Daily advice, stress and flow, give and take, save everyone (including the cheerleader)

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
- Alan Watts -

It is like a Tai Chi move, a water type kung-fu, a way to keep your flow even in the direst need. You should try it, and you will be surprised. Because, as we already learned, stress means resistance to the way the events happen around us. The opposite of stress is flow. Learn how to ride the wave, and you will become more than an expert, you will master that skill.


"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."
- John Bunyan -

This is even more than my daily ritual of random acts of kindness. This will imply observance, intuition and compassion. You need to become proactive, to find the perfect recipient of your benevolence. It is the next step. And in doing this every day, you will start to change. To glow and laugh, to smile and give, to have plentiful of resources there where before was none.


"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. "
- William James -

It is all about our daily habits. Buy local, invest in renewable and fair-trade products. Eat organic, Live as a minimalist. Recover and use again, avoiding waste. It is not about one singular effort. It is about being a model, and changing others without trying. The biggest heroes are always unsung. Nobody knows what they did, but they saved the planet many times over. Become one of them .

Kindness, habit, routine and everlasting love

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."
- John Keats -

There is a special power in anonymous random acts of kindness, and your heart will sing an unseen song long after you did some, even if you do not know the one benefiting from your action. It is good to see yourself helping a person in need, it is even better to do it only for the sake of it, no pride involved at all. Try this today, pay someone coffee in the shop or help some person in need. See what happen.

"I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life."
- Maya Angelou -

How can you enrich your own life? By going the extra mile, especially when it is about yourself. It is your day off, take the train or bus to the next town and wonder aimlessly around, discovering what will attract you on your next move. Do something beyond your routine, it will rewire your brain and bring some sense into your life. It is a good exercise, if you get bored quickly. Be creative, think out of the box. Act out of the box. Ant tell me about your experiences. Make me curious.

"Child, give me your hand that I may walk in the light of your faith in me."
- Hannah Kahn -

It is all about the right attitude. Remember when you were a little child and your parents assisted you every step of the way. Think at yourself as the parent of the entire humanity. Consider every person that you meet as your own child. Watch him or her with love, assisting that person all along. It is all about being with your heart in everything you do, encompassing every one with parental love.

About kindness

That moment when you realize how the old mystics already understood the ripple effect of a random act of kindness, without the 12 years of research using 3 groups of more than 60 people. The winning quote is:

"Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger and continue to uplift others long after your sharing. " (- Rumi -)

How it randomly happen to find the best world to live or why i like to offer flowers

The question for today is:
Can we make a better world for everyone?

The answer is:
Yes. And i will give you not one, but two examples to prove it.

First hint is from a research called "Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks", made by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. The discovered that random acts of kindness have a ripple effect, spreading not by one degree, as it was expected, but by three degrees, in a social network - from a person to person to person to person. Each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not meet. Conclusion is: Be good, become the change you want in the world and the our world will become your world you want to live in.

Second example treat the feeling known as elevation, that warm uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone else good deed. Jonathan Haidt at first, and Simone Schnall later, both researched and found that elevation leads to altruistic behavior. The more will witness your good deed, the better world will become. Witnessing another person's altruistic behavior elicits elevation, a discrete emotion that , in turn, leads to tangible increases in altruism.

You can think about at least few occasions when you witnessed or feel it, and maybe this will make you more prepared to be kind with others. We can bring magic in our life, and other's, we only need to act. That's it!

Have a nice day!

G.

How not to be kind - the A$$ theory

There are some researches that identified some of the barriers that prevent us to be kind and compassionate. I will just go through them and make a summary for you.

a) being busy - an experiment done at Princeton after a talk about the Good Samaritan and subjects being exposed to an individual who is looking to be suffering of cardiovascular problems - when they got enough time more than 60% stopped and helped, when they were even 2 minutes late, only 10% stopped and helped.

b) violent video games - regardless of the hypothesis that playing violent games increase your violent attitudes, the experimenters observed that playing violent video games regularly will reduce cooperative, kind tendencies.

c) meeting people from apparently different social groups than you - you are more inclined to help someone from the same social group.

d) if we feel that helping is not possible or we do not have the capacity, we will not help, due to the society conditioning of being efficient in what you do.

Happiness tips and tricks

This is a 2 stages exercise.

Stage 1
Do one random act of kindness, no matter how large or small, every day for one month.

Stage 2
Do 7 random acts of kindness in one week, for one month, but all 7 in the same day.

In which stage do you think it is more fulfilling for you?

The answer is: Stage 2, because doing all 7 random acts of kindness in same day it is perceived as an extra effort that will provide an immediate durable boost in your own happiness.

Quote of the day

"If you want to be happy for an hour, have a nap,
if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing,
if you want to be happy for a month, get married,
if you want to be happy for an year, inherit a fortune,
if you want to be happy for a lifetime, help others."
(Chinese proverb)

Now we can see that first to are actions with immediate effect and fast hedonic adaptation. Third and forth are major life events, but the hedonic adaptation will still kick in after a while. (Added info: according to recent research, the happiness related to marriage period is about two years.). But the lifetime changing choice is kindness, and more exactly the kindness-happiness loop.

Let me explain more, it is about a research made by Sonia Liubomirsky, where in the phase one, people where asked to remember when they buy something nice for them, paying 20-100$, or when they spend the same amount of money for charity. In both cases they had an increase on overall happiness, but in the case of giving the increase was significantly higher. Now, in the second phase, they were given 20-50$ and asked to spend it on their own or to give in to someone in need. Same as in the phase one, the ones giving had a more significant increase in happiness, but a side effect emerged. The ones that remembered giving where more happy and more likely to spend the money helping others. It is like kindness make you more happy, and being happy make you more kind, in a kind of loop effect.

Conclusion: Be kind with others. Now, according to another experiment, when people where asked to do 5 random acts of kindness in one week, for 6 weeks, some did one every day for five day, some did all five of them on a set day, let's say Friday. Measured, the happiness was much higher at the people who did it on one day, than people who did it most of the days. The theory is that all five acts of random kindness will build a distinguishable experience of that day. When we are making an extra effort, we are gaining in extra happiness. Learn and apply this. You can have a happy life too!

Kind regards
G.

Kindness for children 101

Do you want your kid to be happy, altruistic and kind?

In a very interesting study about the altruistic tendencies in children, as an answer to the question is kindness a trait we are born with or we learn, the children meet a monkey toy and the experimenter give them 8 treats, give one treat to the monkey, the child found a treat and give it to the monkey and choose to give one of his/her own treat to the monkey. The result showed that the biggest increase in happiness was when the child sacrifice one of own treats and give it to the monkey.

While other studies have suggested adults are happier giving to others than to themselves and that kids are motivated to help others spontaneously, this is the first study to suggest that altruism is intrinsically rewarding even to very young kids, and that it makes them happier to give than to receive.

These findings complement recent studies that have shown that giving kids rewards for their prosocial behavior may actually undermine kindness. One possible explanation for these somewhat counterintuitive findings is that, in order for children to grow up seeing themselves as kind and giving, it is important for them to feel that they do good because they want to, not because others expect them to.

Of course, this does not diminish the importance of a loving and kind environment, in which adults teach the importance of prosocial behavior, including by modelling that behavior themselves. It merely suggests that nature may have given us a happy head-start in the task of raising kind kids.


Full link here

Did you know?

...that being kind to others protect you from heart disease, twice better than aspirin?

According to a research made by Post and Neimark in 2007, being kind to others often also increase your life expectancy, make you less lonely, add benefits like stronger immune system, better overall health, fewer aches and pains and decrease the chance for depression.

Terms and definitions needed when one study happiness

In order to understand better my following posts, i decided to start by defining few terms that i will use more frequently, and are close to each other.

Kindness - behavior that involve being friendly, generous or considerate;

Pro-social - term favored by scientists to refer to kindness;

Compassion - literally means "suffer together", it is a feeling that arises when you witness another's suffering and feel motivated to help relieve that suffering;

Empathy - ability to sense on imagine other people's emotions;

Sympathy - means "feel together", feeling close to other's emotions, but without the urge to help as in the case of compassion;

Pity - feeling sorry for someone's suffering, but the observer occupies a place of superiority and look down to the one suffering, while in the case of compassion they are equals.