Finding Kindfulness: How Prosocial Practices Boost Health and Well-being

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Discovering strategies to uphold, sustain, and even improve human health and well-being has been a core goal for centuries. Many thinkers and disciplines have published ideas, practices, exercises, and activities for this purpose, including philosophical and belief systems, cultural values and ideals, and specific behaviors. Modern scientific inquiry into well-being, beyond the absence of mental or physical health challenges or clinical conditions, became established in the late 1900s, and has grown exponentially into a global literature. This article proposes that kindfulness, which includes behaviors and characteristics that can be described as both mindful and kind, enhances prosociality, which boosts lifelong health and well-being. Prosociality is an innate human drive that compels people to do things that benefit others or society as a whole, like help, share, cooperate, and console. Preliminary and published findings from projects designed to offer practical and secular resources for strengthening kindfulness through freely accessible internet-based programs offer preliminary support for this claim. Showcasing the meaning of kindfulness, its links to prosociality, beneficial impact on health and well-being, and a variety of potentially effective strategies for promoting it, this work offers a contemporary, applied perspective on the promise of kindfulness.