Kindness and Your Mental Health Workout Plan
We hope that this quick read from Psychology Today on kindness will inspire you to add some intentional kind acts to your mental health plan. View the article in its entirety using the link below.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canines-kids-and-kindness/202104/kindness-and-your-mental-health-workout-plan
If I asked you to describe your workout plan, some of you would spout regimens rivaling a day in the life of Simone Biles. But if I asked you what your mental health workout plan was, I suspect we’d see many folks looking at their shoes.
My sense is, we tend to be more reactive around mental health than proactive. When it gets bad enough, we’ll deal with it. If we’ve learned anything from Covid and the restrictions it placed on our mobility and social interactions, it’s that it took a toll on our mental health. My goal is to convince you to add a simple yet powerful component to the proactive bank of strategies you have for taking care of your mental health – be intentionally kind to others.
Different Ways to be Kind
I’m a kindness researcher at the University of British Columbia and, when not covered in dog hair from overseeing an on-campus canine therapy program to reduce student stress (bark.ok.ubc.ca), I ask elementary, middle, and high school students about the kind acts they’ve done and why. To date, thousands of students have participated in studies I’ve run and shared with me how they enact kindness. Students have been kind in obvious or overt ways (e.g., “I say good morning to 5 people each day”) and in ways that reflect quiet kindness or kindness done on the down-low (e.g., “I leave some change in the vending machine for the next person.”). Kids are introspective and funny too as we see in the kind act of a 5th grade girl described above.
I’ve learned a lot about how kids are kind and you’ll hear more on this in future posts. The aim of this post is to convince you that being intentionally kind to others can benefit your mental health, regardless of your age.
Across numerous studies, including meta-analyses (Curry et al., 2018; Hui et al., 2020), being kind to others offers a host of benefits to both the initiator (i.e., you) and the recipient. When we think and talk about being kind, the focus is often on the recipient of the kind act yet there is increasing empirical evidence that being kind to others yields a whole host of positive outcomes for the person performing the act of kindness. This includes fostering overall positive dispositions (Alden & Trew, 2013) and psychological thriving (Nelson et al., 2016), life satisfaction (Buchanan & Bardi, 2010), happiness (Aknin et al., 2020), stress reduction (Raposa et al., 2016), and relationship satisfaction (O’Connell et al., 2016). What more evidence could you need?
I’m convinced I need to be kind – but how?
To start, consider a working definition of kindness as an act that shows physical support (e.g., carrying someone’s groceries), emotional support (e.g., mouthing across the room in a meeting to an upset colleague – “it’ll be okay”), or instructional support (e.g., giving a quick tech tutorial to a non-techy) to others to maintain or build relationships. Start by asking yourself “Who around me needs some kindness?” Generate a list and for each recipient and customize a kind act. To bolster your mental health, I suggest aiming to do 3-5 kind acts each week. These acts can be driven by you sharing either your time/energy (e.g., driving a neighbor to a doctor’s appointment) or materials (e.g., sharing home-baked goods with a neighbor).
To start, keep to kind acts that are in your wheelhouse or what kindness researcher Sonja Lyobomirsky and colleagues (2005) coin “self -concordant.” That is, if you’ve never baked a cake before, that might not be your starting point when you think about bringing a treat for your colleagues at work. When it comes to enacting kindness, stick initially with what you know. What’s important here is that you reflect on the needs of your recipient, customize a kind act to support this individual, and post-delivery, you take a minute to reflect on what you did, the reaction of your recipient, and how being kind made you feel. Overtime, you’ll develop a prosocial behavioral pattern and it’ll become routine for you. Performing a series of intentional kind acts each week will enhance your Mental Health Workout Plan and bolster your well-being.