All About Kindness: Definition, Health Benefits, and How to Be a Kinder Person
How often would you say you practice kindness? Do you know how to? Did you know that doing so can go a long way in supporting your well-being, too?
When Jeffrey Brantley, MD, arrived at a meditation retreat years ago, he expected his teachers to focus on mindfulness. Then the instructors announced that the students would be doing loving-kindness meditation as part of their practice: a Buddhist meditation where you wish people well, including loved ones, strangers, people you find difficult, and yourself.
Dr. Brantley had a quick reaction. He says he remembers thinking: “What’s that got to do with being mindful?”
He felt some aversion to what the instructors had said. He judged them a bit — and wondered if they were taking the wrong approach.
But he began the daily practice. He thought of others and wished them well with phrases like “may they be happy,” “may they be healthy,” and “may they find peace.”
By the end of a week of directing kindness toward others, he noticed a change in himself, he says. “I became much more soft, if you will, and receptive to whatever came up.”
He realized that the teachers had included this practice for a reason. Trying to practice mindfulness, where you let thoughts pass through your mind without attaching judgment to them, required kindness.
After the week of practicing kindness, he started feeling less judgmental toward the instructors themselves. And, he noticed how cultivating kindness in this way improved his mood, helped with anger, and helped him in difficult interactions.
As founder and former director of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, Brantley went on to work for decades as a psychiatrist specializing in meditation, including loving-kindness.
He realized that cultivating warmth toward others and toward yourself (self-compassion) — despite his original annoyance at his teachers’ approach — has many benefits to our health.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), kindness is a “benevolent and helpful action intentionally directed toward another person.” The motivation behind kindness is often considered to be the desire to improve the person's well-being — rather than to help someone in order to gain some type of reward or avoid punishment, according to APA.
If you help your neighbor carry groceries up the stairs because you see they’re having trouble with such heavy bags and want to make their day a little easier, that’s different than if you help them carry groceries up the stairs because you think otherwise they’ll report you to your building’s management company for having loud parties, for example.
Researchers also talk about something called prosocial behavior. As one study explains it, the term encompasses any act aimed at benefiting another person, including both everyday acts of kindness (such as helping that neighbor just for the sake of it), as well as efforts to improve the world on a larger scale, such as volunteering regularly.
Simply put, yes, researchers have defined different types of kindness. But these aren’t hard-and-fast clinical definitions.
Researchers studying kindness have compared the effects of two types: kindness directed toward others, and kindness directed toward oneself, per a study published in 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
Another paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology gives further breakdowns: kin kindness, or being kind to your family; mutualism, or being kind to members of your community; reciprocal altruism, or being kind to those you’ll meet again; and competitive altruism: being kind to others when it enhances your status.
But as Brantley’s career has taught him as a clinician integrating Eastern and Western traditions, kindness toward others and toward oneself can be very connected to each other.
For many people, he says — especially those who tend to beat themselves up about things — the hardest person to be kind to is yourself. By cultivating a kindness practice directed outwardly toward others, he says, you can eventually begin to direct more kindness inwardly, too.
“I’m always delighted by the data showing kindness is as beneficial for the giver as the receiver,” says Kelli Harding, MD, MPH, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, and the author of The Rabbit Effect: Live Longer, Happier, and Healthier With the Groundbreaking Science of Kindness.
“We know intuitively that being kind feels good,” Dr. Harding says. “It’s great to know it’s also good for us. For example, evidence that shows volunteers live longer.” For example, a meta-analysis that included studies in adults over 55 found that volunteering was associated with a 24 percent lower risk of mortality, on average, over a given period of time.
Practicing kindness can help you when you’re dealing with others out in the world and everyday stressors that come up. Showing kindness toward people who are rude to you or people who cut you off on the road can help tamp down your stress response by putting you in a better mindset to think compassionately toward the other person (and not be overrun by your emotions), explains Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, PhD, a research assistant professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown, who studies how compassion meditation training can help relieve stress.
“Compassion meditation," Dr. Brefczynski-Lewis adds, “helps one move from simple empathy, which can be quite distressing, into a balanced care for others.” It can help you tap into a warm feeling toward someone else without becoming overwhelmed.
Here are some of the big ways kindness has been linked to improved health:
You’ve got all the kindness and goodness in you that you need already, Brantley says.
You can work on cultivating it more, but you’ve already got it innately in you. “Just think about anything you did in the last 24 hours that was kind,” Brantley says.
Did you hold the door for somebody? Did you smile at a stranger? Did you water a houseplant that looked like it was thirsty?
Even if you feel like a novice when it comes to, say, loving-kindness meditation practice, he says, “you’re not a novice to kindness.”
One way to cultivate kindness is to try the loving-kindness meditation practice Brantley started doing begrudgingly at that retreat decades ago.
Start with a short, online-guided loving-kindness meditation, such as one found on Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center’s website. The instructions suggest lying down or getting into a comfortably seated position while doing this type of meditation. Once you learn how to do it, you can use their written script to practice it on your own.
“If one is feeling kind of numb,” Brefczynski-Lewis says, “such as with empathy burnout, connecting with the warmer feelings of loving-kindness can help in really seeing the humanity of the person in front of you, whether they are your family member, a customer, a patient, or a grocery clerk.”
She recommends that if you’re just starting out with the practice, go slowly, and don’t choose people you find very difficult to send kindness to until you build a bit more confidence in this particular meditation skill.
“I've even done the practice right before meetings with people I've had some difficulty with, and find they go surprisingly much better than expected,” Brefczynski-Lewis says.
Researchers of one study also suggest that expressing gratitude toward someone else for something kind they did may be a good way to kickstart your own kindness efforts. They theorize that gratitude toward others may encourage people to “pay it forward” with kindness.
If you’re just starting out your journey in doing kind acts for others, set aside one day to focus on that kindness. One study suggests that picking one day a week to carry out five acts of kindness provides larger increases in well-being than if you were to perform five kind acts over the course of several days.
That doesn’t mean you should stop there — kindness can be practiced everyday — but honing in on your efforts over the course of one day can show you how good it can feel to reach out to others, inspiring you to make it a regular part of your life.
Being kinder to yourself is a huge component of being kind overall, and practicing self-compassion has numerous wellness benefits, research shows.
This can be tough to do, especially if you’re often self-critical, but a few exercises for starting a self-compassion practice can be found on the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, cofounded by Kristin Neff, PhD, kindness researcher and associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Some include: talking to yourself as if you were talking to a friend, using writing to release feelings of shame, and repeating a kindness mantra during difficult situations.
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