Can You Name 10 Benefits from Performing Acts of Kindess?

We all know that Random Acts of Kindness improves the lives of the recepients but did you know by performing an act of kindess improves your life too?

There are in fact several benefits. I can list ten. How about you? Can you name 10 benefits from performing acts of kindess?

"If there is any kindness I can show, any good thing I can do to any fellow human being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again."

William Penn

I have to admit I had help. There are researchers who have studied this exact subject. They found that when you are kind to others, you are rewarded in several ways. 

For example, researchers in Great Britain had participants take a survey (Journal of Social Psychology) measuring life satisfaction, the group that practiced kindness experienced a significant boost in happiness.


And in 1991, Allan Luks (former Executive Director of The Institute for the Advancement of Health and Executive Director of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program in New York City) documented a study about kindness in a book called "The healing power of doing good: The health and spiritual benefits of helping others".

"When we feel love and kindess toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace."

Dalai Lama

Some of the most significant findings of Allan Luks' research include the following:

1.) Helping others contributes to the maintenance of good health and can diminish the effect of minor and serious psychological and physical diseases and disorders.

2.)  After performing a kind act there is rush of euphoria often called a “helper’s high.” The initial rush is followed by a longer period of calm and improved emotional well-being.

3.) The health benefits and sense of well-being return for hours or even days whenever the helping act is remembered.

4.) Stress related health problems improve after performing kind acts. Helping others:

• Reverses feelings of depression. Supplies social contact.
• Reduces feelings of hostility and isolation that can cause stress, overeating, ulcers, etc.
• Decreases the constriction in the lungs that leads to asthma attacks.

5.) Helping can enhance feelings of joyfulness, emotional resilience, and vigor, and can reduce the unhealthy sense of isolation.

6.) The awareness and intensity of physical pain can decrease.

7.) Attitudes such as chronic hostility that negatively arouse and damage the body are reduced.

8.) A sense of self-worth, greater happiness, and optimism is increased, and feelings of helplessness and depression decrease.

9.) When we establish an “ affiliated connection” with someone (a relationship of friendship, love, or some sort of positive bonding), we feel emotions that can strengthen the immune system.

10.) Caring for strangers leads to immense immune and healing benefits.

Regular club attendance, volunteering, entertaining, or faith group attendance is the happiness equivalent of getting a college degree, or more than doubling your income.

Just like a smile, kindness is contagious. Your act of kindness will brighten someone's day who then in turn performs a good deed. The good feelings spread from one person to the next - rippling through your community. In the end it improves the lives of everyone.



"When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world."

Harold Kushner 

To find a Random Acts of Kindness list please click HERE.

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