5 Ways Acts of Kindness Can Improve Your Wellbeing
By
Dave Kerpen
We all learned the importance of kindness as children. However, somewhere along the way, we learn other things which may conflict: focus, prioritization, selfishness, greed.
Throughout adulthood, it’s all too common for everyday stresses and distractions to prevent us from being kind to others—especially on social media.
From the very beginning, the mission of Likeable Media—the social media agency I co-founded with my wife, Carrie Kerpen—has been to create a more likeable world. For more than a decade, we’ve been delivering on that mission by helping brands create smart and likeable content. But we knew that social media is about much more than just branded content, and we knew that there was a lot more we could do.
So last year, we created #BeLikeableDay: a global movement dedicated to making social media a more positive environment through collective acts of kindness online. We reached 77 million people across traditional and social media, with participation from 45 countries around the world. On February 26, we’re asking everyone to post at least one nice thing on social media. This could be complimenting a friend’s photography, shouting out your favorite charity organization, or promoting someone else’s work. Participating in #BeLikeableDay just means doing anything to leave social media a better place than you found it.
And in addition to leaving social media a better place, you may leave yourself better as well. Being kind to others is actually good for your own health and happiness! Acts of kindness have been proven to do this by:
Reducing Your Stress Levels
A study by Yale and UCLA demonstrated that when we help others, we help ourselves. The researchers found that helping behaviors buffered the negative effects of stress on the participants’ well-being, and those who reported performing more acts of kindness had lower increases in negative emotion in response to high daily stress.
Lowering Your Blood Pressure
Acts of kindness are often accompanied by emotional warmth, and emotional warmth produces a hormone called oxytocin in the brain and throughout the body. Oxytocin dilates the blood vessels and reduces blood pressure.
Giving You an Energy Boost
Research has shown that when you are kind to another person, your brain’s pleasure and reward centers light up as if you w ere the one to receive the good deed. This is called the “helper’s high,” and these hormones produced by kindness boost your energy and strength and can even increase your lifespan.
Alleviating Anxiety
Whether it’s mild or severe, anxiety is common among people these days. And while things like exercise, meditation, prescription medications, and natural healing methods can all help, being kind to others is actually one of the easiest ways to control it. Research on happiness from the University of British Columbia showed that “participants who engaged in kind acts displayed significant increases in positive affect (PA),” which refers to an individual’s experience of positive moods such as joy, interest, and alertness.
Preventing Illness
A study of adults aged 57–85 showed that volunteering, an activity rooted in kindness, “manifested the strongest association with lower levels of inflammation” and “may protect individuals from inflammation that is associated with increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease.”
Several years ago, when researching successful CEOs for my book Likeable Business, I had a conversation with Sheldon Yellen, the CEO of global property restoration company Belfor, that helped me change my mindset and inspired me to more actively institute kindness into my own life.
“Be kind,” Sheldon said, “and you’ll feel better. Be kind to the people at work, and be kind to the people you love, and be kind to strangers. When you’re by yourself, write a kind letter to someone, ‘just because.’ You’ll feel better, and the crazy thing is, that’s how you end up getting ahead.”
After practicing this for years, (and somehow still getting it wrong sometimes!), I’ve realized that kindness always leads to improving my mood, and an improved mood often leads to improved productivity, and that often leads to success! The thing is, whether or not kindness helps you get ahead, this much is true: Every time you’re actively kind, you’ll feel better.
Ready to join the #BeLikeableDay movement? Sign the pledge at BeLikeableDay.com.
