Your kindness works like medicine.
Today I received an yellow DHL box from Germany, that in the description of content said “Süßigkeit” (GER Sweetness, sweet, candy).
For those of you who do not know, 23 years ago, when I was 12 years old, I moved to Saarland-Germany alone as an exchange pupil in Robert Schumann Gymnasium and lived there with a host family.
Speaking as less German language as possible (only “Ja” and “Nein”) in the beginning, I of course started to face lots of challenges- from having to do my homework till late hours at night to interaction problems with people who I wanted to be friends with.
Through the “hard days and nights” my first and early experience of independent life might have gone totally wrong if one day, by any chance, I hadn’t met a magnificent bunch of people. A Georgian family relocating in Germany and living not so far away from where I lived. The only connection I had found with them was that the couple (mom and dad) had earlier taken English language courses together with my mommy and daddy, we all came from the same city and lived on the same (or neighbouring) land in Germany.
Having two soon-to-be teenagers at home, of almost my age, the family decided to invite me over for holidays. The convenience of speaking my native language and laughing at the same jokes over and over again was indescribably important to me. Their children were one of the most humble, smart, sincere and kind human beings I had ever met then and it still hasn´t changed. Not only was my soul soothened by the hospitality, care and love they showed me, but I also got motivated and fearless about continuing my experience in a new country. I soon started getting my homework done in as little time as others, suddenly spoke a good German with distinctive local dialect, kept on going to school and going back to them on every holiday. I suddenly started to enjoy life in a foreign country and from a scared, little, disoriented foreigner I turned into a fairly confident, assertive, knowledgable girl. A girl that learnt about the importance of being kind, gratitude and uncoditional love already in thst age, from people who were not my family. In the times when life could have actually hit me badly, I got lucky enough to meet people that gave me an idea of what humanity was about and who I, myself wanted to be-
a good human.
While mission still in progress, 23 years have gone by, and nevertheless have I stopped wondering of the impacts of the relationships and people I have had and will continue having. The seeds that were planted in me then, started rising, everything I dreamt of in 1997 has at some point become real, I´ve sailed away from the safe harbors many times, cought the trade winds. Explored. Dreamt. Discovered. Accomplished. But the most fascinating thing still is, that whoever I had become or continue becoming has been deeply rooted to the very first impressions of life and things that people gave me. Therefore receiving this yellow box of “Süßigkeit” today, brought not only the home-made Georgian cakes from Germany to my new address, but also reminded me of what I am carrying within me and the grattitude I feel towards those beautiful people who gave me so many good experiences.
The lost and found girl from 23 years ago later became a doctor, then a healthcare manager, lead companies, hired people, initiated ideas about whole new industries, accomplished not only sales targets but most of her dreams too and one day became a mom herself.
Being a mom I never felt good enough by just being a good mom to my own daughter, but rather being good to every child in general, just like the lady that took me to her home and children and gave me hope.
Throughout the years I have tried and hopefully managed to be there for others that needed a helping hand and it might as well be in my genes but the real life experiences have definitely made me more confident about how much a human can do for another human, sometimes without even realizing it or posting on social media.
So if you are searching for some ideas about the best accomplishments you can have for life, with no hesitation, stop thinking about Porsches, Rolexes, and Guccis, just get up and plant a seed of kindness in someone through your own act of kindness, randomly, without counting.
Give someone else´s child a home they miss, give them a reason to grow into new good humans.
While writing this, I find myself having consumed almost more than half of the sweet cakes from the “sweetness” box. The glucose level might be rising, but so will the levels of serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins.
The smell of fresh, spring air around, brings back a memory of the green fields behind their house in Germany where I once learnt how to ride a bike. Green fields with a golden glow of sunset giving the image an even more nostalgic hint.
I am grateful to all the amazing humans who came my way and gave me something, instead of taking things away. Unknowingly, they might have even made me healthier.
This box of sweetness is more meaningful to me than a box of gilt and riches.
But what does medicine have to say about kindness? “The warm, good feelings generated by speaking kind words, thinking kind thoughts and doing kind deeds is mediated by the release of hormones like oxytocin and serotonin, and the stimulation of the calming vagus nerve. This, in turn, counteracts the stress response, decreases inflammation and oxidation in the body, and releases nitric oxide, which lowers blood pressure and improves blood flow.
Kindness extended toward others has also been found in scientific research to change gene expression in a way that is associated with better health. Researchers in a study published in Psychoneuroimmunology in 2017 randomized participants into four groups. For four weeks, participants either directed acts of kindness toward specific individuals, the world at large or themselves, or engaged in a neutral “control” activity. The scientists were specifically interested in whether levels of “expression” of a gene associated with inflammation as well as degenerative diseases were altered with kind activities. They found that those people directing kind actions toward others (but not themselves or the world at large) had a reduction in the expression of this gene. This is suggestive that practicing kindness is an important epigenetic modifier.
Many studies over several years have demonstrated, that if a patient experiences his or her health care practitioner as empathetic (having the ability to understand and share the feelings of another), his or her health improves. Responding with generous listening and attuned presence is perceived physiologically, oxytocin and serotonin and more are released, and healing begins. Improved outcomes in some of the studies include measured immune response, shortened severity and duration of cold symptoms, and improved subjective experience of pain. Recent studies performed at Stanford suggest that the more people see kindness and generosity in their peers, the more they are drawn to conform to that orientation and act accordingly.”
“A new study takes the argument a little further by more specifically identifying how different sorts of generosity affect the brain. To test the effects of both types of generosity, the research team conducted two experiments. In the first, they told 45 participants that their performance on a specific task would result in winning raffle tickets for a $200 prize. Each time they completed the task, they were told they were “playing” to win the money for three different causes: toward someone they personally know is in need, for a charity, or for themselves.
After each play-to-win session, the participants’ brains were scanned via fMRI while they did another task designed to assess their emotional response. The brain imaging turned up a few expected results and one that was significantly unexpected.
The expected result, also seen in previous studies, was that both targeted and untargeted generosity increased activity in two areas of the brain linked to altruism, the septal area and the ventral striatum, which are also linked to parents caring for their young in humans and other mammals. The ventral striatum is best known as a key part of the brain’s “reward system,” central to all achieving, learning and loving (along with the dark side of reward seeking: compulsions and addictions).
The unexpected result was that targeted generosity also decreased activity in the amygdala — the brain’s epicenter of charged emotion, set deep within the limbic system, that kicks off the fight-or-flight response. Increased amygdala activity is a hallmark of anxiety disorders of all varieties, from generalized anxiety to phobias to PTSD.
A second experiment of just over 380 people took a different angle on the same question. This time the participants self-reported about their generous giving habits, and then completed the same emotion task while their brains were scanned. Again, both types of generosity were associated with brain activity linked to altriusm, and again the participants that said their generosity was targeted showed decreased amygdala activity, while those whose generosity was untargeted didn’t show this effect.
Taken together, the results of these experiments suggest that targeted generosity has both altruism boosting and anxiety decreasing effects. We get a little extra something from being generous when we know more specifically how someone will be helped.
“Giving targeted support to an identifiable individual in need is uniquely associated with reduced amygdala activity, thereby contributing to an understanding of how and when giving support may lead to health,” the researchers said in the study’s conclusion.
These results overlap well with those of 2017 study showing that generous acts trigger activity in brain areas linked to decision making and reward seeking. Even when acting generously involves a difficult decision to make a sacrifice, even a significant sacrifice, it still results in greater feelings of happiness, according to the study, and the neural correlations appear to back that up.”
Yet another study results suggest that, for a person to achieve happiness from generous behaviour, the brain regions involved in empathy and social cognition need to overwrite selfish motives in reward-related brain regions. These findings have important implications not only for neuroscience but also for education, politics, economics and health. Generous decisions engage the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in the experimental more than in the control group and differentially modulate the connectivity between TPJ and ventral striatum. Importantly, striatal activity during generous decisions is directly related to changes in happiness. These results demonstrate that top–down control of striatal activity plays a fundamental role in linking commitment-induced generosity with happiness. Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate how generosity is linked to happiness on the neural level. As a matter of fact the following neurological findings were obtained throught this research: Gray matter volume in the right TPJ predicts subjects’ behavioral altruism. GM in right TPJ predicts functional activity profile in TPJ during altruistic choice. Individual differences in altruism relate to both structure and function of right TPJ.
Let us all spread the medicine of kindness and boost eachother´s well-being.
Written by Mariana T. Eiane
https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Pages/default.aspx?PAPNotFound=true
https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Pages/default.aspx?PAPNotFound=true