How Kindness & Compassion Will Improve Your Life
Kindness and compassion are two of the defining characteristics that make us a part of humanity as a whole. It’s actually a natural instinct among people, but some repress this feeling or ignore it because they are not mindful of the world around them.
It is the ability to acknowledge those around you, recognize their needs, commiserate with them, and even to show them compassion and sympathy when needed. But compassion can go beyond helping others—it can also benefit you as well.
- Kindness can improve your health — Showing kindness and compassion can help improve your physical and mental health by lowering your stress levels, anxiety, and depression. When you perform an act of kindness, it gives you a positive feeling that translates into these healthy benefits. But it goes beyond that. When your stress and anxiety levels decrease, you can actually see a similar decrease in high blood pressure and an overall improvement in your ability to fight off diseases with a boost to your immunities.
- Kindness can improve your personal happiness — One of the biggest benefits is that being kind helps you to feel happier in general. When you are focused on nothing but negativity around you, you tend to fall into a cycle of cynicism and depression. By breaking this cycle to show compassion to your fellow human beings, you are giving yourself a boost to your personal well-being.
- Kindness allows you to expand your perspective — By showing kindness to others, you are allowing yourself to see the world from that person’s perspective. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Showing compassion lets you do that in a real world setting so that you can understand what the other person is feeling.
- Kindness can improve the world around you — It may seem like a cliché, but kindness is contagious. If you show others an act of kindness or compassion, they and those around you are more likely to “pay it forward” and share that same action with others. When this happens, you actually help make the world a better place. And who doesn’t want to make the world a little bit better?
Kindness and compassion are two very important traits that need to be cultivated as much as possible. It may sound like a naïve proposition, but if everyone could just go out of their way to be a little kinder, the world would be a better place to live in.
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