Compassion is a powerful emotion that makes people feel empathy and concern for others. The person receiving the compassion and the person giving it benefit when others are treated with compassion.
Several studies have demonstrated how exhibiting compassion can positively impact various aspects of life, including relationships, mental health, and overall happiness.
Several religious and spiritual traditions emphasize compassion, which has been found to encourage prosocial conduct, lessen violence, and increase peaceful coexistence.
In summary, exhibiting compassion for others can profoundly affect all spheres of life, both the individual and the collective.
Ways of showing compassion to others:
- Open the door for someone as it shows you are happy in their presence, making them feel wanted.
- Motivate others whenever they feel down and cannot work for themselves.
- Practice acts of kindness that will help you light up someone’s life and help them out in need.
- Allocate a specific time to bond with your friends and family, which will help you create some beautiful relationships with them.
- Share a hug or a handshake when someone feels down, which might be a positive sign for them.
What Is Compassion?
Compassion is the capacity to sympathize with and understand others who are going through pain or adversity.
It entails recognizing and accepting their suffering or difficulties and being inspired to act to lessen it.
Together with kindness, generosity, and concern for others’ well-being without seeking compensation, compassion includes these traits.
It is a key component of human connection and is necessary to build a kinder and more accepting world.
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How to Practise Compassion?
To practice compassion, One should begin by learning what it entails to empathize with others genuinely.
One approach is actively listening to others and attempting to comprehend their perspectives.
Performing deeds of kindness and selflessness can also aid in developing a caring mentality.
Regular mindfulness practices and meditation can also help one cultivate a compassionate mentality, enabling one to focus on the present and let go of unfavorable ideas and emotions.
And finally, being surrounded by uplifting and encouraging others can also help to foster compassion.
We can cultivate a kind and sympathetic view of the world by implementing these practices into our daily lives.
How to Cultivate Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion is the practice of treating oneself with kindness, empathy, and understanding.
To cultivate self-compassion, start by acknowledging your pain and suffering and then remind yourself that it’s a normal part of the human experience.
You should assist and be kind to yourself like you would a close friend who is in need. You can practice mindfulness by putting yourself in the present and refraining from self-criticism.
Finally, prioritize your mental and physical well-being by giving self-care activities like exercise, a healthy diet, and enough sleep a high priority.
You can develop self-compassion with work and enjoy more well-being and pleasure as a result.
Benefits of Self Compassion
It makes you happy
What could be the first benefit of compassion, apart from it making you happy? Scientists have studied human brains and shown that happy hormones are secreted like you get something when you give something to someone.
Researchers have done a depths study of compassion and have observed that the pleasure centers of the brain are more satisfied when you receive something, but here’s the twist, it is satisfied the same way when you donate or gift something to someone, it can either be donating to a charity, or an NGO, or helping out someone in need.
It makes you happier than when you buy something for yourself
Research conducted by Prof. Michael Norton, published in science, showed that people tend to become even happier when they buy something to gift someone else than when they buy something for themselves.
A similar experiment was repeated after a few years, and the outcome was just the same.
The thing that happens when you are about to gift something to someone is that you are excited about how they would react to the gift.
How they would like your surprise, and this excitement makes you happier than when you buy something for yourself, as you already know the importance of that thing to you and how happy you will be after you buy it.
Compassion leads to kindness.
It is a common thing observed in most people, rather in everyone who inculcates compassion in them, that they are kind. There is a certain link between kindness and compassion.
You can be compassionate without being kind enough. You cannot just help out someone if you don’t feel sad about them, and this kindness provokes you to go out and help them, and that is when you portray your compassion.
Kindness is what commences compassion, and your love and respect for others carry it on. The same goes when you are about to donate something, like to a charity. You don’t donate unless you are kind enough.
Kindness is attractive
A few years back, dating preferences showed that both men and women preferred a kinder individual as their partner.
This shows that kindness is helpful while giving out and helping others and in personal relationships to ensure the longevity of your bonds with others.
Not just talking about the relationship between lovers, all kinds of relationships, when touched with kindness from both ends, when needed, is extremely beneficial in keeping the bond intact.
Kindness lets you portray more affection and sincerity in any relationship, and that helps you out massively.
Compassion contributes to the well-being of everyone.
When you are compassionate, you go on to help others in need. You donate to charities and NGOs, enabling those needy people to lead a life with fewer restrictions, obstacles, and unhappiness.
This means that you are ensuring the happiness and well-being of everyone, even the ones who thought there would be no one to help them out.
As discussed above, compassion and kindness enable you to boost your happiness in the same way, if not more, when you gift something to yourself or treat yourself.
The smile on someone else’s face because of your help can make you happier than when you get something you have always wanted.
Compassion makes you more optimistic.
When you help others, you feel the pain and misery they have been facing in their lives, making you go out there and help them in every way you can.
You feel that they were not expecting much help from you, or maybe they were expecting someone else to help them, but that person ditched them, and that’s when you went on to help them.
This makes you feel that no matter how hard things get, you can get away out, just like they did when they got your help.
It doesn’t mean you need to depend on someone else, but it enables you to be more optimistic that you can still rise from it, whatever happens.
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Compassion takes care of your health.
Compassion is observed to enhance your health, both physically and mentally. Compassion normalizes your blood pressure levels, and as a result, you don’t feel you are about to faint in the later stages of your life.
It strengthens your immune system, and as a result of this, you don’t fall sick or feel exhausted more often.
Lowering your blood pressure levels also ensures that your stress and depression levels are under check, and you can combat them much more easily.
It also provides you peace of mind and sanity, making you kinder and even lengthening your life span.
Compassion allows you to settle conflicts better.
As already said in the previous point, compassion ensures your peace of mind and sanity, and as a result, you act more mature and understanding during conflict.
Instead of adding on to it, you think of ways to curb the conflict and settle it peacefully.
Compassion increases the chances of conflicts being settled much more peacefully, and there is always enough room for reconciliation.
Since compassion makes you more understanding, it enables you to understand the say of the ones arguing or conflicting, and you are better prepared to settle it down peacefully.
Compassion projects outwards
Compassion is contagious. It projects or spreads outwards to everyone, making the world a better place to live in.
It inspires further acts of kindness and compassion in everyone who has experienced or witnessed it sometime in their lives.
When you experience someone being compassionate, trying to be kind, and helping you maturely and peacefully, don’t you feel like doing the same to others in need?
Yes, it is quite natural to feel this way, and this is why compassion, as an emotion, is so strong that it goes out to everyone out there and ensures their well-being.
Compassion uplifts everyone out there.
Compassion has an elevating nature and spreads like a contagious virus; only it is something that ensures the well-being of people around the world.
When you see people helping each other in every way they can, don’t you feel like helping someone in need?
A study conducted at the University of Virginia showed that people, when observed helping and being helped, inculcated kindness and compassion within themselves as well. This compassion bestowed on them resulted in a world where feelings and emotions are valued.
Benefits of Compassionate Leadership
- 1 Happier Employees: Compassionate leaders make their employees feel good, reducing stress and making work more enjoyable.
- 2 People Work Better: Compassionate leaders inspire their team to work harder and do their best because they feel valued.
- 3 Stronger Teams: Compassionate leaders help team members get along better, trust each other, and work together smoothly.
- 4 Solving Problems Easier: Compassionate leaders encourage their team to come up with new ideas and solve problems together.
- 5 Employees Like Their Jobs: Compassionate leadership makes employees like their jobs more because they feel respected and appreciated.
- 6 Less Employee Leaving: Compassionate leaders keep their good employees because they create a workplace where people want to stay.
- 7 Better Work Atmosphere: Compassionate leaders make work a nicer place, where everyone feels included and understood.
Compassion enables you to get out of a funk.
When you are stressed out or are suffering from anxiety-related issues, you will notice that your entire focus is on you only.
At such moments, when your focus is on you, you tend to feel more grasped into stress and depression. It is advised to divert your attention to something else.
This is what compassion and kindness help you out with. Helping others and giving others happiness and some importance can help you escape your sorrow.
This helps you shift your focus towards helping them, paying more attention to their happiness, and gaining perspective.
Compassion is good for the environment.
Compassion is not only good for you or others on an individual basis but also for the entire world, the communities, the societies, and the different age groups of people.
As already discussed, compassion ensures your maturity and understandability and keeps your mental peace in check.
This way, you are more likely to help others when you realize that everyone is equal and deserves happiness and affection.
Compassion brings the world together and makes everyone united as one, trying to restore the well-being of others and theirs.
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Compassion makes your heart bigger.
No, it doesn’t increase the size of your heart, but it makes your heart more generous and kinder. You tend to become someone who accepts others more easily.
You become someone who tends to help others and considers everyone a human being who deserves equal affection and care.
You also start noticing that your heart health improves this way, and you are much less stressed out than you used to be. Even if you are helping others out and paying more attention to them, it sorts things out for you.
Compassion makes you donate a lot more than you used to benefit needy people.
Compassion enlarges your vision.
Compassion doesn’t make you someone who is reserved and only focuses on himself/herself, it makes you someone with an enlarged vision and perspective.
It enhances your identity and changes your view of life, making you understand the commonality you share with others.
You understand that no one is different from the inside and that everyone deserves well-being, affection, and care.
You realize that others around you experience suffering and pain like you, and they need help to come out of this.
That’s when you let your compassion and kindness guide you toward your good deeds.
Compassion makes you wiser and more understanding.
When you are compassionate, it enables you to understand yourself and the others around you much better.
As already pointed out in the previous point, compassion makes you realize everyone around you deserves respect, affection, care, and help, and you even understand the commonality you share with everyone else.
When you observe how needy people are suffering, you get provoked to help them out in every way you can because you seek to relieve suffering.
This ensures that people’s well-being is maintained worldwide, thanks to compassionate people lending their hands to help others.
Compassion allows you to forgive others quickly.
Everyone makes mistakes, and that is human nature. No one is perfect. You may have had people do wrong to you in the past, and that grudge might have continued till this day.
You will notice that compassionate people will try to hear and understand the person who did wrong to them.
There may be a reason for him/her to behave that way, and when you hear the part of the story of the person doing wrong to you, you can better judge him/her and enable them to rectify their mistake and even forgive them.
Forgiving them allows you to lessen a burden from your shoulders.
Compassion makes you less of a rude person.
You all are going to be parents someday, or maybe you are already, or maybe you won’t become one, but the thing is, being compassionate will allow you to be freer with your children and with any other kid or someone younger than you in general.
You will stand out from the rest of the parents when you notice your kid sharing everything with you without getting scared or being a liar.
This will also enable you to regulate your child’s activities and restrict them as much as required.
A ruder person is another factor that might stress your children even more.
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Being compassionate makes you stand out from the rest
Another great thing about compassion is that, even though many people are kind, not everyone is compassionate, which makes compassionate people stand out from the rest.
You will often find a certain group of people taking the initiative and helping out those who need them.
You will never see people taking turns to help out the poor or the ones who need the help of others.
Even if you do, that would be very rare. When you stand out from the rest, you come across several better opportunities because many people notice you doing a noble job that benefits you.
Being compassionate makes you gain more affection from others
Who doesn’t like being loved? Everyone does, right? When you are compassionate, you tend to help out others in need.
You try to help them in every way you can, and when others see you trying to make the world a better place, you are automatically loved and respected.
Affection, respect, and all of this can’t be attained overnight. Still, when you carry forward your noble deeds, you will surely be noticed by everyone around you, and you will be respected like an important person whose existence is very important for the well-being of this world.
Being compassionate allows you to socialize better.
When you go out to help others, you interact with many unknown faces for the first time. You talk with them and try to know the problems they have been facing and many other things.
Also, you can’t help every needy people you meet on the streets, so you may also involve yourself with some NGOs, or Rotaract clubs, trying to bring all the kind and compassionate people under one roof and helping those who need it badly.
All these allow you to make new friends, communicate with many people for the first time, and socialize well.
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Conclusion:
From the above points, it can be concluded that when you are kind and compassionate towards others, you are contributing to the entire well-being of the world, and that isn’t something you should stop.
You will be amazed to see the results of your kindness and good deeds. The benefits of compassion are endless, and the number of people it affects is also endless.
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Frequently asked questions on the benefits of being more compassionate towards others:
How to be compassionate toward patients?
Practice some good manners with them, show some personal interest in them as if they are your own, take the time to visualize and understand what they have been through, as it will let you have an insight into their life.
What is the actual meaning of compassion?
Compassion is the sympathetic pity you show to others when they face a difficult time in their lives or have misfortunes that have made them suffer tremendously.
How to show compassion towards colleagues at the workplace?
Get to know your colleagues in a better way which will help you understand what they mean, offer some help to a coworker whenever they need help which will show your kind nature, and take note of your colleague’s mental well-being.
How to include compassion in your daily life?
Take a note of your psychological well-being, look at how things affect you in a day, try showing small acts of kindness to others, take on the other person’s perspective, and start with self-compassion.
How to become self-compassionate?
Comfort your body as it should be the foremost priority, eat something healthy as it will make you have a feel-good moment, write a letter to yourself explaining how you feel about yourself, give yourself some encouragement which will help you go through.
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“Mindfulness, meditation, and positivity – these three words describe me the best. I founded “BeHappyHuman” blog dedicated to spreading happiness and inner peace through mindfulness and meditation techniques. As a self-taught practitioner, I have been exploring these practices for the past decade and my passion lies in sharing their benefits with others. My mission is to help individuals achieve greater happiness.