A simple mental habit may help protect people from some of the toughest effects of loneliness and social disconnection.
Self-compassion helps to reduce loneliness: being kind to yourself during hard times helps to offset some of the negative aspects of social disconnection.
Self-compassion involves treating yourself with kindness, seeing periods of loneliness in context and avoiding harsh self-judgment.
The finding comes from a study examining how working from home affects feelings of loneliness.
Dr Stephanie Andel, the study’s first author, said:
“We wanted to understand what factors are driving feelings of work loneliness, and to understand how this work loneliness influenced employees’ psychological health and work behaviors.
We looked at three different factors that we thought might drive work loneliness: perceptions of job insecurity, telecommuting frequency and insufficient communication from their companies about how they were responding to the pandemic.
We found each of those factors contributed to feelings of work loneliness, and we also found that work loneliness was associated with depression and fewer voluntary helping behaviors at work.”
The study included people working from home in the U.S. during the initial stage of the pandemic.
Participants completed a weekly diary designed to assess their psychological well-being.
Dr Andel explained the results:
“We found that self-compassion helps protect employees from some of the negative effects of work loneliness.
We suspect this is because self-compassion leads individuals to be kinder to themselves, makes them more likely to recognize that they are not alone in their feelings and helps them to be aware of — but not consumed by — their negative feelings.”
While people who were more self-compassionate had lower depression, they also helped work colleagues less.
Dr Andel said:
“We originally thought if you were more self-compassionate, you might have the energy and mental resources to engage in more helping behaviors at work.
However, it turns out that the pattern is opposite of what we expected.
Instead, those who were higher in self-compassion were more likely to give themselves a necessary break.
We suspect that this may ultimately help them to feel better and help more in the future.”
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The study was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (Andel et al., 2021).
