Predicting self-compassion in UK nursing students: Relationships with resilience, engagement, motivation, and mental wellbeing

Self-compassion, being kind towards oneself, has been identified as a key protective factor of mental health. This is consistent with students’ experiences in the study of nursing, which attracts many students in the United Kingdom. Despite the importance of self-compassion, knowledge in how to enhance self-compassion is under-researched: approaches commonly entail meditative exercises. To suggest alternative approaches, relationships between self-compassion and more established constructs need to be appraised. Accordingly, this study evaluated predictors of self-compassion, examining its relationships with more established constructs examined in other healthcare student populations: resilience, engagement, motivation and mental well-being. An opportunity sample of 182 UK nursing students at a university in East Midlands completed self-report measures about these constructs. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted. Self-compassion was positively related to resilience, engagement, intrinsic motivation and mental well-being, while negatively related to amotivation. Resilience and mental well-being were identified as significant predictors of self-compassion. As resilience and mental well-being are relatively familiar to many nursing lecturers and students, educators can incorporate a self-compassion component into the existing resilience training and/or mental well-being practices. •The importance of self-compassion to student mental health has been reported.•Interventions to cultivate self-compassion remain to be evaluated.•We examined relationships between self-compassion and more established constructs.•Resilience was most strongly associated with self-compassion in all of our analyses.•Self-compassion can be embedded in existing resilience training in nursing education.