Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How Kindness Can Improve Your Happiness and Health | Dr David Hamilton #307

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 104 of the podcast with pharmacist turned author dr david hamilton david has a special interest in the mind body connection and in this clip he shares some wonderful research which shows why kindness is so good for our happiness and our health a lot of your work now is showing the beautiful science that actually exists around kindness. This is becoming clearer and clearer to me as every year passes since I qualified for medical

Starting point is 00:01:57 school and I gain more experience and more experience to see more patients. This for me is the missing link in healthcare. People are far more aware of it, of the way in which even the way you talk to someone, how that can make them feel. In fact, there was a study on doctor visits, over 700 patients with symptoms of the cold or flu. And they participated in, it was called a care study, consultation and relational empathy. And they secretly had to give the doctor a score between 0 and 10 on the empathy that they showed during that visit. And those who scored the doctor a perfect 10 out of 10, their immune response to the same condition was 50% higher than everyone else. And it just came down to empathy, how it made them feel.

Starting point is 00:02:47 And what you're seeing is how you feel then is physically affecting the function of the immune system. And I think that's the key, isn't it? That it's not just in your head, it's changing things biologically, physiologically. That deep connection has tremendous physical effects. In fact, one of the side effects, I suppose, of that feeling connected or feeling good about it is affectionately known as the Mother Teresa effect. I think it was a study, I think it was at Yale or one of the other big American universities. They got over 100 people to watch a 50 minute video of Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta demonstrating

Starting point is 00:03:26 care and compassion to homeless people. And at the end of the study, their levels of a little immune antibody in the saliva called SIGA went up by about 50% for no reason other than just watching the video. And it stayed elevated for an hour or two afterwards and that's because for the hour or two afterwards they were still talking about didn't remember that part when mother Teresa she sat down beside that old really elderly gent and they didn't say a word she just sat beside him she took his hand and laid her head against his shoulder just so that he wouldn't feel alone at that time. And just that emotional bonding experience of watching them on that video spiked the immune system. It just lifted that little antibody level. So it's not just the person who received that, it's also if you're

Starting point is 00:04:18 watching that. Absolutely. It's watching it as well because it comes down to how it makes you feel. If you can feel a sense of connection from being the person who in this case is delivering kindness or compassion being on the receiving end or watching someone else whether it's live or even on a video it has more or less the same effect and i guess you know that could be why you know if you watch a really good film that really moves you and connects you and you feel like crying or you feel like you've really connected with it yeah i don't know that's been studied but i wouldn't it has actually has it so there was a clip of of oprah winfrey during the time of the oprah show and she was really changing people's lives and it was something to do with a school teacher in a class and what people watching it were moved to tears and felt so uplifted and it produced high levels

Starting point is 00:05:06 of what i call the kindness hormone oxytocin it's also called the bonding hormone the cuddle chemical but it produced high levels of that simply by feeling and moved and inspired by watching a like a five minute clip from from what used to be the op opera winfrey show yeah i mean it's really incredible the sort of things you're talking about uh human touch connection all these kind of i guess what we would call the softer components of health you're saying alongside physical exercise physical activity is the most important thing for your cardiovascular health i don't think many people would be familiar with that as an idea yeah just just warmth and connection but because they produce oxytocin so you can you can create that sense through generosity and kindness compassion empathy

Starting point is 00:05:53 all of anything that generates that sense of warmth and connection we we know produces oxytocin but what's interesting is all the research showing the physiological effects of i call it the kindness hormone, really to distinguish between stress hormones. Because physiologically, in many ways, kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of how it makes you feel. I mean, if you ask anyone, what's the opposite of stress? Most people say, oh, it's peace or it's calm. But that's not technically the opposite of stress. That's the absence of stress. Physiologically speaking, if you look at the physical effects of stress and you look at the physical effects of the feeling that you get through kindness which is warmth and connection then they're physiologically opposite even psychologically there's some studies

Starting point is 00:06:34 showing that you know emotionally we get the opposite effects because because many of this the physical effects of stress are not because of a situation but because of how you feel when you're in that situation because two people could be stuck in traffic and one person's feeling stressed and they're producing adrenaline and cortisol. The other person's feeling relaxed. They're not producing much at all. So it's not necessarily the traffic, it's how you feel. So the feelings of stress generate stress hormones. But when you be kind and those feelings you get of warmth and connection, they generate oxytocin. I call this, I call it a kindness hormone to make that distinction that it's a physical, it's a hormone that gets produced because of how you're feeling in that moment, which you initiate through empathy, compassion, touch, emotional warmth, any of these soft behaviors. And understanding this explains a large body of research that we knew the trend in the past,

Starting point is 00:07:29 but we didn't know why it worked that way. For example, why people with better quality of relationships have better cardiovascular systems, why things like hostility and aggression is correlated with higher levels of hardening of the arteries. We didn't know why that is, but now the evidence seems to suggest that aggression and hostility, for example,

Starting point is 00:07:49 reduce levels of the kinase hormone, oxytocin, and therefore we take away a vital part of cardioprotection because oxytocin is now called a cardioprotective hormone, meaning it protects the cardiovascular system. One of the ways it does it is to reduce blood blood pressure so so i i love explaining it in that sense that it's physically the opposite of stress because of how it makes you feel so you can feel that way through being the giver being the receiver or being the person who's watching a nice moment taking place yeah david my mind is blown this is um yeah this is so fascinating you know i i often suggest to

Starting point is 00:08:29 people that make kindness a practice practice thinking kind thoughts about people you know if you find yourself about to say something about someone stop for a minute and even just make an attempt you know not going to do it all the time but some of the times make an attempt, you know, not going to do it all the time, but some of the times make an attempt to think, I wonder if that person's struggling in their life right now. I know I'm talking about their behavior yesterday, but I wonder if they're struggling right now. You never know. I wonder if that man or woman is a good parent. I wonder what their relationship was with their parents and just change the dialogue. And what that does, it introduces empathy and introduces a different way of thinking and not always successful but oftentimes it'll make you feel a little bit more kind towards the person i think if we develop little practices

Starting point is 00:09:17 then kindness becomes a habit so that it's the go-to it's the first thought is the compassionate thought the kind thought and then the way in which you speak to people, the way in which you interact with people becomes more gentle and more warm because it becomes a habit. And that, I think, becomes your way. And I'm speaking from experience here because I have completely changed as a person

Starting point is 00:09:40 during the time that I've been really working on the mind-body connection, but time that I've been really working on the mind body connection, but particularly when I've been focused on kindness, I wasn't meaning as a horrible person, but relative, I have made large gains, I guess, in the,

Starting point is 00:09:55 I guess the quality of person that I've become and I've become gentler, more compassionate, more kind. I cry a lot more. I don't know if that's related to it, but I'm much softer than I was maybe 10 years ago. And it's a consequence of my awareness of what kindness and compassion is and what it does for us. I think that whole idea that the kindness is the opposite of stress is a really beautiful

Starting point is 00:10:19 concept. You've written about the five side effects of kindness right which i think is a lovely lovely idea so what are the five side effects of kindness so number one kindness makes you happier number two kindness is good for the heart number three kindness slows aging number four kindness improves relationships and number five kindness is contagious. And number five, kindness is contagious. There you go. Five side effects of kindness. I love that. And there's science behind all of that?

Starting point is 00:10:50 Absolutely. Behind all of it. In fact, the happiness stuff has been well studied. Typically, what you do is you compare people intentionally doing acts of kindness versus people in a control group who are not doing, who are just behaving as normal. And you can track the happiness levels before and after. And you can do it in a number group who are just behaving as normal. And you can track the happiness levels

Starting point is 00:11:06 before and after. And you can do it a number of different ways. But in almost all of those studies, you see net gains in happiness, or people who do more kindness generally tend to be typically happier. So what you see is kindness actually improves happiness. Another thing it does is it reduces stress at the same time. The slowing aging stuff is interesting because there's a number of processes of aging, a number of different ways that aging occurs. But one of them is something called oxidative stress or the production of free radicals.

Starting point is 00:11:38 In one study I cited when scientists were looking at the rate of oxidative stress in skin cells and they found that if you introduce the kindness hormone to the skin cells put under stress, the levels of oxidative stress were substantially less. And there's similar research looking at how the kindness hormone, I like to call it the kindness hormone. I love it.

Starting point is 00:11:58 I love it. How it has quite a substantial body-wide effect on oxidative stress, which is one of the processes of aging. It's just one of a number. I mean, kindness reducing the aging process, that is profound. And I love the fact that you call it the kindness hormone, oxytocin, which is also called the cuddle hormone or the cuddle chemical. The hug drug.

Starting point is 00:12:19 The hug drug. But, you know, in many ways, it's all kind of pointing to the same conclusion, which is when we are around other people who support us and we support them, we feel good. Our body changes, our genetic expression changes. We reduce things like inflammation and oxidative stress and immune dysfunction these things which actually those three things probably drive most chronic diseases at their core and we're saying that simply being around people we love who are empathetic who are kind who are compassionate it has profound impacts on all those things it's incredible it's you know puts a huge smile on my face hearing things like this because it's it's just a nice thing to hear right it's it's great

Starting point is 00:13:10 when the things that make us feel good as human beings also do good yes for us right that's that's kind of win-win all around i've said this many times it really all comes down to kind interactions you know what's the point in not being kind? Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a really silly thing to say, but I try to see the world that way. I don't always succeed. I think we're only human.

Starting point is 00:13:35 We're just trying to do the best we can. But I think if we make an effort to be a kind person, a decent person, it makes you feel better. It makes that person feel better and it just strengthens social bonds and then you find that communities just seem to work a little bit better people tend to work a little bit better groups work a little bit better when we're making an effort to be kind hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science

Starting point is 00:14:11 next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How Kindness Can Improve Your Happiness and Health | Dr David Hamilton #307

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