Benefits of CCT for mental health professionals, caregivers and healthcare providers

Compassion training strengthens your capacity to be with pain, discomfort and suffering. This prevents you from shutting down or going into empathic distress when you’re taking care of others.
Compassion training helps you build compassion for yourself, which is vital for anyone actively caring for patients, clients, students or family members on a daily basis.
Compassion training helps you help others.

Research in healthcare settings suggests compassion training can:

  • Reduce mind wandering
  • Improve caring behavior toward oneself
  • Decrease anxiety
  • The desire to regulate emotions (down-regulate negative or up-regulate positive) reduced. In other words, the use of emotion suppression decreased whereas acceptance increased.

The above results are highlights from these 3 scientific studies of the Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training program

  • Randomized controlled trial of CCT and enhancing compassion, 2012 full paper
  • CCT study on mindfulness, affect and emotion regulation published in 2013, full paper
  • Study on CCT and mind wandering published 2015, full paper

Click here to check out more CCT research.

Where are compassion training courses happening?

Here are just a few healthcare providers offering compassion training to staff and patients: