Why a Small Kindness Settles You Too, and Why It Still Counts When It's for Yourself

Friday 13 November is World Kindness Day. It began in 1998, at the first gathering of the World Kindness Movement in Tokyo, and the idea behind it is simple: notice kindness, and practise a little more of it. It can sound like a greetings-card sentiment, but there is some careful research suggesting that small, ordinary kindnesses do something quiet for the person doing them, not only for the person on the receiving end.

In 2018 a team led by Oliver Scott Curry at the University of Oxford gathered every experiment they could find in which people were asked to carry out acts of kindness and then had their wellbeing measured. Twenty-seven studies, covering just over 4,000 people, met their criteria. Across them, being kind had a small to medium positive effect on how the kind person felt. The review was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

It is worth being honest about the size of that. The researchers themselves described the effect as modest, roughly the kind of shift that would move someone less than one point on a ten-point happiness scale. Kindness is not a cure for a hard week, and it will not lift a low mood on its own. But a modest, reliable lift from something free, easy and good for someone else is not nothing.

A follow-up experiment in 2019, by Lee Rowland and Oliver Scott Curry in the Journal of Social Psychology, asked 683 people to spend seven days doing one kind of kindness each day. Some were kind to close friends and family, some to acquaintances and strangers, some simply watched for kindness around them, and some were asked to be kind to themselves. After a week, all of the kindness groups were happier than a group who did nothing in particular, and the groups did not differ much from one another.

That last finding is the gentle part. Being kind to yourself seemed to count in much the same way as being kind to someone else. In mid November, when the evenings close in by half past four and the week can feel long, that might be the kindness most of us skip. It does not need to be grand. An early night. A proper lunch away from the desk. Saying no to one thing so there is room to breathe.

If you would like to try it for a week, keep it small and specific. Text someone you have been meaning to reply to. Hold a door, let a car out, thank the person who made your coffee by name. Leave a kind review for a small shop. Then, once a day, do one thing purely because it is kind to you, and notice how it feels without asking it to fix anything.

It also helps to give kindness a little quiet to land in. A rushed favour done while thinking about the next email tends to pass unnoticed, even by you. A few slow minutes afterwards, a cup of tea held in both hands, a walk round the block, lets it settle. If things have felt heavy for a while, please be kind enough to yourself to talk to someone you trust or to your GP.

And if your kindness to yourself today is ten quiet minutes, make it a zen. On Create Your Zen, layer a crackling fire under soft rainfall, or a forest at dusk with the wind in the trees, keep it low, and press play. It is a small thing. That is rather the point.