“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” – Dalai Lama
In my opinion, there isn’t enough attention paid to the recommendation to be kind.
While we may read or hear the advice to “Be kind to yourself” or “Be kind to others,” how many times do we take the words to heart and act accordingly?
Kindness, research shows, has many benefits to both body and mind. It also makes the giver and receiver of the kindness feel better. A deeper dive into how and why kindness counts reveals the following relevant (and hopeful) points.
All Kinds of Kind Acts Boost Happiness
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Social Psychology looked at a week’s worth of kindness activities intervention and how they affected changes in subjective happiness.
In the study, researchers did a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine if performance of different types of acts of kindness resulted in differential effects on happiness. They found that kindness boosts well-being and happiness. Yet, the researchers noted, rarely had other researchers done a specific comparison of kindness acts to different recipients, such as strangers or friends.
In this study, researchers used a single factorial design to compare kindness acts to the following: strong social ties, weak social ties, observing kindness acts, novel self-kindness acts, and a control of no acts. Results showed increased happiness over the seven-day study period; that the number of kind acts and happiness increases had a positive correlation; and the effect did not differ across all groups in the experiment.
The key takeaway is that research strongly suggests acts of kindness increase happiness to strong and weak ties, to self, and to observing acts of kindness.
Kindness Helps in Cancer Care
Those undergoing cancer treatment, as well as their families, often experience intense turmoil. Not only is there uncertainty over treatment success, worry about levels of pain, functionality, and quality of life, the setting and personnel involved in cancer care may seem impersonal, not conducive to well-being or even optimism over outcomes.
In a 2017 study published in the Journal of Oncology Practice, researchers from Texas A&M University, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Henry Ford Health System, and Monash University proposed six types of kindness care for cancer patients.
The six types included: deep listening; empathy for the cancer patient; generous acts of discretionary effort going well beyond what’s expected; timely care using tools and practices to reduce anxiety and stress; gentle honesty, and support for the cancer patient’s family caregivers.
Researchers reported that these manifestations of kindness by clinicians are mutually reinforcing and can help temper cancer’s emotional toll on all concerned.
Altruistic and Strategic Kindness Both Provide Benefits
Researchers at the University of Sussex analyzed existing research on the brain scans of more than 1,000 people who made kind decisions. Their findings, reported in NeuroImage, showed activity in the brain region for both those who acted with strategic kindness – kindness when there was something in it for them – as well as in those who performed kind acts altruistically, expecting nothing in return.
Both gift types (altruistic and strategic) benefit others, and both, according to this research, are consistently rewarding to the giver. Furthermore, although they share many neural substrates, the decisions to give aren’t interchangeable in the brain.
Altruistic kind acts, however, also sparked more activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, showing that there’s something unique about altruistic kindness. Researchers concluded that the fact “that any region is more involved in altruistic decisions suggests that there is something additive and special about giving when the only benefit is a warm glow.”
Being Kind to Your Partner Helps Improve/Stabilize Relationship
While many studies of relationships between partners look at how they deal with negative experiences rather than positive ones, researchers from the University of California found that feeling that your partner is there for you when things are going well and will actually be there when things go right is important to the health and stability of the relationship.
They also found that capitalization, sharing news of positive events with close others, plays a likely central role in the formation and maintenance of a relationship. The researchers, whose work was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, said that sharing positive emotional exchanges may form the basis of a stable and satisfying relationship.
In other words, be conscious of being kind and sharing good news, positive feelings, and hopes/dreams with your significant other. So, while this study focused on partnership relationships, the results seem somewhat appropriate to extrapolate to how kindness affects other close relationships as well.
WAYS KINDNESS IMPROVES WELL-BEING
Looking at things in a positive light and deciding to act in a like manner has many benefits to overall well-being, both for you and the recipient of your kindness. Among the many ways kindness helps in this regard are the following:
- Kindness boosts happiness
- Being kind improves the body’s immune system
- Acting in a kind manner has been shown to lower the rate of depression
- Creativity gets a helpful assist when you are kind
- When you are kind, it may motivate you to work harder
- Kindness increases the brain’s natural supply of endorphins, creating the so-called “natural high”
- In addition, kindness produces a kind of emotional warmth, itself the by-product of the hormone oxytocin, which helps lower blood pressure and pulse rate
Besides, wouldn’t you rather show kindness than the opposite? And, as research demonstrates, kindness is contagious.
Kindness may be religion, as the Dalai Lama’s quote states, yet it’s part of the human condition, is it not? Mankind has evolved to be more than merely a survivor in the species, due perhaps to the extraordinary ability to show kindness and caring for other like beings, as well as animals, the environment, and the planet on which we exist.
from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/kindness-counts-heres-why/
No comments:
Post a Comment