Be kind, it’s (really) good for your health!

Don’t deprive yourself of showing kindness: it’s good for others, for your morale, and even for your personal health!

Don’t just use the annual Kindness Day to practice it. Its benefits on health and morale are scientifically proven.

Caring about others, caring about yourself

Smiling undoubtedly feels good, but practicing kindness on a daily basis undoubtedly does even more, it adds happiness to life. It’s a fact, known and scientifically proven for many years now: being kind is not only good in terms of living together, to ease or avoid tensions. It’s also good for your health!

From the cradle, empathy, the need for exchange and human connection are noticed in infants, clearly sensitive to the sadness or anger around them as well as to positive feelings. This is a quality that seems as innate as it is acquired, as has also been studied on primates. But ultimately, caring about others also means caring about yourself, even if that is probably not the primary goal.

From the beginning of the 2000s, a study by Hope College in the United States highlighted that resentment, revenge, all these negative emotions caused an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. Conversely, asking the volunteers in this study to imagine forgiving after an attack revealed an increase in physiological stress levels. Moral: holding grudges is not good for your health.

Less stressed, and better self-esteem

Beyond that, we can even go so far as to say that kindness produces kindness. This time it was a study carried out in 2009 in Japan among adolescents aged 12 to 16 which made it possible to make the link between violent, antisocial, neutral or prosocial games and degree of personal altruism. Helping others, caring about them, is therefore an intimate part of our personality, of our personal psychology.

Kindness is based on great sensitivity to others © Dmytro Zinkevych

But it is also a way to make yourself happy, and therefore to live better, since you are less stressed and less depressed. This is what researcher Sonia Lyubomirsky, psychologist at Stanford University(1)was able to verify this in 2009 by encouraging half of a group of students to behave altruistically for ten weeks. After this long period of time, those who showed kindness to others not only felt in a better mood, but also had better self-esteem.

Kindness and support for fragility © RomarioIen

Risk of brain accident

Not content with being good for morale, it turns out that kindness is also good for the heart, if we are to believe a study published in July 2014 in the journal ofAmerican Heart Association in July 2014 (2). According to this large study carried out among 6,700 adults aged 45 to 84, followed for 8 to 11 years, cynicism and aggressiveness are definitely not good for health, as they increase the risk of stroke. As for stress or the risk of depression, it increases by 86% when we do not behave well on a daily basis…

Here is my secret. It is very simple: we only see clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

So being kind is good for your health? Would having a heart be good for the heart? It seems in fact that giving is indeed synonymous with receiving. All the more reason to have imagined Kindness Day, created in Japan in 1997 and initiated in Singapore twenty years ago. In France, it was in 2009 that Psychologies magazine took up this Kindness Day idea, which met with immediate success. Kindness, like happiness, should be contagious!

Republished article