In plain language
Most Western adults report poor sleep several times a week, and poor sleep both feeds and is fed by mental health difficulties. Could compassion — noticing suffering in yourself or others and acting to ease it — be one of the psychological levers that improves sleep? Self-compassion had been linked to better sleep before, but compassion for others had never been studied in relation to sleep, and almost no research had tracked these processes within the same people day by day.
In this study, 154 adult inpatients and outpatients with chronic, transdiagnostic psychological disorders answered brief surveys on their phones six times a day for a week, reporting their self-compassion, compassion for others, mood, and how they had slept (hours, quality, and how recovered they felt). This experience sampling approach let the researchers examine both average group-level effects and how much the compassion–sleep link varied from person to person.
The results point to a two-way street: days with higher self-compassion were followed by better sleep recovery the next morning, and nights of better sleep recovery were followed by days of greater compassion toward both self and others — even after accounting for mood. While the strength of the link varied across individuals, most people showed a positive relationship. The findings suggest compassion-focused interventions may help improve sleep recovery in clinical populations.
Key findings
- Self-compassion and other-compassion were positively correlated with subjective sleep quality indicators and mood, in both within-person and between-person analyses.
- Sleep recovery (how restored people felt after sleeping) was the sleep indicator most strongly linked to compassion, more so than sleep hours or rated sleep quality.
- Controlling for mood, higher daily average self-compassion predicted better sleep recovery the next day.
- The relationship was bidirectional: higher sleep recovery predicted greater self-compassion and other-compassion the following day.
- Within-person effects were heterogeneous across the 154 patients, but most of the sample showed a positive self-compassion–sleep recovery relationship.
- The findings suggest compassion-focused interventions may improve sleep recovery in clinical populations, supporting the soothing, arousal-regulating role of self-compassion.
How to cite
APA
Fraser, M. I., Efthymiou, A., Adamski, D., Ciarrochi, J., Gloster, A. T., & Sahdra, B. K. (2025). Self-compassion, other-compassion, and subjective sleep quality indicators in a clinical population: An experience sampling study. Mindfulness, 16, 2916–2929. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-025-02647-z
BibTeX
@article{fraser2025selfcompassion,
title = {Self-Compassion, Other-Compassion, and Subjective Sleep Quality Indicators in a Clinical Population: An Experience Sampling Study},
author = {Fraser, Madeleine I. and Efthymiou, Andrea and Adamski, Danika and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Gloster, Andrew T. and Sahdra, Baljinder K.},
journal = {Mindfulness},
year = {2025},
volume = {16},
pages = {2916--2929},
doi = {10.1007/s12671-025-02647-z}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.