Mindfulness and anxiety among young family caregivers: the mediating roles of psychological flexibility and self-compassion

Introduction: During critical developmental periods, young family caregivers frequently take on unpaid caregiving for family members who are physically ill, have disabilities, or have mental health conditions. Ongoing caregiving pressure may be associated with a greater risk of anxiety and poorer mental health. Psychological flexibility and self-compassion reflect distinct but interrelated psychological processes involved in responding to stress and may help characterize the association between mindfulness and anxiety. Accordingly, among young family caregivers, this study examined the association between mindfulness and anxiety and whether psychological flexibility and self-compassion function as sequential mediators.

Methods: A total of 485 young family caregivers aged 15–24 were recruited from three prefecture-level cities in Hunan Province, China. All participants completed measures of mindfulness, psychological flexibility, self-compassion, and anxiety. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypothesized relationships, and the serial indirect effect was examined using 5,000 bootstrap resamples with bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals.

Results: Higher mindfulness was associated with greater psychological flexibility and self-compassion and lower anxiety; greater psychological flexibility was associated with greater self-compassion and lower anxiety, while greater self-compassion was associated with lower anxiety. The hypothesized serial indirect association from mindfulness to anxiety through psychological flexibility and self-compassion was significant ( β = −0.128, 95% CI [−0.167, −0.096]).

Discussion: The findings support the relevance of the stress process model to young family caregiving and suggest that anxiety is associated not only with caregiving burden, but also with how caregiving-related stress is processed and how individuals respond to their own distress. These findings point to the potential value of considering internal psychological resources alongside the family caregiving context and support from schools, communities, and service systems.