The recipe for happiness and success? Try compassion - CNN - 0 views
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(CNN)Looking for a way to be happier? Are you seeking deeper connections with friends or looking for more friends? Want to relate better to your co-workers? Try a little compassion.Compassion, as one scholar describes it, is "experiencing feelings of loving kindness toward another person's affliction." It's related to, but a little different from empathy, which the same scholar defines as "feeling with someone, that is, sharing the other person's emotion."
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What she, and many other scholars have found, is that compassion is key to coping. The compassionate tend to have deeper connections with others and more friends. They are more forgiving and have a stronger sense of life purpose. Many studies have shown these results.
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In that quiet space, sit in a comfortable position. Focus on your breath and try to clear your mind. The key is to be present in that space in that time. Then mentally focus on your heart area and think about someone you feel tenderness toward. This could be your spouse or your mom or your child.
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Dwell on those positive thoughts for a little bit. Then extend that same feeling toward yourself. Ruminate on that for a little while. Then expand that feeling out to others. Maybe think of someone you aren't as close to and think tenderly about them.
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You also become more accepting of your own failings. That's what a 2014 study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found. In this experiment, there were three small groups of women who were subjected to videos of distressing images. One group got empathy training. Another got compassion training.
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The people with the compassion training still felt these negative emotions, like those with empathy training did, but the part of their brain connected with reward and positive effect also lit up.
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Compassion prompts your brain to have a wider sense of what's going on and it gives you access to more ideas on how to act. When your brain feels threatened like it does with pain, even someone else's, it focuses on the pain only to make it go away, and shuts down those other avenues that incentivize you to help.
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Soldiers who took compassion training recovered faster from stressful situations, such as basic training. Their heart and breathing rates return to normal much quicker than those soldiers who don't get the training.
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School children who did a short eight-week compassion training program functioned better overall, a study showed. After the training, even students who struggled with mental challenges such as ADHD had better attendance and behavior records, and their grades improved.
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"Developing compassion, sets a foundation for the stability of the mind," Jha said. "And developing intrinsic compassion, a concern for the suffering of others and for oneself, that can be very powerful ... for all involved."