you’d never talk to anyone you love, you are not strange and you are not a hypocrite!! It’s the ordinary pattern. The two directions are separate enough that it’s very common to be good at one and not the other.

It also means you don’t have to fix how you feel about yourself before you can be good to other people. You probably already love others well. What you may not have had yet is the same treatment from yourself.

They work best together

The same review found something else. In the studies where the two went together more closely, both were more strongly linked with feeling well. It’s a pattern across studies rather than proof about any one person, but it suggests the goal isn’t to trade one for the other.

And being kind to yourself doesn’t seem to make people selfish. A recent review found that people who are more self-compassionate tend, if anything, to help others a little more.

There may even be a link back to the carers in part two. People who are kinder to themselves feel less overwhelmed when they see someone else suffering, which is exactly the point at which caring starts to wear people down. Nobody has proven that one leads to the other, but it fits.

When kindness is the hard part

For some people, being kind to themselves doesn’t feel like relief. It feels uncomfortable, fake, or even frightening. If that’s how it feels to you, you’re not doing it wrong. Therapists noticed this long before researchers measured it, especially in people who are very self-critical.

Researchers built questionnaires to measure fear of compassion: fear of being kind to others, fear of receiving kindness from others, and fear of being kind to yourself. When the studies using them were pooled, the fear of being kind to yourself and the fear of receiving kindness were the two most closely linked with low mood, shame and self-criticism.

Why it makes sense

If closeness in your life has come with criticism or unpredictability, warmth can feel like the moment before something goes wrong. If a harsh inner voice has kept you working, kept you out of trouble and kept you from being caught off guard, softening it can feel like putting down your guard. People who fear kindness are also more likely to be hard on themselves and to feel insecure in close relationships, which the article on this site about attachment styles looks at from the other side.

One small British experiment shows how strange this can get. People were given oxytocin, a hormone often linked with closeness, on one visit and a placebo on another, and each time were guided through an exercise in imagining compassion. For those who were very self-critical, the exercise felt less pleasant with the oxytocin than without it. It’s one small study, but it fits what many people describe: a nudge toward warmth can be hardest for exactly the people who might need warmth most.

The flare when the door opens

Teachers of self-compassion have a name for the rough patch some people hit when they begin: backdraft. It comes from firefighting, where opening the door to a burning room lets air rush in and the fire suddenly flares. When warmth arrives, old pain can come up with it, and people sometimes feel worse before they feel better.

It’s a name from practice rather than something that has been properly studied yet. But it matches what people with depression and anxiety said in a British interview study: being kind to themselves felt meaningful and worth doing, and also really hard.

So if kindness toward yourself feels uncomfortable, that is information, not failure. It’s common, it makes sense, and it’s a reason to go slowly rather than to decide that it isn’t for you.

The programs, briefly

There are several structured ways to learn compassion. The most studied is compassion-focused therapy, which Paul Gilbert developed for people struggling with shame and self-criticism. Mindful Self-Compassion is an eight-week group course created by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, built around practices such as writing yourself a compassionate letter, or placing a hand on your chest when things are hard. Others, like Compassion Cultivation Training, grew out of meditation traditions and work on kindness toward others as well as toward yourself. Many of them include loving-kindness meditation, where you quietly wish people well: someone you love, someone you barely know, and yourself.

Better than nothing, by a fair margin

Compared with doing nothing, these programs clearly help. Across dozens of trials, people who took part became kinder to themselves and less self-critical, and felt less depressed, anxious and stressed. The improvement in mood also kept growing after the course had ended.

About as good as other good therapies

The fairer test is to compare them with another real treatment, such as a different kind of therapy or relaxation training, rather than with people on a waiting list. When researchers do that, most reviews find the advantage largely disappears. Compassion programs work about as well as other good approaches, not better.

That’s still a respectable result. It means compassion training is one good road among several, and it’s fine to choose the one that suits you.

People in the other therapies became more self-compassionate too, and in both groups, the more that happened, the more their symptoms improved. Self-compassion may be less a special ingredient than something many good therapies build along the way.

Kindness needs practicing on purpose

Two findings stand out. The first is that kindness doesn’t seem to grow as a side effect of just any calming practice. In the large German study from part two, attention-based mindfulness on its own didn’t make people more compassionate. The compassion training did, and it made people kinder to themselves as well.

The second is that practicing compassion in general tends to lift both directions at once. In one American trial, a nine-week compassion course made people kinder to others, more able to accept kindness, and kinder to themselves. After part four, that’s good news: the two directions may start out far apart, but practice can move both.

If you want somewhere free to start, the World Health Organization’s illustrated guide Doing What Matters in Times of Stress has a section on being kind to yourself, and it has been translated into many languages.

The brain map is not settled

Early brain-scanning studies of compassion told a neat story: compassion showed up in areas linked with reward and closeness, and empathic distress showed up in areas linked with pain. When later researchers pooled the studies together, that neat division didn’t hold up.

Brain scans like these usually involve a few dozen people, and the same person can give quite different results when scanned twice. What we can say is what people feel and do: after compassion training, other people’s suffering upsets them less, and in several experiments they help more. Where exactly that happens in the brain is still an open question.

The love hormone is not the compassion hormone

Oxytocin is often called the love hormone. It does play a part in bonding in other mammals, and in people it probably does something too. But how much depends heavily on how you add up the studies, and one famous early finding, that it made people more trusting, didn’t hold up when it was carefully repeated, although a 2026 study found a small boost in trust in men who start out distrustful. In the large German training study, a single session of loving-kindness meditation didn’t trigger a burst of oxytocin, and changes in the hormone didn’t explain why the training made people calmer under stress. Only thin evidence so far ties oxytocin to compassion in particular.

The nerve and the heartbeat

Feeling compassion does come with real changes in the body. When people feel it, their heart rhythm shifts in a pattern linked with the vagus nerve, which has a calming effect on the heart. That much has been measured.

What’s still argued over is the bigger theory often built on top of it, polyvagal theory, with its talk of safe states and social circuits. Several of its basic ideas have been seriously challenged. If you want something practical to do with your body, the article on this site about slow breathing covers what the evidence actually supports.

What stays

Compassion can point outward or inward, and for many people one direction comes far more easily than the other. That’s ordinary, not a flaw, and both directions can be practiced. If you’re kind to everyone but yourself, the kindness you already give other people is the best picture you have of what it could look like pointed back at you.