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Scientific research is showing us that acts of kindness don't just help the people that you're kind to, but they really help you. They can help reduce your stress, they can help increase your social connection. They can help reduce your anxiety and depression, maybe even better than a lot of other strategies that we think of first.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. We're gonna talk today about a strategy, which we have touched on before a couple of times in past episodes, but we haven't gone into it in huge detail, and I think it's really worth diving into it more because this is a strategy that we often underestimate. So the strategy that we've talked about before that we're gonna be talking about today is acts of kindness. Now I wanna ask you three different questions in relation to this strategy to reveal what your thoughts are about it. First of all, um, about social connection. We all know that we need social connection. It's important for our wellbeing, it's important for reducing anxiety. Which do you think, which strategy do you think would be best for helping us to increase our social connection, planning fun things with friends or performing acts of kindness?
So think about your answer to that question. Here's a second question for you. What strategy do you think is going to be most effective for decreasing depression and anxiety symptoms? Writing down your thoughts and feelings or performing acts of kindness, which one do you think would be more effective?
So think about your answer there. Third question is, okay, when you're trying to reduce stress, what do you think is going to be more effective at reducing your stress? Would it be better to just kind of relax and self indulge? Or would it be better to perform acts of kindness? Which one do you think would work better for reducing your stress levels? So we are gonna be able to answer all of these three questions. Thanks in large part, to two really great studies that I wanna highlight today. I'm excited about these studies for a few reasons. One because they are really recent, so they reflect the latest research. Another reason is because they examine a big sample size. A lot of times you see studies, studies that have five people in them, or 10 people, or even just 30 people in them, and it's hard to generalize the results from those studies studies because they were so small.
But both of these studies were big hundreds of people. Um, they were randomized controlled trials, which is the gold standard of stu of studies in psychology. So the top quality type studies that you can have in psychology. They were both published in really high impact, high quality journals, one in Frontiers in Psychology and the other in the Journal of Positive Psychology. And maybe most importantly, they both study. The effect of using this strategy, the acts of kindness on people who have issues with anxiety, depression, and stress.
And this is different than a lot of other studies that have been done in the past because a lot of other studies just study the impact of acts of kindness on kind of normal, healthy people and whether or not it makes them feel. Better feel increased wellbeing, but not a huge amount of studies have focused specifically on people with issues with anxiety, depression, and stress.
And so they're more applicable to our situation here, right? Because they're about people who have issues with what we have issues with.
So let's go to that first question. We need social connection, right? Social connection. You might define it as feeling like you belong or you have, you're close with other individuals or groups. It's really important for wellbeing. In fact, past studies have talked about how really happy people have a high decree of social connection in their lives. They have good high quality romantic friend family relationships, and they have a lot of social interactions with people, frequent social interactions. And interestingly enough, these very happy people didn't, weren't necessarily richer than others or have, they didn't necessarily have fewer negative life events, or they weren't more beautiful than the norm. but then one of the main things that was different about them was that they had this high degree of social connectedness. Another issue to be aware of is that people with anxiety and depression often have particular trouble with this aspect of their lives. They often just don't have very good social connectedness in their lives. That's one thing that people with anxiety and depression kind of have in common. We have a problem with social connectedness, so if we're gonna treat anxiety and depression, this would be one avenue to look at.
So one of these studies that I am zoning in on today looked at this, they divided people into three different groups. First of all, they recruited people that had issues with anxiety and depression. So to begin with, we know that they're studying people with issues related to our issues, right? So one of the groups of people was assigned to plan fun things with friends on two days a week, and they had to do this for six weeks. And then they were gonna track and see how they were doing after six weeks. Another one of the groups was randomly assigned to just write down their thoughts and feelings at least two days a week for the six weeks. And then a third group was instructed to perform acts of kindness on two days outta the week. On those two days, perform three acts of kindness. So these could be big or small acts that benefit other people or make other people happy. That usually cost something from you in terms of your time or your resources. Okay, so those were the three three groups. One group doing acts of kindness on two days a week. One group doing fun things with friends on two days a week and one group writing down their thoughts and feelings at least two days a week. And then they checked back in with these people six weeks later and measured how they were doing on different wellbeing indicators. So one of the things that they looked at was social connectedness. And which group do you think had improved the most in terms of feeling more socially connected? Do you think it was the people writing down their thoughts or feelings? The people organizing fun things with friends or the people performing acts of kindness? Well, if you're like me, you would have assumed that the people organizing fun things with friends would be the ones who had changed the most in their feeling of social connectedness. But if you answered that, then you would be wrong. So writing down thoughts and feelings that didn't help people feel more socially connected. Organizing fun things with friends did help people feel more socially connected, but not as much as doing acts of kindness for other people. This was the thing that increased people's feeling of social connectedness the most. Now that's surprising, right? Because you know. You may have already decided that you need to be more socially connected with people, and you may have instinctively thought, well, this means I just need to plan a lot more things with friends. And that can be a little bit discouraging because you can't really control whether or not somebody else will want to do things with you. It can be hard to organize something that everybody will want to do. There are a lot of things involved in organizing fun things with friends that that makes it hard to control all of the elements involved. But doing nice things for people is something that's a little bit easier to control, right? So that's interesting, I think, to be aware of the fact that performing acts of kindness is gonna be more effective at helping you feel more socially connected than planning fun things with friends. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't also plan fun things with friends, and we'll talk more about this um, at the end of the episode.
But let's go on to the second question for now. So we were talking about improving symptoms of anxiety and depression. Which strategy would be best? To perform acts of kindness or to write down your thoughts and feelings? So this is from that same study. Remember there were those three groups of people. And one of them had to write down their thoughts and feelings. One of them had to perform acts of kindness, and the other group had to organize fun things with friends. Which group do you think had the greatest improvement in their depression and anxiety symptoms? Well, you might think that the people who wrote down their thoughts and feelings had the greatest improvement because this type of strategy is one of the, the primary go-to treatments for anxiety, depression, and it does work really well. It does really help with symptoms of anxiety and depression. But if you guessed that one as the winner, you would've been wrong because actually the people who performed acts of kindness had even greater reductions in anxiety and depression compared to the people who were writing down their thoughts and feelings. So again, this isn't to say you shouldn't write down your thoughts and feelings because that is an effective strategy. But surprising, right? That even more effective in terms of reducing your anxiety and depression symptoms is performing acts of kindness.
Okay, so the last question that we're examining is: you're feeling stressed. Is it better for you to just kind of relax and self indulge, or is it better for you to perform acts of kindness? This is from a second study. The one we haven't talked about yet. This was a large sample size, almost 300 people. Anyway, these people were randomly divided into three groups. And one of the groups had to perform acts of kindness for other people. So on one day a week for six weeks, they had to perform five acts of kindness for other people. And then one of the other groups was given different instructions. On one day a week for six weeks, they had to perform five self-indulgent acts of kindness for themselves selves. So these self-indulgent things might have been like indulging in food or special food or drinks that you love or kinda laing around and relaxing or getting yourself some kind of a present, this type of thing. So which of these two strategies do you think had a bigger impact on the way that people felt in regard to stress? How stressed they felt after six weeks? Well, you might have guessed that kind of relaxing and doing self-indulgent things on that one day a week would've been more effective than doing things for other people. But if you guessed that, then you would've been wrong because actually the people who performed acts of kindness, their perceived stress levels went down a lot at six weeks. And then even six months later when they did a, a follow up, those who had performed the acts of kindness had reduced stress levels, perceived stress levels compared to the people who were doing the self-indulgent acts. Now that's really surprising, isn't it? But in addition to this, the people who were performing acts of kindness, um, they had increased mental wellbeing compared to the self-indulgent group. They had reduced psychological distress, reduced depression and reduced anxiety. So, so many different indicators of wellbeing coming out of this group, doing acts of kindness versus the group doing self-indulgent, relaxing things for themselves.
So let's talk now about what these studies mean and what they don't mean. As I said before, this does not mean that you should not plan fun things with friends. That you should not write about your thoughts and feelings, that you should not relax and do Self-indulgent acts sometimes. Because studies have shown that doing social things with friends, fun things with friends, does reduce your anxiety, does increase your wellbeing, and writing about your thoughts and feelings does have big benefits for your depression and anxiety and self-indulgent acts can be good from time to time. But it just means that you need to not forget about how effective acts of kindness are. That this strategy that we often overlook and often underestimate is actually more effective in helping us to feel socially, socially connected with other people, helping to reduce our anxiety and depression, and helping to reduce our sense of stress than any of the other strategies. But of course, doing all of them, along with acts of kindness is even better. We don't wanna be limited to one type of strategy. More strategies is better. But don't forget about acts of kindness and how effective they are.
And let's talk for a second now about how should you do these acts of kindness? So these studies, all of them followed a pattern that has been shown in past studies to work well, which is don't do the acts of kindness every day. Don't try and do it every day. Just like we talked about a couple weeks ago when we were talking about habits and how it's important to not do it the same way every day. Don't get bogged down and repetitive. Make sure it doesn't get boring. And a good strategy is to do it on one or two days a week only, and then concentrate your acts of kindness, three to five acts of kindness on those days or on that one day, and that this gives you more benefits in terms of your anxiety and depression.
And the last thing to talk about when we're talking about how to do these acts of kindness is that there are healthy ways to do acts of kindness, and there are unhealthy ways to do acts of kindness. And we have had episodes in the past where we have talked about these in more detail. We had an episode where we talked about overgiving and how to avoid that. And we have also talked about the importance of doing acts of kindness because of something that you want to get closer to rather than because of something that you want to escape from. So it's really important to be doing it because you want to see something happen or you want to get closer to some outcome instead of trying to get away from something that you don't want. So it's important to not be doing these acts of kindness to avoid feeling guilty or to avoid feeling like you're a bad person or to avoid other people judging you or something like that. It's important that you do the acts of kindness in order to approach something that you want because you want to see some outcome in, uh, someone else's life or in your own life because you want to go towards something. So it's really important to act because of an approach, motivation rather than an avoidance motivation. That's a really important element in being healthy.
But in any case, don't forget about this really important, effective strategy that will help you so much. This is really interesting that scientific research is showing us that acts of kindness don't just help the people that you're kind to, but they really help you. They can help reduce your stress, they can help increase your social connection. They can help reduce your anxiety and depression, maybe even better than a lot of other strategies that we think of first. So that's what I have for you today. Thanks for listening and see you next week.