The best portions of a
good man's life are his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of
love. --William Wordsworth
Three Ways to Bring More Kindness to
Your Life
--by Juliana Breines, syndicated from Greater Good, Dec 12, 2015
One of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things
that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity
have been linked to greater life satisfaction, stronger relationships, and better mental and physical health—generous
people even live longer.
What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others
creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire
further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research
suggests that kindness is truly contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’
acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of
kindness spreads through social networks by three degrees of separation, from
person to person to person to person.
But just because we have the capacity for kindness, and reap real
benefits from it, doesn’t mean that we always act with kindness. We may be too
busy, distracted, or wrapped up in our own concerns to pay close attention to
others’ needs or actively seek out opportunities to help. Or we’re just out of practice:
Researchers have argued that kindness is like a muscle that
needs to be strengthened through repeated use.
How do we strengthen kindness? Researchers have identified a
number of effective exercises, and many of them are collected on the Greater Good Science Center’s
new website, Greater Good in Action (GGIA),
which features the top research-based activities for fostering happiness,
kindness, connection, and resilience.
Here I highlight GGIA’s 10 core
kindness practices, grouped into three broad categories.
1. How to Cultivate
Feelings of Kindness
Kind behavior comes more naturally when
we’re feeling a sense of compassion and connection with others. This first set
of practices focuses on cultivating these feelings.
The Feeling Connected practice involves thinking about
a time when you felt a strong connection to another person—through a meaningful
conversation, say, or by experiencing a great loss or success or historic event
together—and describing that experience in writing. A 2011 study led
by researcher Louisa Pavey in the United Kingdom found that participants who
completed this exercise reported increases in feelings of concern for others
and stronger intentions to carry out a number of generous acts over the next
six weeks, such as giving money to charity and helping a stranger in need.
How does this practice increase
kindness? Research suggests that feeling connected to others satisfies a
fundamental psychological need to belong; when this need is unmet, people are
more likely to focus on their own needs rather than caring for others.
Similar to Feeling Connected is the Feeling Supported practice,
which involves thinking about the qualities of the people you turn to when
you’re distressed, then recalling a time when you were comforted by one of
them. A 2005 study led
by Mario Mikulincer, dean of the school of psychology at the Interdisciplinary
Center Herzliya in Israel, found that people who completed this writing
exercise, compared with those who wrote more generically about a colleague or
acquaintance, subsequently reported greater compassion and willingness to help
a person in distress. This simple practice is powerful because it increases
“attachment security,” a state that involves feelings of trust and comfort and
is especially helpful when we’re feeling threatened or insecure. It can also
remind us of the kinds of qualities we want to embody when kindly supporting
others.
Another excellent way to tap into feelings of compassion and
concern for others is to take an Awe
Walk, which involves going for a stroll somewhere that seems vast
and perspective-shifting, and makes us feel connected to something greater than
ourselves. In a 2015 study led
by Paul Piff, then a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, some
participants stood in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees and gazed up for
just one minute; other participants looked away from the trees, at a building.
The tree gazers were subsequently more likely to help someone in need and less
likely to feel that they were superior to others.
Finally, you can try a Compassion Meditation. This simple—though not
necessarily easy—technique involves paying attention to your breathing as you
extend feelings of goodwill toward a loved one, yourself, a neutral person, and
even an enemy. Results of a 2013 study led
by Helen Weng, then at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, showed that participants who performed the
compassion meditation for two weeks demonstrated more generous behavior,
donating more money to a victim of unfair treatment, and they also showed
greater activity in brain regions associated with understanding the suffering
of others and regulating emotions in response to pictures of suffering. (You
can find audio of a guided compassion meditation on the GGIA website, along
with the script for this meditation.)
2. How to Boost the
Happiness We Get from Kindness
Another way to increase the amount of
kindness we perform over the long terms sounds simple: make a concerted effort
to perform more kind and generous acts in the short term.
Intentionally practicing kindness in
our everyday lives, even on days when we’re not in a particularly generous
mood, can go a long way toward turning kindness into a habit. That’s largely
because of the way kindness breeds happiness: The good feelings serve to reinforce
our kind acts and make us more likely to want to perform them in the future.
Practicing Random Acts of Kindness is a good place to start. This
practice involves performing five acts of kindness in one day and then writing
about the experience. They can be anything from bringing a meal to a sick
friend to giving up your seat on the bus to donating blood to buying a coffee
for the person in line behind you at a cafe. For ideas, consider acts of
kindness that you’ve witnessed or received in the past, and check out this Buzzfeed list of
101 suggestions. Random acts of kindness not only lift our spirits in the
moment; they also have the potential to alter the way we feel about ourselves
and increase healthy forms of self-esteem.
Research suggests that not all acts of kindness are created equal,
however. Many factors can influence whether and how these acts bring us
psychological benefits. The Making Giving Feel Good practice outlines three
strategies that can maximize the positive effects of generosity.
The first strategy is to make giving a choice. Research suggests
that when we feel obligated to give—such as when we feel cornered by an
aggressive request—we are less likely to enjoy it. It’s important to give
yourself the option to say no, and to give others the same option when
requesting help. The second strategy is to make a connection with the recipient
of your kindness—for example by taking a colleague out to lunch rather than
just giving a gift certificate. The third strategy is to take the initiative to
learn about the impact of your generosity, which can elicit contagious feelings
of joy. For example, see this video of
a bone marrow donor meeting the little girl whose life he saved.
3. How to Inspire
Kindness in Others
It’s important to find ways to boost
your own kindness. But arguably the greatest good we can do in the world comes
from finding ways to increase kindness in others. That’s what the next set of
practices are designed to do.
On GGIA, we provide three research-based strategies for educators,
parents, and leaders of all kinds to help others overcome barriers to kindness
and generosity. The first is to create Reminders of Connectedness in a home, office, or classroom. These
reminders can be something as simple as a quote evoking shared goals, words
like “community,” or a picture conveying warmth or friendships.
The second involves Putting a Human Face on Suffering: Being able to
identify distinct, specific victims of a problem—and learning about their
personal stories—can make that problem more vivid, strike an emotional chord,
and thus motivate people to help.
The third, Shared Identity, involves forging a sense of common
humanity across group boundaries. Reminding people to see the basic humanity
that they share with those who might seem different from them can help overcome
fear and distrust and promote cooperation. Even small similarities, like appreciating sports, can foster a greater sense of
kinship. (An overview of these three strategies is also provided in the Eliciting Altruism practice.)
Finally, the practice for Encouraging Kindness in Kids offers four specific techniques to
bring out children’s natural propensity for kindness and generosity. These
techniques include avoiding external rewards for kind behavior, so that kids
get to experience the feeling that kindness is its own reward, praising kids’
character instead of their behavior so they come to see kindness as an
essential part of who they are, and modeling kindness in your own behavior,
since actions tend to speak louder than words when it comes to nurturing
generosity.
Becoming a kinder person—and nurturing
kindness in your children and students—isn’t something that happens overnight.
It takes practice to turn your best intentions into concrete actions. We hope
the kindness exercises on Greater Good in Action provide an effective way to
start building that habit today.
This article is printed here with permission. It
originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies
the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills
that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.
Sourced From www.dailygood.org
