Speaker 1: Hey, good afternoon everybody. It is six twenty six and
Speaker 1: twenty ninth. God, we're moving into July already ready to
Speaker 1: celebrate our two hundred and fiftieth birthday.
Speaker 2: Today we're going to do a feel good research piece.
Speaker 1: That says how kindness can enhance your life and actually
Speaker 1: affect your genes.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for this one.
Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome to Health Talk with Doctor Lynn. Your
Speaker 1: daily dose. The information you hear on the show is informational.
Speaker 1: It's not meant to diagnose or treat any disease. Any
Speaker 1: kind of complete health conditions must be checked out and
Speaker 1: discussed with your primary care physician. Get ready for the
Speaker 1: good news of the day. God bless you, folks, and
Speaker 1: here is Doctor Lynn and our daily devotional today comes
Speaker 1: to the Book of Psalms, chapter five. As you get
Speaker 1: out of bed this morning, be aware of my presence
Speaker 1: with you. You may not be thinking clearly yet, but I am.
Speaker 1: Your early morning thoughts tend to be anxious ones. As
Speaker 1: you get connected with me, invite me into your thoughts
Speaker 1: by whispering my name. Suddenly your day brightens and feels
Speaker 1: more user friendly. You cannot dread a day that is
Speaker 1: vibrant with my presence. You gain confidence in knowing what
Speaker 1: I am with you that you face nothing alone. Anxiety
Speaker 1: stems from asking the wrong question, if such and such happens,
Speaker 1: can I handle it? The true question is not whether
Speaker 1: you can cope with whatever happens, but whatever. You and
Speaker 1: I together can handle anything that occurs. It is this
Speaker 1: you and I together factor that gives you confidence to
Speaker 1: face the day cheerfully, Hellelujah to that stay tuned seven
Speaker 1: two seven, nine one six four two went five to
Speaker 1: reach me off air. Kindness begins with empathy, which activates
Speaker 1: brain circuits that mere others feelings had foster compassion. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, Kent Neurburne decided to take a job
Speaker 1: as a cab driver. What I didn't count on when
Speaker 1: I took the job, but it was also a ministry.
Speaker 1: Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a
Speaker 1: rolling confessional. He's now a newborn now an award winning
Speaker 1: author from Minnesota, wrote a book called Make Me An
Speaker 1: Instrument of Your Piece. I encountered people whose lives amazed
Speaker 1: me and nopled me, made me laugh, and made me weep,
Speaker 1: And none of those lives touched me more than that
Speaker 1: of a woman I picked up on a late, warm
Speaker 1: August night. He arrived at a given address, but no
Speaker 1: one came out, and I thought, well, I better decide.
Speaker 1: Do I go up knock on the door? Just wait here?
Speaker 1: A lot of drivers would just have taken off. He
Speaker 1: decided to go knock. A woman came to the door,
Speaker 1: and she appeared to be in her eighties. The woman asked,
Speaker 1: would you help me carry my suitcase out to the car? Sure,
Speaker 1: he said. That's when the woman told him I'm going
Speaker 1: to a hospice. The doctor said I have to go.
Speaker 1: She got in the cab, sat in the back and asked,
Speaker 1: can we drive through the city. This would be the
Speaker 1: last time I'll see it, and I'd like to pass
Speaker 1: by some of the places that were important in my life.
Speaker 1: She took me by a dance hall and part of
Speaker 1: the city. This is where she said heard her husband
Speaker 1: first met. She took me by the houses where she lived.
Speaker 1: She took me by a hotel where she had been
Speaker 1: an elevator operator. We just drove through the city the
Speaker 1: whole night, and it was getting late and early morning,
Speaker 1: and she said, Okay, I'm tired, let's go now. Nerburn
Speaker 1: drew her to the hospice. She got out of the
Speaker 1: cab and asked how much do I owe you?
Speaker 2: You don't know me anything.
Speaker 1: Nerbourne said, oh, you have to make a living. She said,
Speaker 1: there are other fairs. Don't worry, he replied. Nerbourne helped
Speaker 1: her get her bag out of the car and the
Speaker 1: hospice staff was waiting for her with a wheelchair. She
Speaker 1: then went over and gave Nerberg a big hug and said,
Speaker 1: thank you for doing this. It was one of those
Speaker 1: moments it makes you think, maybe that is why I
Speaker 1: was put on earth to do that for that particular moment,
Speaker 1: to help that woman. On the surface, being kind benefits
Speaker 1: to recipient, but by giving you, the benefactor also gain
Speaker 1: a meaningful and tangible ways. The effects of kindness manifest
Speaker 1: concretely in scientific data, even in your DNA. Kindness is
Speaker 1: part of human nature. Scientists have found that children as
Speaker 1: young as eighteen months can demonstrate clear intentions to help others.
Speaker 1: Acts of kindness usually begin with empathy, as we feel
Speaker 1: compassion for others suffering word klind to free them from it,
Speaker 1: motivating active kindness. In those moments, our brains empathy circuit
Speaker 1: lights up, building on decades of neuroscience research, we know
Speaker 1: that when mere neurons activate, we feel or react in
Speaker 1: ways that reflect.
Speaker 2: Those to whom we are observing.
Speaker 1: Our brains, to a certain extent, experience a degree of
Speaker 1: overlap between the experience of others.
Speaker 2: And of our own.
Speaker 1: However, kindness goes beyond the desire to free people from
Speaker 1: suffering and includes an intention to improve their well being
Speaker 1: without expecting anything in return. When you give, something is
Speaker 1: inadvertently gained that engenders beauty in your own inner world.
Speaker 1: A twenty twenty three study out of Australia, six hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy one participants set off in a two week
Speaker 1: experiment in living well. The participants were randomly assigned into
Speaker 1: four groups. One group was asked to be kind to themselves,
Speaker 1: the second to be more outgoing and sociable, the third
Speaker 1: to engage in activities such as art and music appreciation,
Speaker 1: and the fourth to engage.
Speaker 2: In acts of kindness for others.
Speaker 1: Then, day by day, the researchers checked in about how
Speaker 1: these activities made the participants feel. When it came to
Speaker 1: you to pneumonia, a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment
Speaker 1: helping others trumped.
Speaker 2: All the other activities.
Speaker 1: While self care, socializing, and exploring art evoked positive feelings,
Speaker 1: they couldn't compete with the warm afterglow when others experience
Speaker 1: through the engaging and acts of kindness. Naturally, kindness cultivates happiness.
Speaker 1: In a twenty nineteen study published in a Journal of
Speaker 1: Social Psychology, researchers found that people who performed kind acts
Speaker 1: every day for seven days experienced a significant increase in happiness. Wherever,
Speaker 1: whether people were kind to their family or to strangers,
Speaker 1: the more kind deeds they did or observed, the happier
Speaker 1: they were. Furthermore, kindness affects more than emotions. It influences
Speaker 1: one DNA. Our group of scientists from University of California
Speaker 1: set out to discover whether being kind to others changes
Speaker 1: our bodies at the genetic level. To empirically test their query,
Speaker 1: researchers randomly assigned adults to three groups for four weeks.
Speaker 1: One group performed acts of kindness for specific people, others
Speaker 1: performed acts for themselves, and the last group performed a
Speaker 1: neutral activity as a control. At the beginning and the
Speaker 1: end of the study, the participants gave blood samples. The
Speaker 1: scientists looked for changes in the set of genes linked
Speaker 1: to inflammation and stress. Genes that went over active are
Speaker 1: associated with a higher risk of diseases such as heart problems.
Speaker 2: The findings were fascinating.
Speaker 1: The group that performed kind acts for other people showed
Speaker 1: the greatest healthy change in their gene activity and immune cells.
Speaker 1: The blood samples showed reduced expression of genes tind inflammation
Speaker 1: and stress. Most human behaviors, emotions, and traits are at
Speaker 1: least somewhat socially contagious, said Abigail marsh And neuroscience from
Speaker 1: Georgetown University. Seeing other people do kind deeds triggers the
Speaker 1: witness brain circuits to mirror the kind as, priming them
Speaker 1: to be kinder to themselves without a conscious effort. A
Speaker 1: famous parable tells of how a storm left thousands of
Speaker 1: dying starfish stranded on the beach. A man watched his
Speaker 1: crowds gathered, but did nothing. Then the child began picking
Speaker 1: up the starfish one by one, throwing them back into
Speaker 1: the sea. Some demand said, don't you realize there were
Speaker 1: miles and miles of beaches and hundreds of starfish.
Speaker 2: You can't make a difference.
Speaker 1: The child's smile picked up another starfish, drew into the
Speaker 1: ocean and replied, I made a difference to that one.
Speaker 1: The man was moved he joined in, than one by one,
Speaker 1: the whole crowd joined. As data suggests single acts of
Speaker 1: kindness may spread further than you think. Research by Adam Grant,
Speaker 1: a professor at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: corroborates the contagious elements of kindness and what he calls
Speaker 1: upstream reciprocity by controlling experience. Participants who witness someone else
Speaker 1: helping another person were twenty six more likely.
Speaker 2: To help a random stranger later.
Speaker 1: The study, published in the Psychology Science, researchers recruited volunteers
Speaker 1: and randomly assigned them to another eight week mindfulness training
Speaker 1: or a control activity. At the end of the experiment,
Speaker 1: participants believed they were reporting for an unrelated task. In
Speaker 1: a waiting room. There, an actor on crutches passed by.
Speaker 1: The actor, who visibly winced while walking, stopped just as
Speaker 1: she arrived at the chairs. She then looked at her cellphone,
Speaker 1: audibly sighed in discomfort.
Speaker 2: And leaned back against the wall. What happened next was
Speaker 2: quite telling.
Speaker 1: Fifty percent of the mediation trained group quickly gave up
Speaker 1: their chairs. Only fifteen percent of the control group did
Speaker 1: the same. The authors noted that meditation resulted in a
Speaker 1: large effect, increasing the odds of acting to relieve another
Speaker 1: person's pain by more than five times. Follow Up experiments
Speaker 1: confirmed that even shorter meditation interventions for three weeks nurture
Speaker 1: significant empathy. A simple model is to ask will doing
Speaker 1: the good thing mean more to the other person than
Speaker 1: it will inconvenience me? And when that's the case, do
Speaker 1: the right thing. Notice it doesn't come in a pill.
Speaker 1: All right, folks, God bless you, have a great week,
Speaker 1: and I'll see it