The world is changing and people are feeling scared. What we regard as normal has been completely flipped on its head. What we need now more than ever is kindness.

When you’re kind to someone, it’s not just that person who benefits. Kindness makes you happier. It’s good for your heart. It helps support your immune system. It slows ageing. It improves relationships. And it’s contagious – any small act of kindness you might perform is proven to have a ripple effect that reaches over 100 more people, and I can’t think of a better message to put out there in these unique and uncertain times.

My guest this week is David Hamilton, a pharmacist-turned-author with a special interest in how the mind affects the body, and vice versa. We chat about his fascination with the placebo effect and the many studies that demonstrate how the brain actually changes – and the body heals – in response to certain information. We talk at length about oxytocin, which David calls ‘the kindness hormone’, and how it’s the main contributor to heart health outside exercise. And he explains why kindness is the opposite of – and antidote to – stress.

If you’re feeling powerless, or that any efforts you make at the moment are insignificant, I really hope that listening to this podcast will help. It was recorded back in February, before the scale of this pandemic could be known. And yet it feels timely to release it now, as a reminder of what is within our control, when so many other factors aren’t.

Watch the video version of this interview in full below.

Watch the video interview

Further Reading:

• Patient Education and Counseling – Perception of Empathy in the Therapeutic Encounter: Effects on the Common Cold
• Psychologies – The Mother Theresa Effect
• Frontiers in Neuroscience – Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human–dog bonds
• WebMD – Loneliness Rivals Obesity, Smoking as Health Risk
• Journal of Abnormal Psychology – Confronting a traumatic event: Towards an understanding of inhibition and disease
• Association for Psychological Science – Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process
• Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology – Martial Discord and Coronary Artery Disease: a comparison of behaviorally defined discrete groups
• Psychological Science – Spousal Relationship Quality and Cardiovascular Risk: Dyadic Perceptions of Relationship Ambivalence are Associated with Coronary Calcification
• Time magazine – The Brain: How the brain rewires itself
• Journal of Neurophysiology – Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills
• Neuropsychologia – From mental power to muscle power—gaining strength by using the mind
• Science – Thought for Food: Imagined Consumption Reduces Actual Consumption
• National Geographic – Stop Food Cravings Through Imaginary Eating?
• Clinical Psychology Review – Loving-Kindness and Compassion Meditation: Potential for Psychological Interventions
• The New York Academy of Sciences – Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging? Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres