ARE YOU GRATEFUL AND ARE YOU KIND?
Many people are finding that they are feeling unhappy at the moment… lack of control in your life can bring up a lot of anxieties for you. And certainly Covid can do that to you. Fortunately, there are a few quite easy things you can do for yourself to turn this around and being grateful and being kind can be an easy step back to happiness.
I personally have added a Yale University course on Happiness to my daily routine and as well as learning a lot, I am also enjoying the stimulation. The course was surprisingly easy and even could be described as fun. Of course the theme of this course is are you grateful and are you kind?
Generally the theme to all the most inspiring courses on line is gratitude and kindness. The emotional benefits of being kind to others is immense, some say even more than for the person your are being kind to.
“If I had to choose between greatness and goodness, I’d choose goodness first.” – Dr. Angela Duckworth
Mindfulness is also a magic cure for depression and being unhappy
Here is a paragraph from some research that shows gratitude and acts of kindness make as significant difference to your wellbeing when you practice it.
HAPPY PEOPLE BECOME HAPPIER THROUGH KINDNESS: A COUNTING KINDNESSES INTERVENTION
Department of Psychology Tohoku Gakuin University
Kobe College Japan
JUNKO TANAKA-MATSUMI and KANAKO OTSUI
Kwansei Gakuin University Japan
Gratitude is an important human strength that contributes to subjective happiness (Emmons and Crumpler, 2000; McCullough et al., 2002; Peterson and Seligman, 2004). McCullough et al. (2001) showed that grateful individuals were especially appreciative of the contribution of others to their happiness. Watkins et al. (2003) suggested that grateful persons would further be characterized by the appreciation of life’s simple pleasures. These results imply reciprocal relationships among gratitude, subjective happiness, and good social relationships. Consequently, compared with unhappy people, happy people report close and satisfying relationships and feel more gratitude in their lives (Park et al., 2004). Whereas gratitude results when people receive kindness from other people, kindness entails enacting kind behavior toward other people. We expected that in addition to the strength of gratitude, the strength of kindness would also play an important role in increasing subjective happiness.