“You might think that kindness is a bit of a fluffy, illusory thing, but in reality, it’s fundamental to the way we connect,” says Robin Banerjee of the Center for Kindness Research at the University of Sussex, England. .
“For me, being kind is part of the purpose of being alive,” says Bernadette Russell, an activist for kindness.
“Kind acts are needed in the world, now more than ever,” says Nina Andersen, founder of Community Senior Letters.
Robin Banerjee, Bernadette Russell and Nina Andersen spoke to the BBC about the extraordinary power of kindness and kindness, and its impact on our own mental health.
The extraordinary power of kindness
“In 2011, I was sitting in a cafe, enjoying breakfast, when I looked at a TV screen and there was a double-decker bus on fire in London,” Bernadette recounts.
What he was looking at was the biggest riot in modern English history, sparked by the death of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police in Tottenham on August 4, 2011.
“It was terrifying. It looked like a civil war.
“Also there was a very negative response to the riots which also bothered me a lot.
“I began to despair more and more over what felt like the enormity of the world’s problems. I didn’t know what I could do”.
A few days later, Bernadette was at the post office and saw that a stranger was a few pennies short of a stamp. She gave them to him.
“Their gratitude was so great compared to the little time and money it cost me. But I thought: ‘I put a smile on her face’, that gratified me.
“On the way home, I came up with the foolhardy plan of trying to do an act of kindness every day for a stranger for a year. It changed my life!”.
little charms
Studies have repeatedly shown that kindness is intuitive. The more time we have to think, the less kind we are.
Even infants have an instinct to help when they feel connected to others.
Being kind can also have powerful effects on our brains.
“It is one of the great paradoxes of goodnessthat a kind act, intended to benefit others, actually has positive consequences for yourself,” says Robin, who is the head of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Sussex.
“There are patterns of activation in the brain that correspond to a drive for well-being. Reward pathways in the brain are activated when people perform kind acts.”
Kindness triggers neurotransmitters in the brain, the chemical messengers that control our moods.
The pleasant sensations they generate drive a feeling of connection with others.
“The relationships required to work cooperatively are based on basic social connections. Therefore, it is fundamental to the way in which human beings interact”, emphasizes the psychologist.
Kind Bernadette
And what happened to Bernadette during the time she made it a point to be kind every day of every month for an entire year?
The experience, he told the BBC, turned out to be “completely moving, completely terrifying, occasionally expensive, sometimes physically dangerousLike when I carried some really heavy purchases 4 miles to a lady’s apartment.
“It was very creative, but it was also exhausting and incredibly inspiring.
Bernadette experienced the chemical effects of the so-called “helper’s high,” the special tingling sensation that comes over us when we’re nice.
“I was like drugged every day.
“Most of the time I felt a kind of warm glow around my heart and also in my belly… I just felt really good.
But, if kindness is so beneficial, and it is in our nature, why don’t we live in a kinder world?
“Human beings have a predisposition to be kind, but also cruel to other people. The environment makes a big difference,” says Robin.
“We have to question all those stories that show kindness as a weakness,” says Bernadette.
“When you think of a really successful person, do you think of someone kind? Or rather a celebrity or someone very rich?” Asks the psychologist.
“What can we do to change the narrative of success so that it involves having positive relationships with other people?”
kindness pandemic
The Kindness Test, a recent study devised by the University of Sussex and launched by the BBC involving more than 60,000 people from around the world, found that two-thirds of them thought the Covid-19 pandemic had caused people were nicer.
In the first lockdown of 2020, British teenager Nina Andersen created a campaign to get students in schools to write to older people.
“I thought about how the elderly had no contact beyond the walls of their nursing homes.
“What started as a very small localized idea turned into something much bigger than I could have imagined. It has reached more than 250 schools and more than 250 nursing homes and positively impacted thousands of people.”
And his campaign overflowed the borders of the United Kingdom.
“What we witnessed during that time was how much we longed to help each other. What we have to do now is remember the immense kindness that we were capable of,” says Bernadette.
So how could a kinder world be made?
“It’s not just about instructing people in a certain setting to be nice,” says Robin. “We need to change our environment so that it seems normative to be nice.”
“I would like to see that companies, schools, hospitals, all public services have a manifesto of kindness. So that everyone wonders: ‘Is this nice?’ So that it becomes a common theme of our conversation at every level in every organization, everywhere,” says Bernadette.
But wishing for big changes doesn’t mean that small acts of kindness aren’t meaningful.
“The biggest lesson for me was accepting the fact that every day I can do something, whether it’s just saying hello to a person, or smiling… that’s how we change the world,” considers Bernadette.
“Your good deeds increase the chance that they will be replicated and a circle of kindness will form,” says Nina.
“The little things can actually be the big thingsRobin points out.
“All those little things that you think are not relevant, maybe they are the most important thing to create an environment that really allows people to feel good and to be able to work together and to be able to take on some really big challenges.”
“Just as a beach is filled with a billion grains of sand, there is a kind of beautiful humility in saying, ‘I can, at any time of any day, contribute to making the world a better place,’ Bernadette concludes. (I)
* This article is adapted from the BBC Ideas and BBC Radio 4 video The woman who was kind every day for a year.
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
