Story highlights
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Compassion for others can lead to more friends, success and
sustainable happiness
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Training to be more compassionate changes your brain for good
(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."
But
compassion is not for the touchy-feely Oprah set alone. The U.S. military and
professional sports teams found real success with mindfulness and compassion
training. In fact, the baseball team that incorporated mindfulness practice into their routine
last year, the Chicago Cubs, won
the World Series. The "lovable losers" hadn't won a World Series in
108 years.
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Jha has
U.S. Department of Defense contracts to teach mindfulness and compassion to the military. At the University of Miami,
she works with football players and regular students to teach them resilience
in the face of high stress, and regular everyday stress, too.
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.
Compassion
also has direct personal benefit. The compassionate tend to be happier,
healthier, more self-confident, less
self-critical (pdf), and more resilient.
But if
you've ever struggled to find loving kindness for the guy who cut you off on
your morning commute, know you are not alone.
Recent politics have exposed real anger,
coldness and polarization among Americans, polls say. We may even be getting less
compassionate, as a 2009 study showed.
Compassion
takes practice. But if you do practice, the experts promise the next time you
get cut off, while you may not be happy about it, it won't ruin your morning.
How do you get to compassion?
A whole
industry exists to teach you compassion, but it doesn't have to cost you money.
You can start simply with a common exercise called the Loving Kindness
Meditation. All you need is a quiet space and about 20 minutes, or 15 minutes
if the thought of having to find 20 stresses you out.
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.
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.
As time
allows add more people to that circle. After a little practice, you can add
people who don't automatically inspire tender thoughts. Serious practitioners
eventually add in all of humanity.
This
may sound a little woo-woo, but several studies show this simple exercise
really does strengthen your sense of compassion.
Why does it work?
Even
short-term exercises like this broaden your attention, your thinking and your
overall sense of well-being in a way that lasts.
That's in part because it changes your brain.
Compassion
helps your brain become more flexible to instinctively help you become more
altruistic, or pro-social, toward others.
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.
The
control group got basic memory training. When researchers looked at their
brains before and after two training rounds, they saw a difference in reaction
to the same distressing video.
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.
For the
empathy trained, the part of the brain associated with threat and social
disconnection was engaged instead. That suggests they'd likely shy away from
the pain they were seeing and not be as apt to help. That also meant those who
had the compassion training saw an increased positive affect of the training
and decreased negative affect, as compared to the other trainings.
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.
Who should you try compassion training?
Compassion
training has helped others who experience regular stress in their work. After
compassion training, doctors and nurses who
suffer a lot of professional burnout become better caregivers and feel empathy
without internalizing a patient's distress as their own.
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.
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.
Dr. Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi developed
a cognitively based compassion training program at Emory University that is
based on Tibetan contemplative methods. Negi has seen stressed students and
members of the public make remarkable progress.
"There
is a real benefit to this practice, including physical health benefits and a
real reduction in physical signs of stress," Negi said. His studies have
documented success in specific patient populations, including breast cancer
survivors and people with PTSD, and for those with run-of-the-mill stress.
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"Creating
an environment in which people can learn soft skills and emotional
intelligence -- these are so important," Negi said.
The
happiness that can come from compassion training is the kind that lasts, unlike
the fleeting feeling of happiness that might come, for example, when you buy a
new car. (Scientists call this the hedonic treadmill effect.) Happiness derived
from compassion is sustainable.
"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."
https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/12/health/compassion-happiness-training/index.html
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