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#ElvisEnergyExperiment: Kindness

April 29, 2021

In 2019, we’re exploring our energy. How it affects us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We’ve hooked up with a series of experts who will set an experiment every month to help us discover a new way of managing our energy.

For December we’re going to be looking at Kindness and how doing good things for others can have a profound impact on our energy and the energy of those around us. As the world we live in gets faster and faster, kindness and compassion can at times feel like they’ve been left behind in favour of selfies, self-interest and the eternal pursuit of our own growth and success.

Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, David W. Orr put it perfectly when he said: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

Witnessing acts of kindness produces oxytocin, occasionally referred to as the ‘love hormone’ which can lower our blood pressure and improve our overall heart-health. According to research from Emory University, when we're kind to another person, our brain’s pleasure and reward centers light up, as if we were the recipient of the good deed—not the giver. This phenomenon is called the “helper’s high.” Who doesn’t want some of that?

Our partners for this months Kindness #ElvisEnergyExperiment are the brilliant Action for Happiness. A movement of people committed to building a happier and more caring society - where people care less about what they can get just for themselves and more about the happiness of others. And if that alone didn't make them an awesome bunch of folk, their patron is the Dalai Lama and from what we hear he's a pretty kind and happy man, so we couldn't be more delighted to be working with Action for Happiness this month.


Throughout December, Action for Happiness are running their #DoGoodDecember campaign, which includes an alternative to the traditional advent calendar. Their #DoGoodDecember calendar focuses on promoting kindness through daily actions we can all do each day to help spread a bit more kindness in the world. We're going to be following this calendar for the month, giving each days activity a go, and you can join us by downloading the calendar on the link below or by visiting the Action for Happiness website here.

Photo by Jess Zoerb on Unsplash