Self-kindness when facing stress: The role of self-compassion, goal regulation, and support in college students' well-being

Abstract

This project brought together the constructs of goal and emotion regulation as a way of understanding college students' well-being, building on previous work that identified the ability to disengage in goal pursuit and to redirect energy toward alternative goals as an important contributor to well-being. In Study 1, we assessed the amount of variance in well-being accounted for by measures of goal management, adding to the regression measures of student stress and self-compassion, the latter defined as a healthy form of self-acceptance and characterized as a tendency to treat oneself kindly in the face of perceived inadequacy. In Study 2, the stress scale was replaced by measures of perceived need and availability of support. Across studies, although factors such as goal management, stress, and need for and availability of support were important predictors of well-being, self-compassion accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in well-being. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.