Why Practice It? How Do I Cultivate It? What are the Limitations? Does Wealth Reduce Compassion? By Jeremy Adam Smith New psychological research points to how we can feel authentic pride in our country—and…. Featured Articles. Newman October 30, This month, slow down and appreciate the good in your life. By Elizabeth Svoboda October 19, An international study finds that people who turn away from compassion have felt more depressed and anxious during the COVID pandemic.
By Steve Calechman September 23, Religious organizations are drawing on research to help parents raise kids with strong character and compassion. Compassion makes us feel good: Compassionate action e. Being compassionate—tuning in to other people in a kind and loving manner—can reduce risk of heart disease by boosting the positive effects of the Vagus Nerve , which helps to slow our heart rate.
One compassion training program has found that it makes people more resilient to stress; it lowers stress hormones in the blood and saliva and strengthens the immune response. Compassion training may also help us worry less and be more open to our negative emotions. Practicing compassion could make us more altruistic.
You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are.
Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness. Things will not always go the way you want them to. You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals. This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.
Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Low social connection has been generally associated with declines in physical and psychological health, as well as a higher propensity for antisocial behavior that leads to further isolation.
Adopting a compassionate lifestyle or cultivating compassion may help boost social connection and improve physical and psychological health. Indeed, compassion is contagious. Social scientists James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard demonstrated that helping is contagious: acts of generosity and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness.
You may have seen one of the news reports about chain reactions that occur when someone pays for the coffee of the drivers behind them at a drive-through restaurant or at a highway tollbooth.
People keep the generous behavior going for hours. Our acts of compassion uplift others and make them happy. We may not know it, but by uplifting others we are also helping ourselves; research by Fowler and Christakis has shown that happiness spreads and that if the people around us are happy, we, in turn become happier.
Although compassion appears to be a naturally evolved instinct, it sometimes helps to receive some training. Cultivating compassion does not require years of study and can be elicited quite rapidly. In a study Cendri Hutcherson, at the California Institute of Technology, and I conducted in with APS Fellow James Gross at Stanford, we found that a seven-minute intervention was enough to increase feelings of closeness and connection to the target of meditation on both explicit measures, but also on implicit measures that participants could not voluntarily control; this suggests that their sense of connection had changed on a deep-seated level.
Fredrickson tested a nine-week loving-kindness meditation intervention and found that the participants who went through the intervention experienced increased daily positive emotions, reduced depressive symptoms, and increased life satisfaction.
A group led by Sheethal Reddy at Emory with foster children showed that a compassion intervention increased hopefulness in the children. Overall, research on compassion interventions show improvements in psychological well-being, compassion, and social connection. In addition to questionnaire measures, researchers are finding that compassion interventions also impact behavior.
APS Fellow Tania Singer and her team at the Max Planck Institute conducted a study that looked at the effects of compassion training on prosocial behavior. Singer found that daylong compassion training did in fact increase prosocial behavior on the game. Interestingly, the type of meditation seems to matter less than just the act of meditation itself. Condon, Miller, Desbordes, and DeSteno in press found that eight-week meditation trainings led participants to act more compassionately toward a person who is suffering give up their chair to someone in crutches — regardless of the type of meditation that they did mindfulness or compassion.
More research is needed to understand exactly how compassion training improves well-being and promotes altruistic behavior. Research by Antoine Lutz and APS William James Fellow Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that, during meditation, participants display enhanced emotional processing in brain regions linked to empathy in response to emotion-evoking cries.
In addition to having taught hundreds of community members and Stanford students who have expressed interest, we have also developed a teacher-training program currently under way.
Given the importance of compassion in our world today, and a growing body of evidence about the benefits of compassion for health and well-being, this field is bound to generate more interest and hopefully impact our community at large. CCARE envisions a world in which, thanks to rigorous research studies on the benefits of compassion, the practice of compassion is understood to be as important for health as physical exercise and a healthful diet; empirically validated techniques for cultivating compassion are widely accessible; and the practice of compassion is taught and applied in schools, hospitals, prisons, the military, and other community settings.
Thanks for the fascinating article. I hope your work and vision continue successfully, for the benefit of all. I have experienced the benefits social connectedness in profound ways and how cultivating compassion has enhanced my life. I will continue to give back in my practice by integrating techniques that cultivate compassion. My hope is that these techniques will enable clients to ultimately continue this movement.
Thank you! Great article! Compassion is spreading rapidly and is being shared and taught globaly…. This alone already feels healthy and vibrant Thank you so much. Go to Facebook: Avatar Compassion Project for further information. Important, thoughtful. A great introduction to compassion research, the benefits of compassion. It will be interesting to see if training programs for the workplace can and will be developed. I highlighted this article for my readers on leadership.
I enjoyed this article thank you for writing it. I am thinking that I should broach this subject to our schools and see about integrating some sort of compassion training. While it may appear that compassion could be genetic, maybe there are other explanations. All of the scientific studies above do not put the participants in a worse shape financially or otherwise.
If one will lose nothing, but may gain social recognition, compassion is obviously a favorable response. If the relative chance of survival is in question, how will the compassion fare? That is the moment of distinction that true altruism will shine. One can easily obtain the benefits of social connections through other means besides compassionate behaviors.
So why? Singer, at Max Planck, shows that compassion and empathy are distinct: compassion triggers kindness toward strangers; empathy identifies with the pain of in-group members. Greetings nice countrymen and women, My name is Tom and i have been hell bent on helping the disenfranchised for over 20 years now.
While some people experience compassion more often by nature, there are things that you can do to help improve your own ability to feel compassion for others. Learning this ability takes some time and practice, but it's worth it to keep working on flexing your compassion skills. Being open to feeling what others are feeling can help you create deeper, more meaningful connections. Acting on these feelings of compassion can benefit others, but as the research suggests, sometimes compassion is its own reward.
Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life. Oxford University Press; Sympathy, empathy, and compassion: A grounded theory study of palliative care patients' understandings, experiences, and preferences. Palliat Med. Prosocial spending and happiness: using money to benefit others pays off.
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How are compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction affected by quality of working life? Findings from a survey of mental health staff in Italy. Cocker F, Joss N. Compassion fatigue among healthcare, emergency and community service workers: a systematic review. Published Jun Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect after compassion training.
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