Give yourself a break! That’s the advice from a new study out of McGill University, which shows that compassion for others without self-compassion leads to anxiety and mental health problems.

The study was conducted in Canada, a country known for its compassion for others. It involved an initial sample size of 1,286 people from throughout the Canadian provinces. All information on age, race, and gender was self-provided, and a significant percentage refused to provide data, so take these numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism:

• Mean age = 45 yrs., 18 yrs. minimum, and 87 yrs. maximum
• 77.1% identified as female; only 15.3% identified as male
• 74.9% self-identified as White; no other race had more than 3.3%
• 70.1% identified as heterosexual, 11.5% bisexual, and 5.2% lesbian or gay

So, they’re not average Canadians. They have an average of nearly 18 years of education, which means an average of a master’s degree. The survey surprisingly does not include self-reported income or wealth questions. Only 41% of respondents (all adults) were employed full-time, and only 13% more were employed part-time, meaning over 40% were unemployed, homemakers, or still in school. Roughly 17% said that meditation was “important” or “very important” to their daily lives.

Now that you know who is in the respondent pool, here’s what they participated in:

[Participants] completed measures of compassion for self, other humans, and animals, symptoms, affect, emotion regulation, connectedness, and well-being.

Of the initial 1,286 participants, 213 agreed to participate in a three-month follow-up using the same measures for compassion, connectedness, and well-being. Profiles were then “compared cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and within-profile correlations were examined.” The researchers identified six compassion profiles:

• others-oriented
• animals-oriented
• behaviorally-oriented
• human-oriented
• integral-highly
• restricted compassionate

The goal was to see how these compassion profiles aligned with “adaptive psychological functioning,” or strong mental health. What the researchers found was that those with high compassion across all six “domains” showed “the most adaptive psychological functioning.” 

However, those with high compassion for others and low compassion for self were “linked to poorer outcomes.” Which leads researchers to conclude, drumroll please, that low self-compassion leads to anxiety and poor mental health outcomes even when balanced by compassion for animals or other people.

That’s sort of a long walk, but it’s an interesting study, and it caught the eye of Sydney Page, who writes “The Optimist” column for The Washington Post. Page is herself a graduate of McGill University, where the study was done, and lives in Toronto.

The lead researcher for the study, Dr. Bassam Khoury, Director of McGill’s Mindfulness Research Lab, was blunt with Page about his prognosis for individuals who overflow with compassion for other beings but not for themselves:

If someone reported high compassion for others but low compassion for themselves, they tended to have anxiety, depression and low well-being.

What, exactly, does it mean to have self-compassion? Dr. Khoury identified four traits of the self-compassionate:

• thinking about yourself without judgment
• actively taking care of yourself
• feeling love and respect for yourself
• accepting comfort or help from others when you need it

In discovering this correlation, Dr. Khoury has done a great service to those struggling with addiction and mental health issues. A significant portion of recovery involves strengthening self-compassion. Making a list of ways you could be kinder to yourself, and then monitoring your progress over time, should improve mental health outcomes.

This information can be more directly tied into recovery apps, encouraging users to document and increase acts of self-compassion over time. Adding this feature to recovery apps in some fashion should also improve app usage rates as users receive positive reinforcement from the self-compassion inventory.

In my opinion, Canadians have compassion down to a science. Despite the self-reported and demographically-skewed nature of this survey, it points to something that deserves measurement with greater rigor. The study indicates that self-compassion, including self-forgiveness, could be a key cognitive lever in recovery from addiction and mental health challenges.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published September 30, 2026.

Sources:

“Latent profiles of compassion for self, other humans, and animals: A two time point study,” Personality and Individual Differences, August 2026.

“This type of compassion brings us the most benefit, study shows,” The Optimist, The Washington Post, September 16, 2026.

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