Good Friday morning to you!!
A short and sweet post for you this morning.
As you know, I love chatting about positive psychology and the science of well being.
While I help people recover from depression, anxiety and chronic stress, my hope is not just that they recover, but that they improve their well being and quality of life.
Research shows that this one thing can have the most impact on well being:
1) A spontaneous act of kindness or what’s often referred to as Random Act of Kindness.
I tell a lot of my patients with depression about the benefits of volunteering or “giving back” somehow.
But you don’t even need to go that far.
You can do a simple spontaneous gesture during the day for someone you know, or a complete stranger.
Dr. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, shares an example where one day, upon going to the post office to see stamps had risen by one cent, he purchased a bunch of one cent stamps and handed them out to people in line, so they all didn’t have to buy an extra one cent stamp.
I like to do small gestures regularly:
- Let traffic into my lane when they signal (if we all did this, the world would be a better place).
- Hold doors open for people.
- Send thank you emails to people to show my gratitude. (Earlier this year my manager died in a car accident and I felt good knowing that just a couple of months before that I shared my gratitude with him for his support as a manager).
- Yesterday I popped into the good chocolate store by my clinic and picked out some sea salt caramel dark chocolates for the Medical Office Assistants because they help me out so much.
It’s the small things that count. Do them for a stranger or do them for someone you love.
Just try it out.
So I challenge you to do one spontaneous nice thing for a fellow human.
AND come on over to the Facebook group to tell us what you did!
xo
Char
PS.
Last week I was driving across Canada and I stopped into a highway gas station near Medicine Hat, Alberta. This cat was sleeping in the rack. Apparently he wandered in 6 years ago and never left. That’s good people:)
