In light of the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve found myself speaking and writing a lot more about kindness recently. You can catch loads of my videos on my social media pages, plus I share lots in my Personal Development Club monthly live talks and in my free online course, ‘The Biology and Contagiousness of Kindness‘. One […]
immune system
The most contagious thing is kindness
We’re all thinking of contagion right now due to the coronavirus. Let’s not forget that kindness is also highly contagious. Scientists at Harvard and Yale measured the contagiousness of kindness out to three social steps. That is, when you be kind to someone, that person will be kind or kinder to someone else (1 social […]
6 ways your brain can’t distinguish real from imaginary
1) Belief Research shows us that when a person receives a placebo that they believe is a drug, and subsequently experiences a placebo effect, it is because their brain has produced the substances necessary to give them what they expected the drug to do. For example, when you receive a placebo for pain, but you […]
Loving kindness slows ageing at the genetic level
I’ve written a lot about the links between kindness and ageing, and part of my focus has been that kindness is the opposite of stress, at least in terms of how it makes us feel and the physiological consequences of those feelings. Just as feelings of stress produce stress hormones (like cortisol and adrenalin), so […]
How belief can drive recovery
When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the placebo effect was frequently dismissed as ‘all in the mind’ or ‘psychosomatic’. It wasn’t a real improvement, it was believed, merely that people ‘think’ they’re feeling better. This was conventional wisdom at that time and is still a widely held belief today. When a mother kisses a […]
Can you visualise drugs working?
I recently chatted with a girl who has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was a child. Now in her late 20s, she’s taken painkillers for years. When she was first diagnosed, a nurse instructed her to imagine her painkillers travelling to her joints and then dissolving into little particles and spreading out over the joints, […]
Can kindness boost the immune system?
In other blogs, I’ve written how kindness is the opposite of stress in terms of its physiological effects. At first, one might imagine that peace is the opposite of stress, but peace is more the absence of stress than its opposite. In a number of different ways, kindness produces opposite effects from those that stress […]
Do drugs work better if we believe in them?
It seems to me that they do – broadly speaking. Paying more for a simple painkiller, for example, seems to make it work better. A study of differently packaged aspirin tablets, for example, found that those that were branded to look more expensive worked much better than those that looked plain and generic. In other […]
A hug a day … boosts your immune system
I’ve written about hugs in some past blogs and books, in particular about how they produce the hormone oxytocin, which is good for the heart. I coined the term, ‘A hug a day keeps the cardiologist away’. I love hugs so I couldn’t wait to share some exciting new research about how they can protect […]
7 Ways that Love is Good for Your Health
Love feels good. I think we’d all agree on that. But it also has some surprising health benefits. Here’s a list of 7 of them: 1) Love is good for your heart I think we all expect this. Biologically, love produces the hormone ‘oxytocin’. It’s why it’s often referred to as the ‘Love Hormone’ […]