Along with your alternative medicine treatments for stress relief, depression or weight loss, try spreading joy to others to give yourself an emotional boost.
Now that everything is automated, things are a bit different, but you might recall parking your car in a metered spot on the side of a street and getting out to see that the meter was already full. Someone had either come and paid for a full four hours and left five minutes later, or had simply walked by an empty meter and filled it up. If this never happened to you then I’m sorry, but if you’ve never walked by an empty meter and dropped a coin in for a stranger in need then I’m even sorrier!
Picture a perfect stranger standing in line at the pharmacy, stressing out about how long the line is, knowing their meter is going to run out before they get back to their car. They leave the pharmacy and dash back expecting to see a ticket on the dashboard—but there isn’t one there. Instead, the meter is full, thanks to the kindness of another stranger who decided to give someone a little help. When else can fifty cents make such a difference in someone’s day?
This is considered a random act of kindness, and the trend is actually becoming pretty popular. Strangers fill meters, pay for the tolls of the car behind them on the highway and even spring for a latte for the next person in the drive thru. The recipients of these kind acts usually get a big emotional boost, going off feeling a bit happier knowing that there are such nice people in the world. But for the person who committed the kind act that happiness is even greater.
Whether you are trying to cope with heightened anxiety levels, are following a medical weight loss diet or are using alternative medicine to treat another chronic concern, it is easy to get caught up in the stress of ill health. You might start to wonder when things are going to turn around. By engaging in random acts of kindness you can shift your mood from one of self-doubt and disillusionment to one of hope. Being nice to others is a great stress-management technique to implement in conjunction with your existing medical weight loss and alternative medicine therapies.
Supplement Medical Weight Loss with Altruism
Multiple studies have shown that giving to others actually makes the giver feel great. One study published in 2010 in the Journal of Social Psychology found that people who engaged in regular acts of kindness hold a greater level of satisfaction with their lives. They found this by following three groups of participants as they engaged in kind acts, novel acts and no extra kindness at all. The groups each submitted personal satisfaction surveys before the study started and again after following the studies instructions for 10 days. Those who made a point to do kind random acts wherever they could significantly became more satisfied with their own lives.
There are all sorts of ways that being more altruistic like the meter-filling Samaritans above can improve your quality of life and even your health. Being the beneficiary of a small act of kindness can cure a day of the blues, but being the benefactor of these acts can help lift someone out of depression by improving their self-satisfaction and self-worth.
Think of how happier a place East Brunswick might be if everyone in town engaged in a random act of kindness today…
