A good piece of news from the 2023 World Happiness Report is that rates of kindness are increasing. This was judged by more people having helped a stranger, donated money or goods or taken part in volunteering compared to data from previous years. In this blog I take...
Kindness 2.0: going beyond the feel-good factor to true compassion. As an associate lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University one of my favourite parts of the job is marking one of the first assignments on the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology course. Students...
When we think of the concept of resilience, it may be that we think of simply being tough or breezing through challenges with little acknowledgment of discomfort. Yet research has suggested that resilience is not about avoidance, but about being able to sit in our...
What is it to truly accept yourself? To accept your strengths and weaknesses, to accept your past choices and behaviours, the good things that have happened and the bad and to accept you’re not superhuman or perfect? As many other people can be, I am often hugely...
Kindness wasn’t part of my dissertation that I completed recently as part of my degree in Applied Positive Psychology. The dissertation focused on people who had divorced over the age of 50 and had rebuilt their lives through social groups. The focus was on...
Early Lessons ‘Be kind’ was one of the first messages or lessons taught to me growing up. In fact, it was and remains one of the most important values taught to me as a small child. When reflecting on my childhood, both at home and school, all around me were messages...
When I was in my late teens I worked in a factory just outside of Birmingham. I can clearly remember a cartoon one of my work mates had pinned on his locker. There were four captions, the first showed a boss yelling and wagging his finger at a worker. The next caption...
It really isn’t that hard to be kind. Yet, I see people struggling to put a smile on their faces. I understand that everyone has struggles and sometimes they are experiencing grief, sadness, and a heaviness of weighted burden in their lives. What I want to say here is...
Being kind makes us feel great. There is a mountain of research that outlines the benefits of performing acts of kindness. It improves our physical as well as our psychological health, so with anxiety and depression at an all-time high could kindness be the perfect...
We have all most likely seen newsfeeds, and clips on social media of people performing random acts of kindness. The definition of a random act of kindness or RAOK is a selfless act performed by kind people to either help or cheer up a random stranger for no other...