Cultivating Compassion for Resilience and Wellbeing: Applications for Individuals and Workplaces

Introduction

Problems with stress and mental health were pervasive prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and have only grown more significant over time. In 2019, an estimated 970 million people worldwide were living with a mental disorder, accounting for about one in eight adults (WHO, 2022). Similarly, nearly 50 million American adults experienced a mental illness in 2019 (Reinert, Fritz, & Nguyen, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant global social and economic disruptions that have resulted in a compounding effect of stress and overwhelm.

The Global Burdens of Disease (GBD) estimates a 25-27% rise in the prevalence of depression and anxiety since the beginning of the pandemic (Santomauro et al., 2021). Additionally, workers have reported the highest stress levels on record (Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, 2022). Thus, there is a strong need to respond to the mental health needs of adults, including how to mitigate the adverse effects of stress and crisis. When humans, individually or collectively, are activated by stress and threat, compassion is both a motivational framework and an evidence-based skill set that can enhance emotion regulation, appropriately orient problem-solving, and activate a sense of belonging (Gilbert, 2017; Kolts & Chodron, 2013).

Modern people have to contend with a chronic contextual overload. There are so many stressors–including personal, societal, and global –that people have to manage in their lives. Additionally, there are many contextual constraints placed on maintaining peoples’ wellbeing including time, money, and other resource limitations. Addressing issues of stress, therefore, cannot only include expensive, high-resource strategies if they are to be applicable and distributable at scale. Modern stress management strategies need to include interventions and practices that are highly accessible, trainable, and affordable. Compassion-based interventions meet this criterion.

Since the 1970s, researchers have established a clear link between mindfulness practice and stress reduction (Kabat-Zinn, 2013). Programs like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) have been shown to effectively reduce stress and enhance wellbeing (Khoury, Sharma, Rush, & Fournier,2015). While mindfulness contemplative interventions may have elements of compassion interventions within them, practices that focus primarily on developing compassion offer something unique to individuals and workplaces (Brito-Pons, Campos, & Cebolla, 2018). Over the past decade, an emergence of research has investigated the benefits of compassion practices on stress and wellbeing. Compassion cultivation is a type of mind training that translates to tangible intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes leading to greater resilience and wellbeing (Roca et al., 2021).

The following chapter explores the function and importance of compassion in the wellbeing of individuals and groups. The authors will explore the definitions of compassion and what facets contribute toward compassionate motivations and behaviors. The chapter will explore the positive outcomes compassion practice has on stress, health, and wellbeing. The authors provide an overview of how compassion training programs are structured and implemented. Lastly, the authors discuss how compassion can be applied to workplace settings to reduce stress, burnout, and increase group cohesion.