Self-compassion and sleep quality: Examining the mediating role of taking a proactive health focus and cognitive emotional regulation strategies

Abstract

Sleep quality (SQ) impacts health yet many university students get poor sleep. Self-compassion (SC)—care for oneself during challenging times—is associated with SQ yet how SC has these effects is unclear. This study cross-sectionally examined whether SC is negatively related to poor SQ and whether proactive health focus and cognitive emotional regulation strategies (CERS) mediate this relationship. University students ( N = 193) self-reported SC, proactive health focus, CERS, and SQ. SC negatively associated with poor SQ ( r = −0.34) and self-blame mediated this ( b = 0.08, 95% CI [0.01, 0.16]). SC may improve SQ through reducing self-blame.

A Systematic Review on Mediation Studies of Self-Compassion and Physical Health Outcomes in Non-Clinical Adult Populations

“…Across the 20 included studies, quality ratings for Downs and Black (1998) ranged from 40% (low-quality) to 73% (moderate quality). Six studies scored within the low rating range of 40-53% (Butz & Stahlberg, 2018;Hwang et al, 2019;Li et al, 2020;Sirois et al, 2019;Vaillancourt & Wasylkiw, 2019;Wisener & Khoury, 2021) and 14 scored within the moderate quality, 60-73%, range (Butz & Stahlberg, 2018;Dunne et al, 2018;Finlay-Jones et al, 2015;Homan & Sirois, 2017;Hu et al, 2018;Miller & Strachan, 2020;Rakhimov et al, 2022;Semenchuk et al, 2021;Sirois et al, 2015Sirois et al, , 2019Wisener & Khoury, 2020. More specific study ratings can be found in Table 1.…”

“…Mediation checklist ratings ranged from low to high quality with scores ranging from 2 to 8 (out of 11). One study scored 8 with high quality (Study 2; Butz & Stahlberg, 2018), 12 studies scored within the moderate quality ratings within the range of 4-5 (Butz & Stahlberg, 2018;Finlay-Jones et al, 2015;Homan & Sirois, 2017;Hwang et al, 2019;Rakhimov et al, 2022;Semenchuk et al, 2021;Sirois et al, 2015Sirois et al, , 2019Wisener & Khoury, 2021), and seven scored within the low quality range of 2-3 (Dunne et al, 2018;Hu et al, 2018;Li et al, 2020;Miller & Strachan, 2020;Vaillancourt & Wasylkiw, 2019;Wisener & Khoury, 2020).…”

“…Secondly, we report findings of indirect effects of various mediators linking self-compassion to physical health. Out of the 20 studies, nine used simple mediation models (Butz & Stahlberg, 2018;Dunne et al, 2018;Hu et al, 2018;Hwang et al, 2019;Miller & Strachan, 2020;Semenchuk et al, 2021;Sirois et al, 2019;Vaillancourt & Wasylkiw, 2019) and eight used multiple parallel mediation models (Finlay- Jones et al, 2015;Semenchuk et al, 2021;Sirois et al, 2015Sirois et al, , 2019Wisener & Khoury, 2020. Of the remaining three studies, one used a serial mediation model (Homan & Sirois, 2017), one used a multilevel mediation model (Li et al, 2020), and the remaining one used both multiple and sequential mediation in the same model using SEM (Rakhimov et al, 2022).…”

“…One study assessing cognitive reappraisal as a possible mediator reported a moderate, positive correlation with self-compassion (r = .49, p <.001) and a weak, negative correlation with bedtime procrastination (r = −.17, p <.001) (Study 2; Sirois et al, 2019). The other study assessing Cognitive Emotional Regulation (CERQ) (Study 2; Semenchuk et al, 2021) as a mediator found positive correlations between self-compassion and CERQ subscales except for the acceptance subscale (ranging from r = .19 to .46, p <.001). The correlations between CERQ subscales and poor sleep quality showed mixed findings: some were non-significant (self-blame, acceptance, putting into perspective, catastrophizing, and other blame) and others had weak, positive correlations (rumination, positive refocusing, refocus on planning, and catastrophizing; ranging from r = .15 to .17, p <.01, and r = .19, p <.001).…”

“…No other DERS facets had significant indirect effects in both studies. One study found that self-compassion had an indirect effect on poor sleep quality via self-blame but not via other cognitive emotion regulation strategies (Study 2; Semenchuk et al, 2021). Two studies evaluated both negative and positive affect as mediators and one additional study evaluated negative affect alone.…”