Society | An unsuspected strength

If she had to give a nickname to today’s society, psychologist Pascale Brillon would opt for “ego.com”. “We talk a lot about being interested in ourselves, taking care of ourselves, which is very positive indeed, but we forget that taking care of others is not just burdensome. It’s not just harmful. It can also be a source of a lot of satisfaction,” believes the professor from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).

In recent years, she has noticed a “erosion of kindness”, a value highly advocated in the more religious Quebec of the past, she emphasizes. We see him on social networks, where he says “vile things” to himself, under the cover – or not – of anonymity. We are witnessing this in real life, where the stress linked to the pandemic has caused “very great irritability, a very great feeling of isolation and anger in the population”. “Some people feel like they have lost social skills during these years,” says Pascale Brillon.

Call for kindness

The psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress, traumatic grief and anxiety is convinced that society would benefit from valuing kindness more. The Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) agrees.

This year, for National Mental Health Week, the organization is launching “a call for kindness”. A few months ago, its Montreal subsidiary did the same by leading a regional campaign around this theme. “We did a search in the literature to see what is part of our daily lives, which does not require too much effort and which is accessible to everyone. We came across studies which demonstrate that kindness, the more we practice it, the more beneficial it is for mental health,” explains Fanny Gravel-Patry, when asked about the I practice kindness initiative, launched by the organization last November.

We suspect that being the recipient of a kind gesture feels good, but doing it also brings its share of benefits. “Kindness will reduce stress, increase our level of happiness, increase our self-esteem,” says Fanny Gravel-Patry, mental health promotion advisor at the ACSM Branch of Montreal.

“People have the impression that it gives meaning to their existence, that too is something very positive,” argues Pascale Brillon.

“They even have the perception that the world in general is more benevolent when they themselves have performed acts of kindness,” she adds, specifying that a positive vision of society promotes “more serene mental health” .

Generous and happy

Lara Aknin, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, knows well the benefits of doing acts of kindness. Director of the Helping and Happiness Lab, she is particularly interested in financial generosity.

In one of the many studies his team conducted, participants, randomly divided into four groups, were given $5 or $20 to give something to others or themselves. “People who had to spend money on someone else were happier at the end of the day,” says the professor. She calls these emotional benefits a “happiness boost,” since they were observed in the short term. However, if doing kind gestures becomes a habit, “it may improve happiness in general,” she believes.

Does the value of the gift influence the joy felt? “In real life, when people use their own money, we see that the more they give, the happier they say they feel,” replies Lara Aknin. However, “it’s difficult to say if happy people are more generous or if it’s generosity that makes people happy,” she emphasizes. To clarify the question, it would be necessary to carry out an experiment, she thinks. Through another study, however, his team demonstrated that “even when you give the equivalent of just $2.50, you can feel short-term emotional benefits.”

Small gestures count

At the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, Canadian researcher Gillian Sandstrom is part of the team that contributed to the Kindness Test, a major study on kindness carried out in 2021 involving 60,000 participants from 144 countries and the results of which were the subject of a BBC podcast.

Each respondent was asked to indicate the last act of kindness they had received. Most of them were very simple: a smile, a compliment, a thank you, help carrying a bag of groceries… “All these small gestures can make a big difference,” the researcher is convinced. psychology, whose expertise focuses a lot on interactions with strangers.

“Every time we do something that shows someone that we see them as a human being, it’s an act of kindness and it feels good,” she is convinced.

Between fears and hesitations

If small acts of kindness have positive effects on the person doing them and the person receiving them, why aren’t we doing them more often?

For example, bringing your boss a coffee could be seen by some as a gesture made in order to obtain a promotion. “Men also told me that they no longer wanted to hold the door for a woman because she might take it badly,” she says.

To those who hesitate to show kindness because of other people’s interpretations, she wants to tell them: “People can see the good intention behind the gesture. It pays to be kind. »

To talk about the importance that kindness should have in our social relationships, Pascale Brillon suggests using the image of a wall. “We are all bricks. To hold the wall, you need mortar. Mortar is kindness. »

Visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website

Listen to the BBC podcast The Anatomy of Kindness (in English)