Effects of Self-Compassion on Stress and Health Behaviors in Daily Life: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Objective: Daily stress is closely linked to health behaviors in everyday life, yet few interventions have examined how self-compassion shapes the associations at the daily level. This randomized controlled trial evaluated whether a brief expressive-writing self-compassion intervention impacted daily stress, daily health behaviors, and stress–behavior relationships across 7 days.

Methods: Participants were randomly assigned to either a self-compassion writing condition (N = 78) or a control condition (N = 88), followed by a 7-day daily diary assessing daily hassles, uplifts, eating, sleep, physical activity, and alcohol use. Self-compassion was measured at baseline and 1 week after completion of the daily diaries.

Results: The manipulation moderated the associations between daily hassles and snacking and between daily uplifts and snacking. In the control condition, higher daily stress and daily positive experiences were associated with greater total and unhealthy snacking, whereas the associations were diminished or absent in the experimental condition. However, participants in the self-compassion condition reported shorter sleep duration on days characterized by higher uplifts. Multilevel mediation analyses revealed no direct or indirect effects of the intervention on daily stress or daily health behaviors. Mixed analyses of variance indicated that although self-compassion increased over time, the intervention condition did not have greater increases in self-compassion compared with the control condition.

Conclusions: The findings provide initial evidence that a brief expressive-writing self-compassion intervention may buffer stress–behavior dynamics in daily life. Future research should focus on whether increasing the frequency of self-compassion practices can strengthen and sustain the effects over time and across diverse populations.