The Kindness Cure | Introduction
How the Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World
The following excerpt offers the inspiration for The Kindness Cure: How the Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World. Originally published in 2018 by New Harbinger, I have since obtained the rights and republished it in November 2024 under KindMinds Media. This allows me to share the message of kindness in new ways and update the content from time to time, and keep kindness relevant.
Naturally, kindness is both timely and timeless. Consider one of the insights from the World Happiness Report 2024, released in March 2025:
"Expecting kindness from others is a stronger predictor of happiness than experiencing or anticipating major harms."
Most people have a generosity of spirit, which is quite adaptive if we are to keep the human species alive and well. Yet it takes practice and many, many reminders. The report also ranks the world's happiest countries and highlights a concerning trend—happiness levels among people under 30 are declining in the U.S. (where I live).
I dedicated this book to my daughters, who were teenagers when it was first published. They’re still under 30, navigating a world that calls for a compassionate response to today’s challenges. The message of kindness remains as relevant as ever, and the World Happiness Report 2024 reinforces my commitment to keeping this work alive.
On the first of every month I will share a chapter. Portions of each chapter are free. To give you a flavor of what you can expect, here is the Table of Contents, followed by the Introduction (in its entirety). I hope you will follow along the kindness adventure with me.
Part 1: To Be Human Is to Be Kind
Chapter 1: Kindness Takes Effort
Chapter 2: Your Kindness Instinct
Chapter 3: Happy to Help
Chapter 4: Cultivating Courage
Chapter 5: Compassionate on Purpose
Chapter 6: Imagination’s Objects of Affection
Chapter 7: The Kinship of Belonging to Each Other
Part 2: Your Caring Mind
Chapter 8: Reset Your Stress
Chapter 9: Befriending Your Senses
Chapter 10: Emotional Paradox
Chapter 11: The Power of a Pause
Chapter 12: Face-to-Heart Connections
Chapter 13: Hugs and High Fives
Chapter 14: Taking in Kindness
Part 3: Kindfulness
Chapter 15: Mindfulness with Heart
Chapter 16: Your Loving Self
Chapter 17: The Naturalness of Being
Chapter 18: Radical Acceptance
Chapter 19: Singing for Our Souls
Chapter 20: Cherishing the Little Things
Chapter 21: An Attitude of Gratitude
Part 4: Kindsight
Chapter 22: Grace and Grit
Chapter 23: Forgiveness Is a Gift to Yourself
Chapter 24: Apologies Make for a Friendly World
Chapter 25: Writing New Beginnings
Chapter 26: Accepting a Helping Hand
Chapter 27: Gifts in Kind
Chapter 28: Networks of Generosity
Conclusion: Reimagining Kindness
INTRODUCTION
“Mom, I have something to tell you. But I want you to hear me out before you say anything.” When a seventeen-year-old daughter starts a conversation like this, what parent doesn’t brace for the worst? Car crash. Date rape. Pregnancy. I held my breath.
Sophie explained that the night before she had been physically attacked by another girl. My daughter showed me the deep nail marks across her chest and back. I flinched. Her boyfriend had taken a photo of Sophie’s bloodied nose, which I refused to look at because I didn’t want the image imprinted in my brain.
“Are you okay now?” I pleaded.
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid something else might happen?”
“Not really.”
“Why did this girl jump you?”
“An old grudge... Jealously... A power trip.”
My impulse was to bang down the door of the girl’s house and ream out her mother. But Sophie took the high road: she showed compassion for the girl and her life situation—much more grace than I could muster. As a clinical psychologist working primarily with girls and women for two decades, I know a lot about mean girls. Sophie didn’t expect an apology, and the girl never offered one. It all fell into the past. But the skirmish really stuck in my craw. It was so unkind.
The incident inspired me to dig deep, to draw on my own practices of mindfulness and compassion in the face of meanness. But given the state of our world during a contentious U.S presidential election, this felt hard to do. Political mudslinging had intensified. Children had started becoming anxious or aggressive, openly taunting immigrants and disabled people. Bullying was on the rise and so were fears of deportation. Swastikas were painted in our local middle school, and our Holocaust memorial was desecrated. Many of us felt horrified by the discourse on the treatment of women and girls. Moreover, a steady stream of atrocities amplified fears that the world is dangerous: the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks seemingly everywhere, public mass shootings, young black men continually killed by police officers, rioting, acts of retaliation. Instead of responding with unity or cohesion, all this created more divisiveness and separation among us. And yet, I resonated with Selena Gomez’s song, “Kill ’Em with Kindness,” that my girls were listening to. It was timely, and it kept me going.
The topic of kindness became central to the many conversations I was having at home, among colleagues, and with clients. The question kept popping up, over and over: What happened to kindness?
The world felt like a meaner place, even though historians insist that we live with less violence and more democracy. Everything seemed to be breaking into pieces, and empathy, respect, and common decency became dwindling resources. Because it can, quite simply, feel too hard to be generous in spirit within such an environment. But as I learned, it does feel easier when you understand the power you are wielding when you are kind. When facing anything that feels threaten- ing—be it political, personal, or as natural as a life change—you can “kill” your fears with kindness. And so the idea for this book was born.
I started inviting people to share reflections and stories on kindness. I’d ask, “Do you consider yourself a kind person? How so?” Either people had a quick reaction: “Oh, trust me, I’m not a kind person.” Or they were stumped: “Gosh, I really have to think about that one.” Mind you, plenty of people came up with kindness stories: a person giving up an airplane seat for a pregnant woman after her flight was canceled; a cabbie lending money to someone with a lost wallet; an unexpected thank-you card; daffodils left on doorsteps. But half the time, people had to stop and think for a while about kindness. It became clear that, in general, we are grappling with it—as if kindness is hiding in a corner and we have to search it out to find it.
A Fear of Kindness
We seem to have a kindness phobia on our hands. People are afraid to be kind, to admit to being kind, to trust people who are kind, to pay attention when kindness does happen. What’s going on?
Has our speedy technological world made it too easy to disengage from one another, fetishize our differences, and normalize a cool-to-be-cruel mentality?
Does the world feel so unsafe that we are being overprotective?
If so, are we reverting to a survival mentality that reserves kindness for our children, close family, and friends?
Have we prioritized values like personal success and happiness over the well-being of others to the extent that the Golden Rule is a relic of the past?
Are we expecting people to be kind but don’t enact it ourselves?
Or do we simply take everyday kindness for granted?
Answer: all of the above. These questions are recycled in history, and different ages have different results. Even as I offer an update to this book, the desire for kindness remains a universal need yet the practice of it is often cursory. “Kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings,” write psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor. Their brief historical account on the rise and fall of kindness laments its decline as the Victorians conceived of it, which was an openheartedness that linked people to one another. There was a sense that our lives depended on being kind because, as philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Our sweetest existence is relative and collective, and our true self is not entirely within us.” Kindness included expanding beyond people within an inner circle to view strangers as kin, which cultivated the Victorian recognition of a shared humanity. This was uplifting and motivational. It led to caring cultures.
The attitudes of modern society—with emphasis on self-sufficiency, self- interest, and separation—have eroded our confidence in kindness as an orientation to living a meaningful life and as a civic virtue. Kindness has become associated with being weak, fragile, feminine, nostalgic, and untrustworthy. Yet our instinct for kindness percolates to the surface all the time, because our basic neurology is wired to care. As Taylor and Phillips write, it’s a paradox: “People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it.”
It’s time to create cultures of kindness, at the very least because we are desperate for them. To do so, it’s on each of us to transform kindness from a sentimental notion to a natural expression of love, respect, and appreciation for one another. This takes effort. The Kindness Cure will give you a language for kindness, encourage you to feel its necessity, help you to make kindness explicit, and give you ways to cultivate it from the inside out. As you will see, you possess a compassionate instinct. It’s part of your genetic blueprint. But the capacity for kindness can erode if you don’t exercise it, which may be the greatest thing to fear.
Bothering to Care
This fear is made vivid by the Making Caring Common project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. The executive director, Rick Weissbourd, observes that we are in an era of high-achievement pressure and that we emphasize individual happiness. “What we don’t see is more focus on concern for others, concern for community.” Weissbourd believes, and I agree, that we need more caring opportunities and demonstrations of kindness, especially among people different from us.
The project’s report, titled The Children We Need to Raise, surveyed more than ten thousand diverse youth. Almost 80 percent of the youth picked “high achievement” or “happiness” as their top value, while roughly 20 percent selected “caring for others.” The general findings were that “young people neither prioritize caring for others nor see the key people around them as prioritizing it.” The researchers observed a gap between caring rhetoric and reality, between what parents and other adults say are their top priorities and values and the messages they convey by daily behavior:
When children do not prioritize caring and fairness in relation to their self-concerns—and when they view their peers as even less likely to prioritize these values—there is a lower bar for many forms of harmful behavior, including cruelty, disrespect, dishonesty, and cheating.
The report cautions us about the misguided values and behaviors of today’s children, and it implicates the society in which they are raised. It implicates us. We can see the gap between rhetoric and reality almost everywhere we look: politics, business, education, parenting. If we value caring and kindness, then we need to cultivate it in ourselves, in our relationships, and in our community. Weissbourd reflects:
“I think the good news is that lots of kids do value caring and kindness. Just too often they are valuing it second [to happiness and achievement].”
(More on the trend toward perfectionism in The Perfectionist’s Dilemma: Learn the Art of Self-Compassion and Become a Happy Achiever, released Jan 2025.)
A Rallying Cry for Kindness
Kindness is a neglected virtue in today’s culture—but it persists as an instinct we can cultivate as something that benefits us and the world. The Kindness Cure is a rallying cry that illuminates kindness as a path to well-being and joy.
Most of us value kindness and have the desire to express it. Doing so inherently takes courage, since we must be willing to experience the vulner- ability of connecting with other people—especially those who are different from us. We do have what it takes: it’s entirely natural to be relational. Discoveries from a broad range of disciplines—including neurobiology, evolutionary sciences, psychology, and education—offer hope for a kinder and gentler world because, quite simply, we are wired for it and we benefit from it. Studies repeatedly show positive effects of kindness on personal and collective well-being in areas as diverse as physical health, emotional health, relationships, life satisfaction, communities, and even economies. The science confirms ancient wisdom, and the data is piling in. Here are some of the things we’re learning that kindness can do:
Activate emotional regulation and compassion networks in the brain
Alleviate symptoms related to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans
Protect against compassion fatigue in helping professionals and first responders
Lessen migraines and symptoms of chronic pain
Promote positive attitudes and compassion toward oneself and others
Lessen judgment and increase empathy for stigmatized social groups
Improve body image
Strengthen romantic relationships
Improve symptoms related to depression, anxiety, and social isolation in teenagers
Foster stress resilience and prosocial behaviors in young children
Promote longevity in those who volunteer
Kindness, it turns out, is a happiness fix. And you have the wiring and the natural motivation to grow kindness from the inside out. With this book, you can strengthen your instinct for compassion and encourage it in others, because when you intentionally practice it, kindness radiates from you. It spreads. It is contagious.
A Guide to The Kindness Cure
My deep conversations about kindness reveal that each person wakes up to it in a unique way, often through personal hardship, a shift in perception, an emerging self-compassion, or a desire to create a culture of caring. The stories in this book share these wake-up moments, show how kindness is naturally cultivated, address what gets in the way, and demonstrate how we heal through it. They come from clients, friends, colleagues, social media contacts, and my own experiences; in a few instances, I have changed names or identifying details. Mostly, they are very ordinary stories of everyday people doing the best that they can.
Because cultivating and prioritizing kindness is a daily way of being, this book casts a wide net. After you have read chapter 1, you can jump in any- where. Each chapter begins with a story, describes a principle, shares wisdom inspired by the sciences, offers a practical exercise to carry forward, and concludes with a reflection. Here is an overview of the four parts that mark dis- tinct phases on your journey.
Part 1: To Be Human Is to Be Kind highlights your natural tendency for kindness, caring, and concern as fundamental to survival as a species. This section of the book shows how kindness arises in our everyday experiences. I point out the traps that are so easy to fall into: misguided attention, empathic distress, stress, and indifference toward others. And I show how you can be a kindness warrior.
Part 2: Your Caring Mind draws attention to just how wired for kindness you are with your body’s amazing physiological map. You can appreciate the ways that this “caring blueprint” operates and understand the tensions that arise in how humans evolved to both survive and thrive. I offer ways to calm your nervous system and regulate your emotions, including empathic ones, because without the burden of emotional upset, you are able to make choices to be loving, kind, and helpful.
Part 3: Kindfulness shows you how to strengthen your kind neural path- ways through the building blocks for kindness: mindfulness, intention, and self-compassion. Life is full of joys and pains, and responding to challenges with inner strength affects your physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual life. The tenderness and loving-awareness that result have the power to expand appreciation and gratitude for yourself, others, and the world you live in. This creates a life oriented to kindness.
Part 4: Kindsight conveys how basic needs for love and belonging are shared by all. How you learn from your past and envision your future depend on how you choose to live in the present moment. With kindness as a life orientation, expressions of compassion, forgiveness, and generosity become contagious—igniting an upward spiral of positivity and well-being for the greater good.
Kindness is both simple and sacred. I hope you, your family, and your friends can be inspired by these stories, share these practices, and thereby cast a wide net for a more loving and compassionate world.
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