The Effectiveness of Health Promoting Lifestyle Education on Self-Compassion and Psychological Flexibility of Elders

The elders in the life are faced with many challenges due to the loss of self-compassion and psychological flexibility. Therefore, the aim of this research was determine the effectiveness of health promoting lifestyle education on self-compassion and psychological flexibility of elders.

This research was a semi-experimental with a pretest and posttest design with a control group. The research population was elders of the old people's homes of the 5th district of Tehran city in 2022 year. The sample size for each group was considered to be 25 people, and this number was selected by purposive sampling method. The samples randomly were divided into two equal groups including experimental and control groups and the experimental group underwent 8 sessions of 90 minute by health promoting lifestyle education, and the control group remained on the waiting list for training. Data were collected by demographic information form (age and education level), self-compassion scale (Neff, 2016) and psychological flexibility questionnaire (Bond et al., 2011) and were analyzed by with chi-square and multivariate analysis of covariance tests in SPSS-19 software.

The findings showed that the experimental and control groups didn’t significantly different in terms of age and education level (P>0.05). Also, health promotion lifestyle education significantly improved the self-compassion and psychological flexibility of elders (P<0.001).

According to the results of the present study, specialists and therapists can use the health promoting lifestyle education method along with other educational and therapeutic methods to improve psychological characteristics in the elders including self-compassion and psychological flexibility