Six Daily Choices for Health, Well-Being, and Longevity

Kindness is linked with clinically significant improvements to your health and well-being.

There’s a biological benefit to showing others compassion. Science indicates that people who display gratitude, kindness, optimism, forgiveness and happiness often enjoy greater longevity and overall well-being. Kindness is also an evolutionary strategy vital to humanity’s survival. It provides “a sense of belonging,” helping social groups cohere without the need to identify a common enemy or resort to emotional coercion or threats.

“Kindness, as an indispensable and essential social principle, should be the basis of any relationship between human beings so that they can relate in the most useful, fraternal and elevated way possible.”

Being kind to others may improve recipients’ health in clinically significant ways. For example, according to research from Harvard University, using “positive psychology” interventions, such as displaying gratitude or optimism, when treating patients with cardiovascular conditions like heart failure is linked with the improvement of patients’ conditions. Scientists working at cancer research centers have outlined six different ways to integrate kindness into patient treatment plans to improve patient outcomes: Listening deeply to patients; displaying empathy; going above and beyond patient and family expectations, embracing an ethos of generosity; reducing patient stress through targeted assistance; honestly discussing patients’ health with them (with positive framing); and offering support to patients’ families.

Embracing an optimistic mindset prevents premature aging by slowing telomere shortening.

Your telomeres – DNA structures that serve as markers for aging — serve as a prime indicator of your overall health and susceptibility to diseases such as osteoarthritis, cancer and diabetes. Telomeres protect your chromosomes and prevent cell death. As you age, your telomeres naturally shorten, and people born with shorter telomeres tend to have shorter life expectancies.

Fortunately, genetics aren’t the only factor determining how fast your telomeres shorten. Factors you can control, such as your environment and lifestyle – like whether you smoke – can also accelerate telomere shortening. High stress levels are also one of your telomeres’ “greatest enemies,” as stress leads to inflammation, which damages cell health. Those suffering from chronic stress conditions and depression are more likely to experience accelerated biological aging. Once you’ve prematurely shortened your telomeres, you can’t undo the damage, making it vital that you take steps to reduce the stress in your life today.

“Optimism, strongly correlated with good health and longevity, is a mental disposition that we can learn and cultivate, making it a powerful ally on our path to well-being.”

But all is not lost if you’re more pessimistic in temperament. You can nurture optimism by intentionally adopting strategies such as practicing kindness, meditating and expressing gratitude – possibly with the help of a cognitive behavioral therapist. Research also indicates that simply spending five minutes a day visualizing the best version of yourself can help boost optimism levels in as little as two weeks.

Forgiving yourself and others frees you from the toxic effects of anger and resentment.

It’s time for a new paradigm of forgiveness. Treat it as a tool for connection, compassion and liberation, as opposed to viewing it within a dualistic “victim-torturer” framework imbued with judgmental concepts, such as “sin” or “guilt.” True forgiveness requires you to feel a sense of connection to all of humanity and understand that people often make poor decisions due to their own experiences of trauma and neglect. It reflects a choice to liberate yourself and others from anger while attuning yourself to feelings such as harmony and happiness.

“Day after day, without even realizing it, we build a wall around our hearts – a wall made of anger, guilt, shame, judgments, recriminations and rigidity.”

When it comes to forgiving those who have wronged you, start by conceding that they are humans who made mistakes but have the capacity to reflect and change.  Still, it’s important to note that doing so isn’t synonymous with forgetting. Forgiveness is a tool survivors can use to overcome emotions such as resentment, which will erode their health and well-being if not dealt with.

Boost resilience, increase self-esteem and improve sleep with gratitude.

Practicing gratitude is critical to your overall well-being for several reasons, including:

• Improved physical health – 2013 research in Personality and Individual Differences demonstrates a correlation between being grateful and taking care of your health through actions like regularly getting medical checkups and exercising.
• Improved psychological health – Gratitude researcher Robert A. Emmons confirms a link between gratitude and happiness: Practicing gratitude reduces depression by decreasing negative emotions such as regret and envy.
• Improved sleep – Spending just 15 minutes a day writing in a gratitude journal improves sleep quality, according to 2011 research in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being.
• Better self-esteem – According to a 2014 study in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, athletes who display gratitude see a rise in self-esteem, vital for optimal performance.
• Increased resilience – According to a study published in 2003 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, expressing gratitude helped survivors of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States to overcome their traumatic experience.
• Enhanced ability to make friends – According to 2014 research in Emotion, when you thank people shortly after making their acquaintance, you’re not just demonstrating good manners, you’re also more likely to create a new friendship or connection.

Achieve “eudaimonia” happiness through self-actualization and purpose.

Scientists have connected happiness to greater overall health because how you feel shapes how you behave – in healthy or unhealthy ways. For example, those with greater happiness levels and lower cortisol levels tend to have less harmful fat around their heart. But not all kinds of happiness are created equal.

“Happiness manifests itself as a natural state of being when you are fully aware that you exist – an intense, unconditional, existential happiness.”

Many people today focus on hedonic happiness: pursuing goals such as wealth accumulation and material goods. But when people become wealthy, happiness levels actually tend to decrease – a paradox attributable to the fact that people often sacrifice the “relational goods” that contribute to happiness, such as participating in community life and spending time with family, when working to accumulate wealth.

Isolation and toxic relationships are linked to premature death.

The quality of your relationships affects your overall health. According to a meta-analysis published in 2010 in PLOS Medicine of the findings in 148 different studies, when you lack strong social connections, you increase your risk of dying prematurely by as much as 50%. A Harvard study of men between ages 42 and 77 found that those who were single, didn’t belong to any community groups and had fewer than six relatives or friends, were more likely to suffer nonfatal strokes and to die of suicide, accidents and cardiovascular disease. When choosing relationships, focus on quality over quantity: Conflict-ridden marriages have toxic effects on both physical and mental health. In contrast, more harmonious couple relationships benefit brain health and memory in old age. 

“Relationships are real food, and as such, they can be toxic or rich in emotional, vital, and mental nutrients.”

Most people are unaware of the factors that lead them to form connections with others. Factors that shape the choice to create a friendship include instinctual factors, centering around sensory impulses; sentimental factors, such as feelings of familiarity or security; intellectual factors, in that you’ve evaluated the pros and cons of a connection; ideological factors, when the individual shares your ethics and values; or social factors, when, for example, someone provides a sense of social validation or affirmation.

Because most people don’t consider why they become friends with others, they may enter into inauthentic relationships. Reflect carefully on why you’re spending time with those you consider your friends. Remind yourself that friendship is ultimately a choice. If you’d like to start cultivating healthier relationships yet feel socially isolated, consider volunteering: You’ll likely feel more connected to your community, overcome loneliness, and connect with new friends who share your values.

Tools such as meditation, music and nature can help you become healthier and more kind.

Leverage the following tools to align yourself with the emotions and values associated with kindness while boosting your health and well-being:

• Meditation – Long-term practitioners of loving-kindness meditation (LKM), which centers around cultivating unselfish feelings of kindness and compassion toward others, tend to have longer telomeres than those who don’t regularly meditate.
• Music – Music can enhance your neural networks, decrease your heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones and inflammation levels, alleviate pain and lessen the damage caused by heart attacks and strokes.
• Nature – Living near green spaces is connected to lower mortality rates and longer telomere length. Prolonged exposure to nature also positively affects brain health. You’re more likely to have more significant amounts of gray matter in brain areas connected to attention and memory. Strengthen your connection to nature by embracing a mindset shift: Humans are not separate from nature but part of it, so you should treat the natural world and other life forms with kindness.

Cultivate inner peace by taking control of your mindset.

Your brain is inundated with roughly 34 gigabytes of information every day. Media creators compete for your attention, filling your news feed with sensationalist stories about issues such as homicides and terrorism. Chronic exposure to negative information can trigger your brain’s survival responses, leading to feelings of panic. Take control of your mindset, refocusing your attention on kindness, beauty and harmony instead, thus protecting your health and well-being.

“We are architects of our future, and we can create, through silence and thought, an inner and outer reality filled with harmony, optimism, peace, happiness, joy, and love.”

To experience greater feelings of harmony, work on balancing the three “guans” — or “attributes,” a concept taken from Indo-Vedic culture:

1. “Tamas” – When you’re in a “tamasic” or “dark” state of mind, you may feel relaxed, lethargic, heavy, bored or apathetic. When you cultivate a healthy balance of tamas, you feel well-rested and calm, but when you have too much or too little tamas, you might feel a sense of inertia or struggle with insomnia.
2. “Rajas” — When you’re in a “dynamic” or “rajasic” state of mind, you may feel energetic, focused, restless, anxious or excited. A healthy balance of rajas looks like dynamism, while an unhealthy excess or deficiency can look like hyperactivity or a lack of action.
3. “Sattva” — When in a “sattvic” state, you’re experiencing the “truth” of consciousness. Too much sattva can look like spaciness, while too little can appear like a lack of inspiration. Engage in activities that help you balance your sattva, contributing to feelings such as serenity and peace.