Kindness is at the foundation of what it means to love someone. Being kind is an essential expression of love for another person. In general, acts of kindness and love help us maintain and cultivate happy and healthy relationships with others. When we are thoughtful toward one another and do nice things for other people, it makes those other people feel good.
The recipient of such kind love experiences positive emotions and a sense of well-being. Moreover, the giver of such kind love also benefits from these feelings and actions. The selfless acts you perform do, in fact, provide you with more psychological benefits than you might think at first.
Kindness makes people not only happier but also healthier. It is important to recognize that our physical and mental health can improve when we are kind, considerate, and compassionate toward other people. Kindness, in whatever form it takes, appears to elicit positive and eliminate negative physiological and psychological responses in people. Kindness in relationships tends to buffer their negative emotions and stresses. Studies have shown that interventions that focus on kindness are good for physical and mental health, preventing the common cold, and dealing with pain.
Kindness Tends to Prevent Common Colds
It may be surprising, but kindness can help to reduce the prevalence of the common cold. According to some evidence, people who perceived clinicians showing greater empathy experienced (1) increased levels of immune responses, (2) less severe symptoms of the common cold, and (3) lower durations of the common cold. The findings from randomized controlled trials are encouraging (Rakel et al., 2009). Kindness can help keep you from getting sick, even if it’s just the common cold.
The Positive Impact of Kindness on Pain Relief
It has been known for quite a long time that not only physiological processes but also mental ones can influence the intensity with which one experiences pain. Consistent with this evidence, the use of psychological treatments and specific interventions has been utilized and shown to be beneficial for those suffering from long-term pain. Many of these treatments are based on active self-kindness, such as mindfulness. Cognitive behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy have widely used the benefits of kindness.
Compassion-focused Therapy of Pain
For example, compassion-focused therapy (CFT) is based on the power of kindness. This is a type of psychotherapy that merges the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with concepts of Buddhist psychology. It also employs some ideas from social, developmental, and neuroscience to teach compassion. Compassion-focused therapy is especially beneficial for people who tend to frequently experience shame and high self-criticism. This makes it difficult for them to feel warm toward and be kind to themselves or others.
One study, for example, looked at how interventions based on compassion and loving-kindness affected how people thought about and felt about persistent pain (Penlington, 2019).
Some people tend to over-evaluate their daily life or past difficulties. Consequently, their soothing systems can be relatively weak. In such cases, kindness and compassion can be a good way to develop these calming systems. Participants in the study practiced compassion-focused exercises, helping them to recognize certain maladaptive patterns in their thoughts and behavior and develop adaptive ones. Researchers came to the conclusion (Penlington, 2019) that compassion-based interventions like mindfulness and loving-kindness exercises could be used in everyday pain management.