Everyone’s heard of superfoods by now – the blueberries, the kale, the chia seeds we dutifully sprinkle onto things because we know, deep down, they’re good for us. We chase these nutrient powerhouses for our bodies without thinking twice.
But there’s a superfood for your mental health too. It doesn’t come from a health store or the depths of the Amazon rainforest, and you can’t buy it in a jar.
It’s kindness.
A ray of sunshine through the cloud
Picture a genuinely crappy day. Everything’s going wrong, there’s a grey cloud hanging over your head that won’t budge – and then someone, a colleague, a friend, even a total stranger, does something small and kind. Lends an ear. Hands you a coffee. Offers you their seat.
Suddenly the cloud has a crack of sunlight in it.
Here’s the thing that makes kindness so remarkable as a mental-health tool: it isn’t just good for the person receiving it. It’s good for the person giving it, and it’s good for anyone who merely witnesses it. Kindness is a win-win-win. And it isn’t just a fleeting nice feeling – the evidence shows it has profound, lasting effects on mental health.
I often think about my late friend Margaret. She battled severe depression for years, and after one particularly difficult period, she wrote to Patch Adams – the real-life doctor Robin Williams played in the film – after watching a movie about his life. He wrote back the same day. His advice was disarmingly simple: “Go out and serve and see your depression lift.”
Margaret took it literally. She and her husband threw themselves into volunteering with a local befriending charity, and later trained as a laughter therapist alongside Patch himself, visiting care homes and children’s hospitals dressed as a clown.
When I met her, not long after all this began, she was one of the most consistently cheerful people I’d ever known. Helping others didn’t just distract her from her depression – it became her beacon.
Why we’re wired for this
Kindness feels this good because it’s ancient. Genuinely ancient – evolutionary biologists trace kindness-related genes (oxytocin and its receptor) back roughly 100 million years (although its roots go back around 700 million years).
Somewhere along the way, our ancestors figured out that sharing, cooperating, and looking out for each other was a better survival strategy than going it alone.
That inclination got passed down, generation after generation, until it became simply part of what we are. The good feeling you get from a kind act? That’s Mother Nature quietly high-fiving you for keeping the whole human project going.
In 1979, a researcher named Allan Luks coined the term “helper’s high” after studying over 3,000 volunteers. More than 95% of them reported some kind of high from helping others – and the ones who volunteered regularly were significantly more likely to be in good health than those who didn’t.
Every study since has confirmed it: kindness makes us happier, and it’s protective against depression and anxiety. It’s less a nice bonus and more a mental health pill, minus the prescription.
There’s a lovely study from the University of British Columbia that captures this well. Researchers asked 632 people to record everything they spent money on for a month – bills, groceries, coffee, gifts, everything. The happiest people were the ones whose spending included something for someone else.
So the scientists dug further: they gave volunteers either $5 or $20 and told half to spend it on themselves and half to spend it on someone else. By the end of the day, regardless of the amount, the people who’d spent it on others were happier.
It didn’t matter if it was $5 or $20. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was $1 or $1 million. The money was never really the point. The giving was.
The chemistry of caring
Thanks to modern neuroscience, we can now actually watch this happen in the brain – and it’s a genuine feel-good party up there. Acts of kindness trigger a release of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and natural opiates like endorphin.
I call oxytocin the “kindness hormone” – it shows up reliably whenever we experience empathy, compassion, kindness, in much same way stress hormones show up when we’re stressed.
Here’s the interesting part, though: it’s not the act itself that triggers these chemicals. It’s how we feel about it – that momentary felt connection that comes through genuine kindness. Two people can do the exact same kind deed, but if only one of them genuinely means it and therefore feels it, only they get the hormonal reward.
And you don’t even need to be the one doing the kind act – you get a version of the same lift from receiving kindness, or simply watching it happen to someone else, even on a video.
This ties into something the neuroscientist Candace Pert called “molecules of emotion” – the idea that emotional experiences generate neuropeptides that ripple out into real, physical changes throughout the body. It helped kick off an entire field, psychoneuroimmunology (mercifully shortened to PNI), studying exactly how our emotions, brains, and immune systems talk to each other.
There’s a nice parallel with mindfulness here too. Regular mindfulness practice physically changes the brain’s focus regions, a bit like exercise builds muscle. Kindness-and-compassion-based practices do something similar for the brain’s happiness and empathy regions.
The more you practice what I call kindfulness – mindfulness with the caring left in – the more those regions strengthen, and the more naturally happy and empathetic you tend to feel.
An old idea, rediscovered
None of this is actually new, even if the brain-scan technology is. Back in 1796, an English Quaker named William Tuke set up the York Retreat, a radical alternative to the brutal asylums of the era, where he cared for people with mental health difficulties.
His approach had no conventional treatments at all. Instead, residents looked after each other – cooking, cleaning, listening, gardening, playing games together. It was kindness, dressed up as trust, respect, and autonomy.
It worked. People got better. The model spread to America, where psychiatrists were so struck by their patients’ improvement that they became convinced it must be causing actual “organic changes in brain matter.”
They were right, as it turns out – we now know that regular experiences of kindness do measurably alter brain circuits in ways that lift mood and buffer against stress and anxiety. It just took us over two centuries to prove what Tuke had already worked out by instinct.
An unexpected antidote to anxiety
I’ll let you in on something here: I’ve dealt with anxiety on and off since I was a child. So it meant something to me, learning that kindness can act as a genuine antidote to it – whether you’re giving it, receiving it, or simply standing nearby when it happens.
When you’re deep in anxiety, your thoughts spiral into an endless loop of “what ifs,” and rational thinking rarely helps much. But a small act of kindness can interrupt that cycle almost instantly.
It redirects your attention outward, away from the churn in your own head, and the oxytocin that comes with it actively dials down the brain regions responsible for anxiety – like turning down a dimmer switch in a room that’s too bright.
There’s also the connection piece. Anxiety tends to isolate us, even in a crowd. Kindness – especially face to face – reminds us that we’re not actually alone in it. And anxiety and genuine connection have a hard time coexisting in the same moment.
In one study, 115 highly anxious people were asked to perform six acts of kindness a week for a month. By the end, they reported feeling better, more satisfied in their relationships, and less inclined to avoid social situations altogether.
The smile you can’t help returning
Here’s a small, delightful footnote to end on. Researchers at Uppsala University once flashed a smiling face on a screen in front of volunteers – but only for a few thousandths of a second, faster than the conscious mind could register.
Using a technique known as facial EMG, they found that every participant’s smile muscles twitched in response, even though none of them consciously saw anything at all.
In a follow-up, people were shown a smile and instructed to frown instead of smiling back. Their smile muscles fired first anyway, every time, before their conscious mind could override it. We are, quite literally, built to mirror kindness before we can stop ourselves.
So if you’ve ever smiled at a stranger and gotten a blank look back, take some comfort, because somewhere, for a fraction of a second, they smiled first.
They just don’t know it yet.
An invitation
Kindness isn’t a soft addition to a mental health routine – it’s one of the more evidence-backed tools we have, sitting quietly in plain sight, free, and available to absolutely everyone, regardless of what kind of day you’re having.
So here’s a small invitation, not a task: today, notice one moment where a small kindness is within easy reach – a compliment, a listening ear, a seat given up, a coffee paid forward. You don’t need to plan it or perform it. Just let yourself notice it’s there, and see what it stirs.
Your brain, it turns out, has been waiting for the excuse all along.
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This post was adapted from my book, ‘The Joy of Actually Giving a F*ck’ (Hay House, 2024). Link.
References
Oxytocin is around 100 million years old. Link.
Allan Luks’ study is detailed in his book, ‘The Healing Power of Doing Good’. Link.
University of British Columbia studies of spending money on others or ourselves. Link.
Candace Pert’s book, ‘Molecules of Emotion’. Link.
The antidote to anxiety study. Link.
The Uppsala University studies. Link.