Self-Compassion Calms and Soothes Fight-or-Flight Responses

Exactly six years ago this week, I wrote a post, “The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure,” which offered some practical advice on different ways to increase parasympathetic activation within the autonomic nervous system (which counterbalances fight-or-flight responses) by engaging the vagus nerve.

One section of that 2013 post recommended practicing Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM). Typically, during LKM you systematically direct warm-hearted thoughts of love and kindness to four groups of people including strangers (all beings), enemies, loved ones, and self-compassion to yourself.

Source: Hassan Ouajbir/Pexels

My interest in the link between LKM and the vagus nerve is rooted in the landmark study (2010) by Barbara Fredrickson and Bethany Kok, "Upward Spirals of the Heart: Autonomic Flexibility, as Indexed by Vagal Tone, Reciprocally, and Prospectively Predicts Positive Emotions and Social Connectedness."

Last year, I wrote another post, “Kindness Towards Oneself and Others Tones Your Vagus Nerve,” which does a deeper dive into the link between self-compassion and increased parasympathetic activity as marked by increased heart rate variability (HRV).

This week, a new study on the link between self-compassion and increased parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) activation advances our understanding of the benefits of loving-kindness meditation and self-compassion. The paper, “Soothing Your Heart and Feeling Connected: A New Experimental Paradigm to Study the Benefits of Self-Compassion,” by first author Hans Kirschner and colleagues from the Mood Disorders Centre at the University of Exeter was published online February 6 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

For this study, senior author Anke Karl and her team recruited 135 healthy (non-depressed) volunteers who were divided into five groups and given different sets of 11-minute-long audio instructions and queries. For example, some of the audio questions included asking participants how socially connected they felt to others, how safe they felt, and if they tended to be kind to themselves.

The primary goal of this experiment was to study the effect of self-compassion exercises on self-reported mood and a participant’s psychophysiological responses as measured by sweat response, heart rate beats per minute (BPM), and HRV.

All of this data was compared to other control exercises that were purposely devoid of specific thoughts related to self-compassion. These exercises included a session of negative (rumination), a neutral exercise, and an exercise designed to elicit positive (excitement) emotions.

As would be expected, verbal instructions that prompted study participants to speak to themselves using a hyper-critical inner voice led to increased feelings of threat and distress as marked by faster heart rate BPM, decreased HRV, and secreting a nervous sweat. These "fight-or-flight" responses are triggered by heightened activity in the sympathetic nervous system (SNS).

Notably, increased self-compassion and decreased self-criticism were self-reported after both the self-compassion exercises and the positive (excitement) valence exercises. However, more robust parasympathetic activation (as indicated by increased heart rate variability) was unique to self-compassion exercises.

“As predicted, rumination triggered the opposite pattern across self-report and physiological responses. Furthermore, we found partial evidence that physiological arousal reduction and parasympathetic activation precede the experience of feeling safe and connected,” the authors said.

“Our study is helping us understand the mechanism of how being kind to yourself when things go wrong could be beneficial in psychological treatments,” Karl said in a statement. “By switching off our threat response, we boost our immune systems and give ourselves the best chance of healing. We hope future research can use our method to investigate this in people with mental health problems such as recurrent depression."

The authors sum up their findings in the paper’s conclusions: “We conclude that self-compassion reduces negative self-bias and activates a content and calm state of mind with a disposition for kindness, care, social connectedness, and the ability to self-soothe when stressed. Our paradigm might serve as a basis for future research in analogue and patient studies addressing several important outstanding questions.”

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This study has some limitations such as only including non-depressed participants. The researchers speculate that people with clinical depression might not experience the same increase in parasympathetic activation by doing these 11-minute self-compassion exercises. Also, this study doesn't investigate the ability of someone to redirect a negative mood, which is an important feature of practicing self-compassion. The authors acknowledge that more research is needed to address these two outstanding questions from their recent study (Kirschner et al., 2019).