The connection between kindness, compassion and gratitude
Is anyone as shocked as I am by the fact that next week is already Thanksgiving?
Maybe it’s because it was such a warm fall that it seems like it crept up on me without warning but here we are, officially in the season of gratitude.
When we’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed as can often happen at this time of year, gratitude can feel hard.
We can say, and logically understand, that we’re grateful for things in our lives, like running water, food to eat and our health, but we struggle to actually feel and experience the health benefits of that gratitude in our body.
That's because the stress puts our brain in survival mode so when we say the thing we're grateful for, our brain immediately follows it with, but.... and shifts our focus to something we're lacking, something that isn't going the way we want or something we want to be different.
This cuts off the part of the process where we integrate our spoken gratitude on a physiological and cellular level and reap the true benefits, thus making our gratitude feel inauthentic or forced.
This past Sunday I got to enjoy the morning participating in a huge community service event, which felt like the perfect way to spend World Kindness Day.
I certainly left the event feeling that full-body sense of gratitude and it got me thinking about the connection between kindness, gratitude and compassion. (I also went home and took a very well-deserved and luxurious nap.)
Kindness allows for a two-way interaction and is action-oriented, like doing the good deed of packing care bags.
Compassion is more feeling-oriented and kind of like a one-way street either going outward towards others or inward towards ourselves.
On a physiological level, kindness can decrease blood pressure and cortisol. People who give of themselves in a balanced way also tend to be healthier and live longer.
In relation to our mental well-being, kindness has been shown to improve mood, like I experienced after I left my event, and to increase self-esteem, empathy and compassion.
So kindness can lead to compassion.
Compassion benefits us by increasing activity in the areas of the brain involved in dopaminergic reward and oxytocin-related affiliative processes. It also enhances positive emotions in response to adverse situations.
According to sociologist and researcher Brené Brown, compassion can also decrease our feelings of resentment.
“Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
When we’re struggling to feel compassionate, we’re living from a place of fear. It may look like lack, judgment, impatience, frustration, etc., but it always stems from that survival brain where it believes, in some way, there is not enough or we are not enough.
Gratitude, like kindness, can help increase our feelings of compassion.
When we feel grateful and hold a thought of gratitude we cannot hold a thought of fear at the same time. The two different parts of the brain where these feelings stem from, cannot be active simultaneously.
So in the same way our brain habitually wants to take us out of our moments of gratitude with "survival mode thoughts", we can re-train it to get out of survival mode through thoughts of gratitude.
I've been listening to gratitude meditations recently and a few messages I've heard have stuck with me and I want to share them with you. Hopefully they help increase your experiential feelings of gratitude today.
Each day there are 1 million people who don't wake up.
So each day that you wake up, that the people you love wake up with you, is a truly great day.
Each day is a gift in itself. That is why it is called the present.
You think today is just another day?
It is not.
It is the gift that has been given to you.
That is why it is called To-Day.
Here are 3 more quick tools to increase compassion for yourself and others:
Presence: When we physically presence ourselves, we remind our survival brain that we are safe and in this moment we can relax.
Connection: When we bond with something outside ourselves, be it another person, nature, a pet, it takes the focus of ourselves and our own ego and we remember that we are connected to all things, which comes from a place of love.
Giving: Finding a way to give to someone else, no matter how big or small, whether that’s time, skills, money, energy takes the brain out of lack and any feelings that you don’t have enough or are not enough and can bring a sense of abundance and contentment. When we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.”
