Flex Your Kindness Muscles at the Empathy Gym!

Lauren Findley has a community of over 500k followers on Instagram who are dedicated to watching her workouts and learning more about physical health. She’s a staple in the body building community and has abs of steel, but even more importantly a heart of gold. Lauren contacted No Bully, a non profit organization dedicated to eradicating bullying, because she wants to use her platform for good to raise awareness around bullying prevention. It’s a topic that is important to her, for she has younger siblings and has also experienced first hand how cruel people can be online.

Together we developed a campaign called “Flex Your Kindness Muscles at the Empathy Gym.” It’s a four week campaign where we dive into how to cultivate kindness, just like we would any other muscle when working out. Lauren talks about the science behind how kindness gets easier with practice and has massive health benefits on her YouTube Channel.

According to Random Acts of Kindness, some of these health benefits include:

• It’s good for your heart! Witnessing acts of kindness produces oxytocin.
• It fuels energy and produces serotonin which generates that feeling of calmness.
• Kindness just makes you happier overall!
• Studies have shown that developing a habit of kindness reduces pain, stress, anxiety, depression, and blood pressure.

The Empathy Gym dove into several reports around the effects of kindness. One of our favorites was from The Greater Good Science Center, based at UC Berkeley. They developed a compelling report that took 683 adults from over two dozen countries to complete at least one act of kindness daily for a week. They had four different kinds of test groups. The first group had to do nice things for close friends and family. The second group had to do nice things for acquaintances and the third group had to show kindness to themselves. The fourth group showed no acts of kindness, but just observed.

The results of the survey found that each group became happier by doing any one of those acts of kindness, compared to the fourth group that just observed. What was surprising to the researchers was that showing kindness to strangers, family or friends, and ourselves had the same amount of impact and boosted participants overall mood. Each week in April, Lauren is sharing different ways to showcase kindness in these three areas. This week is focussed on self care. Check out No Bully’s list of 100 different ways you can practice self kindness.