Helen Keller once said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it…”, and I never tire of remembering it. Since a young age, I believed in the power of kindness to replenish a suffering individual’s will to fight on. As I grew in age and experience, I discovered there is a scientific basis to this belief too.
With the advent of 24/7 news, we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of horrific news about the capability of human beings to unleash sheer monstrosity on fellow human beings. I had no clue how dangerous that is, until I read Kahneman’s book on heuristics – where he said, human beings tend to overestimate the prevalence of a certain phenomenon if it is broadcast repeatedly in the media. To put it simply, if we hear on the news that a person got robbed on their way home from work, we tend to think we are more likely to experience something similar than we actually are.
We can do the math and see how such a practice among news channels propagates a skewed view of the world – it is exponential.
So how do we counter such negativity? Kindness is probably the only thing in the world that spreads just as fast as bad news. What do people like to hear more? Good news or bad? People may be drawn to bad news at first, but their eagerness and even capacity to constantly hear bad news wanes fast over time and they ultimately take solace in good news. Good news on the other hand doesn’t drive people away.
There are studies that show if you perform a random act of kindness each day, the levels of the “feel good hormones” in your blood are bound to rise: Serotonin – a hormone that heals wounds and makes you calm, Endorphin, that reduces pain, Oxytocin that makes you feel happy. The “feel good hormones” are also released in the body of the person at the receiving end of the kind act. But that’s not even the most exciting part! This is – just hearing about acts of kindness produces the same effect as on the doer and the donee. Now do you get why it’s important for us to be selective about the kind of news we surround ourselves with?
Another curious thing about kindness is that it never goes unnoticed. There are always witnesses to kind acts who become all the more likely to pay it forward. And with enough of us paying it forward, our communities will transform, and hence, our country or whatever or larger identity is. Sounds a little far-fetched, I know. But we can always hope, right? Here’s to kindness and hope.
Rummaging Ruminations 