Several years ago, I invited people into the lab and asked for detailed descriptions of the last time they felt a love of humanity. They described a time that a friend had donated an organ to a stranger, an experience building homes with Habitat for Humanity, and a stranger who brought back a wallet. 

A feeling of pride permeated these stories—a sentiment that said, I am one of these humans that can do good. They felt joy at being part of the human species—and we found that those momentary experiences of love of humanity left people motivated to do good themselves. It seems that when we identify with humanity, we are more likely to concern ourselves with others’ well-being. The reverse is also appears to be true: people who frequently experience love of humanity have a stronger sense of being part of it.

Can we measure these qualities? Recently, psychologists Sam McFarland, Matthew Webb, and Derek Brown developed a new instrument for gauging common humanity, calling it the Identification With All Humanity (IWAH) scale. The IWAH scale asks questions about how close, connected, affiliated, and concerned people feel toward three classes of people: those in one’s immediate community, citizens of one’s own country, or people all over the world.

Here at the Greater Good Science Center, we turned this scientific scale into a quiz for our readers, which more than 2,000 people completed.

In analyzing the results, we found readers generally identified most strongly with people all over the world, followed by their community and then fellow citizens—which raises interesting questions about the values and experiences of our readers, and how those might shape their identities. We also asked demographic questions that allowed us to explore how key life details influence identification with humanity, country, and community. Here are some of the results.

Older people have a greater sense of common humanity. Love of humanity (and also of country and community) increased throughout life until middle age, when it plateaued. But then growth resumed as participants neared 70, with the elderly reporting 20 percent stronger love toward people all over the world than those younger than 18. What stunts identification with others for 40-60 year olds, most dramatically in the “all humans everywhere” category? Is this an age when preoccupations with career and family stall pro-social sentiments? Or is there something unique about those generations? This needs more study. But the overall lifetime trend is clear: As we age, it seems we come more and more to discover commonality with other people.

Women feel more common humanity than men (and they take more quizzes). Three times more women than men took our quiz, and women reported greater identification with all three groups on our five-point scale: community (3.7 vs. 3.5), country (3.5 vs. 3.2) and humanity (3.8 vs. 3.6). But before you put men on Mars and women on Venus, consider the fact that the pattern is the same for both sexes: highest for humanity, followed by community, then country. The real difference is that women seem to identify much more strongly with groups in general. Why might that be the case? This result points to a much bigger discussion about how women think about themselves in the love/care realm and the extent to which this is a function of the complex intersection between biology and acculturation.

Liberals identify more with community and humanity than conservatives do; conservatives identify more with the fellow citizens of their country than liberals do. Political orientation was systematically related to identification with community (the blue line in the graph at left) and people all over the world (green), but not fellow citizens (red). As we move to the Right on the political spectrum, identification with all people everywhere drops, and identification with citizens of one’s country shoots up among the “very conservative.” Conservatives tended to equally identify with community and fellow citizens.

That said, of the people who completed the quiz, only 161 rated themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative,” suggesting that the population sample was biased toward liberal. This bias might reduce the impact of conservative viewpoints on the overall data. If there were equally as many conservatives who took the quiz, for example, would more conservative people show even greater willingness to identify with fellow citizens? But as is, the pattern of those 161 conservatives differs considerably from that of our liberal readers.

Money can’t buy love of humanity. Generally, people with higher annual household incomes rated higher levels of identification with community and country, but this pattern did not hold for identification with all humanity. People making less than $15,000 per year showed the least identification with community and fellow citizens, which is consistent with Maslow-ian theorizing about basic needs and self-actualization—i.e., identifying with all humanity would be a privilege closer to self-actualization. People making $50-75,000 annually showed the highest levels of identification with community and fellow citizens, which dropped again in higher income brackets. However, annual household income had no systematic influence on their inclination to identify with people all over the world.

Spiritual people show more common humanity. In one of the most striking, consistent effects, self-reported spirituality strongly predicted the magnitude of identification with all three groups—community, country, and humanity. Why might this be the case? Many spiritual traditions explicitly advocate common humanity thinking and the “Golden Rule” (treat others as you wish to be treated)—and this might make it easier to consider all kinds of other people as “family.” Another factor to consider: Spirituality, as well as spiritual practices like prayer and meditation, are also associated with reduced stress and anxiety, and a greater sense of community. People have an easier time identifying with others when they are not stressed themselves, and when they feel enmeshed within a supportive community. 

Race and geography don’t make much of a difference. Ethnic background did not predict systematic differences in strength of love toward community or humanity. However, when I collapsed together responses from all non-white quiz takers and compared those to white quiz takers (3/4 of the respondents), non-whites reported slightly greater love of fellow citizens.

Where people live had only a minor impact on how much they identify with people in their communities, country, or all over the world, although West coasters (a majority of respondents) showed significantly greater love of humanity than people from the Midwest.

Why do we love the world?

Taken together, our Love of Humanity quiz begins to paint a picture of a primarily female, liberal, white, fairly spiritual population’s willingness to identify with people all over the world, followed by people in their communities, and least with fellow citizens.

There is something idiosyncratic about the love of humanity exhibited by Greater Good readers, given the nature of the questions. Logically, one might think that Love of Humanity should be the lowest value, since it’s the biggest bucket. However, this may be a case where logic doesn’t explain human behavior as well as a more nuanced, psychological perspective that takes emotions and interpersonal sentiment into account. How and why is it that Greater Good readers identify less with fellow citizens and communities than with people all over the world? Is there something easier about saying that you feel connected to people all over the world than to people in your own community or country of citizenship? Do memories of conflicts or ideological disagreement factor into our identification with communities or fellow citizens, but not into thinking about people all over the world?

This is an area that we have only just started to investigate—and we’d love to hear your own responses to these questions in comments.

These are common questions in American workplaces, often posed rhetorically—and sometimes with hostility.

Elsewhere in American life, we say “thank you” to acknowledge the good things we get from other people, especially when they give out of the goodness of their hearts. We say “thanks” at home and in school, in stores and at church.

But not at work. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans released earlier this year by the John Templeton Foundation, people are less likely to feel or express gratitude at work than anyplace else. And they’re not thankful for their current jobs, ranking them dead last in a list of things they’re grateful for.

It’s not that people don’t crave gratitude at work, both giving and receiving. Ninety-three percent agreed that grateful bosses are more likely to succeed, and only 18 percent thought that gratitude made bosses “weak.” Most reported that hearing “thank you” at work made them feel good and motivated.

But here comes the messed-up, mysterious, and interesting part: Almost all respondents reported that saying “thank you” to colleagues “makes me feel happier and more fulfilled”—but on a given day, only 10 percent acted on that impulse. A stunning 60 percent said they “either never express gratitude at work or do so perhaps once a year.”

In short, Americans actively suppress gratitude on the job, even to the point of robbing themselves of happiness.

Why? It may be because in theory, no one gives away anything at work; every exchange is fundamentally economic. You don’t deliver that memo to your boss at three o’clock sharp out of the goodness of your heart, but because that is what you’re being paid to do. Your “thanks” is a paycheck. Fail to do what you’re “asked,” and you may not see another one.

Tellingly, only those who earned $150,000 or more were likely to express any gratitude for their jobs, according to the Templeton survey. This hints at one of the factors that undermines gratitude at work: power and pay imbalances. In a study published in January of last year, M. Ena Inesi and colleagues found that people with power tended to believe others thanked them mainly to kiss their butts, not out of authentic feeling—and as a result of this cynicism, supervisors are themselves less likely to express gratitude.

Indeed, the Templeton survey found that 35 percent of respondents believed that expressing any gratitude could lead coworkers to take advantage of them. When we acknowledge our interdependency, we make ourselves vulnerable. (And in fact, gratitude is not always the best response—see Amie Gordon’s essay “Five Ways Giving Thanks Can Backfire.”)

The result is a vicious, culturally ingrained circle of ingratitude, which can have a terrible effect on workplace morale and cohesion. Why should this be the case? Because the need for a paycheck is only one of the motivations we bring to work. We don’t just work for money. We also work for respect, for a sense of accomplishment, for a feeling of purpose. We invest our selves and our emotions into our jobs, and work affects our emotional states.

Gratitude is a non-monetary way to support those non-monetary motivations. “Thank you” doesn’t cost a dime, and it has measurably beneficial effects. In a series of four experiments, psychologists Adam Grant and Francesca Gino found that “thank you” from a supervisor gave people a strong sense of both self-worth and self-efficacy. The Grant and Gino study also reveals that the expression of gratitude has a spillover effect: Individuals become more trusting with each other, and more likely to help each other out.

The benefits of gratitude go beyond a sense of self-worth, self-efficacy, and trust between employees. When Greater Good Science Center Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas analyzed data from our interactive gratitude journal Thnx4.org, she found the greater the number of gratitude experiences people had on a given day, the better they felt. People who kept at it for at least two weeks showed significantly increased happiness, greater satisfaction with life, and higher resilience to stress; this group even reported fewer headaches and illnesses.

Building a culture of gratitude at work is not easy, but the science says it’s worth it. So here are five research-tested tips for fostering gratitude on the job.

1.  Start at the top

This is one of the clearest takeaways from research into workplace gratitude: Employees need to hear “thank you” from the boss first. That’s because expressing gratitude can make some people feel unsafe, particularly in a workplace with a history of ingratitude. It’s up to the people with power to clearly, consistently, and authentically say “thank you” in both public and private settings.

These efforts can also translate into protocols and procedures. When hiring someone new, bosses can ask: How do you wish to be thanked? When an employee leaves, throw them a goodbye party and take a moment to express appreciation for their qualities and contributions. Gratitude can also be built into performance reviews and staff meetings, where five minutes can be allocated for people to say “thanks” to each other.

2.  Thank the people who never get thanked

Every organization has a class of employee that hogs all the glory. In hospitals, it’s doctors. At universities, it’s faculty. And every organization has high-profile individuals. But what about those who cut the checks, submit the invoices, mop the floors, write the copy?

Thanking those who do thankless work is crucial because it sets the bar and establishes the tone. Yes, faculty do the research and teaching core to a university’s mission, but without a cadre of staff behind them they’d have to raise money for their own salaries and empty their own wastebaskets. Public appreciation of, for example, administration and physical plant staff makes their contributions visible and thus broadens everyone’s understanding of how the organization functions—and needless to say, it improves morale and increases trust.

3.  Aim for quality, not quantity

Forcing people to be grateful doesn’t work. It feeds the power imbalances that undermine gratitude in the first place, and it can make expressions of gratitude feel inauthentic.

The key is to create times and spaces that foster the voluntary, spontaneous expression of gratitude. It’s also the case that studies consistently show that there is such a thing as too much gratitude—it seems trying to be grateful everyday induces gratitude fatigue.

How do you convey authenticity? Details are decisive. When you are specific about the benefits of a person, action, or thing, it increases your own appreciation—and it tells a person that you are paying attention, rather than just going through the motions.

4. Provide many opportunities for gratitude

When people are thanked for their work, they are more likely to increase their helping behavior and to provide help to others. But not everyone likes to be thanked—or likes to say “thank you”—in public. They may be shy or genuinely modest.

The key is to create many different kinds of opportunities for gratitude.

For example, research consistently finds that keeping a gratitude journal makes you twenty-five percent happier. Can an office keep a journal? Of course!

The Administration and Finance office of the University of California, Berkeley, created an appreciation platform that allows employees to recognize each other’s contributions, which feeds into a “Kudos” webpage that publically highlights these contributions.

You don’t need to build a website—a bulletin board will do, sometimes called a “Gratitude Wall.” But this kind of project will work best if it encourages the “thank you” to target actual human beings instead of things. We are all thankful for coffee, for example, but the gratitude should go to Mary, the administrative assistant who makes the coffee every morning.

Gift-giving is another way to foster gratitude. Research shows that giving gifts may have an important effect on working relationships and reciprocity—and non-monetary gifts are the most beneficial of all.

Giving creates gratitude, but giving can also be a good way to express gratitude, especially if the person in question is shy. You can say “thanks” by taking on scut work, lending a parking space, or giving a day off. These kinds of non-monetary gifts can lead to more trust in working relationships, if it’s reciprocal, sincere, and altruistically motivated.

There is one more, quite tricky way of fostering gratitude: Research points to the notion that gratitude might have positive effects on transforming conflicts, which can benefit the organization and working relationships. How do you do that?

It starts with the one charged with mediating the conflict: For example, a supervisor with two bickering employees might open a meeting by expressing sincere appreciation of both parties. Throughout the process, that person should never miss an opportunity to say “thank you.” The research says this attitude of gratitude will have a positive feedback effect, even if results aren’t obvious right away.

5. In the wake of crisis, take time for thanksgiving

Cultivating a culture of gratitude might be the best way to help a workplace prepare for stresses that come with change, conflict, and failure. Making gratitude a policy and a practice “builds up a sort of psychological immune system that can cushion us when we fall,” writes psychologist Robert Emmons. “There is scientific evidence that grateful people are more resilient to stress, whether minor everyday hassles or major personal upheavals.”

Gratitude helps employees to see beyond one disaster and recognize their gains. Ideally, it gives them a tool “to transform an obstacle into an opportunity,” as Emmons writes, and reframe a loss as a potential gain. If your office has gone through a crisis, hold a meeting with the aim of gaining a new perspective on the incident. Emmons proposes a series of questions to help people recover from difficult experiences, which I’ve adapted for the workplace:

• What lessons did the experience teach us?
• Can we find ways to be thankful for what happened to us now, even though we were not at the time it happened?
• What ability did the experience draw out of us that surprised us?
• Are there ways we have become a better workplace because of it?
• Has the experience removed an obstacle that previously prevented us from feeling grateful?

The science says we Americans need to overcome our aversion to gratitude on the job, and come to see it as just one more career skill we can cultivate alongside skills like communication, negotiation, and forgiveness. It’s something anyone can learn—from which everyone will benefit.

If you count yourself amongst those who are unhappy in their job—or at least have that occasional niggling feeling that your work and self are out of alignment—how are you supposed to go about finding a meaningful career? What does it take to overcome the fear of change and negotiate the labyrinth of choices, especially in tough economic times?

Here are six pieces of essential wisdom drawn from some of the best brains in the field.

1. Accept confusion

First, a consoling thought: Feeling confused about career choice is perfectly normal and utterly understandable. In the pre-industrial period there were around thirty standard trades—you might decide to be a blacksmith or a barrel-maker. But now careers websites list over 12,000 different jobs.

The result? We can become so anxious about making the wrong choice that we end up making no choice at all, staying in jobs that we have long grown out of. Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the “paradox of choice”: too many options can leave us standing in one place like deer caught in the headlights.

Then add to this our in-built aversion to risk. Human beings tend to exaggerate everything that could possibly go wrong. Or as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says, “We hate losing twice as much as we love winning,” whether at the casino table or when making career choices. So our brains are not well calibrated for daring to change profession. We need to recognise that confusion is natural, and get ready to move beyond it.

2. Don’t pigeonhole yourself

Many people are enticed by personality tests, which claim to be able to assess your character then point you towards a job that is just right for you. It’s a reassuring idea, but the evidence for their usefulness is flimsy.

Take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the world’s most popular psychometric test, which places you in one of sixteen personality types. Despite its ubiquity, it has been widely criticized by psychologists for over three decades, partly due to its lack of reliability. If you retake the test after five weeks, there is around a 50 percent chance that you will be placed into a different personality category.

Moreover, according to US psychologist David Pittenger, there is “no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types.”

So don’t let any anyone tell you what you can and can’t be on the basis of a personality pigeonhole they want to put you in.

3. Aim to be a wide achiever, not a high achiever

For over a century, Western culture has been telling us that the best way to use our talents and be successful is to specialize and become a high achiever, an expert in a narrow field—a corporate tax accountant, say, or an anesthetist.

But an increasing number of people feel that this approach fails to cultivate the many sides of who they are. For them, it makes more sense to embrace the idea of being a “wide achiever” rather than a high achiever. Take inspiration from Renaissance generalists like Leonardo da Vinci who would paint one day, then do some mechanical engineering, followed by a few anatomy experiments on the weekend.

Today this is called being a “portfolio worker,” doing several jobs simultaneously, often on a freelance basis. Management thinker Charles Handy says this is not just a good way of spreading risk in an insecure job market, but is an extraordinary opportunity made possible by the rise of flexible working: “For the first time in the human experience, we have a chance to shape our work to suit the way we live instead of our lives to fit our work. We would be mad to miss the chance.”

Ask yourself this: What would being a wide achiever encompass for me?

4. Find where you values and talents meet

“Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation,” said Aristotle 2,500 years ago.

He would surely endorse contemporary research findings showing that those pursuing money and status are unlikely to feel fulfilled: the Mercer Global Engagement Scale places “base pay” as only number seven out of 12 factors giving job satisfaction.

The best alternative, says Harvard’s Howard Gardner, is to find an ethical career, focused on values and issues that matter to you, and which also allows you to do what you’re really good at. That might sound like a luxury option when unemployment lines are long. But consider that in OECD countries, the social enterprise sector is growing 250 percent faster than the rest of the economy.

So imagine yourself in three parallel universes, in each of which you can spend next year trying a job in which your talents meet the needs of the world. What three jobs would you be excited to try?

5. Act first, reflect later

The biggest mistake people make in career change is to follow the traditional “plan then implement” model. You draw up lists of personal strengths, weaknesses and ambitions, then match your profile to particular professions; at that point you start sending out applications.

But there’s a problem: that typically doesn’t work. You might find a new job, but despite your expectations, it is unlikely to be fulfilling.

We need to turn this model on its head. Instead of thinking then acting, we should act first and reflect later by trying out jobs in the real world, for example by shadowing or volunteering, testing out careers through experiential learning. Laura van Bouchout gave herself the thirtieth birthday present of spending a whole year trying thirty different jobs—a kind of “radical sabbatical.” She was manager of a cat hotel, then shadowed a member of the European Parliament, and finally found that working in advertising was unexpectedly exhilarating.

But don’t think that you have to resign on Monday morning to try this. Rather, you can pursue “branching projects”—what organizational behaviour expert Herminia Ibarra calls “temporary assignments”—on the side of your existing job. Disenchanted with banking? Then try teaching yoga or doing freelance web design on the weekends. Such small experiments can give you the courage to make big—and well-informed—changes.

Challenge yourself: What is your first branching project going to be? And what is the very first step you can take towards making it happen?

6. Approach work as a life-long experiment

Changing career is a frightening prospect. But ultimately, there is no avoiding the fact that it is a risk.

Ask successful career changers how to overcome the fear and most say the same thing: in the end you have to stop thinking and just do it. That may be why nearly all cultures have recognised that to live a meaningful and vibrant existence, we need to take some chances—or else we might end up looking back on our lives with regret.

Carpe diem, advised the Roman poet Horace. Seize the day before it is too late. “If not now, when?” said the rabbinical sage Hillel the Elder. It is only be treating our working lives as an ongoing experiment that we will be able to find a job that is big enough for our spirits.

My response is that not only will a grateful attitude help—it is essential. In fact, it is precisely under crisis conditions when we have the most to gain by a grateful perspective on life. In the face of demoralization, gratitude has the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal. In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope. In other words, gratitude can help us cope with hard times.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that gratitude will come easily or naturally in a crisis. It’s easy to feel grateful for the good things. No one “feels” grateful that he or she has lost a job or a home or good health or has taken a devastating hit on his or her retirement portfolio.

But it is vital to make a distinction between feeling grateful and being grateful. We don’t have total control over our emotions. We cannot easily will ourselves to feel grateful, less depressed, or happy. Feelings follow from the way we look at the world, thoughts we have about the way things are, the way things should be, and the distance between these two points.

But being grateful is a choice, a prevailing attitude that endures and is relatively immune to the gains and losses that flow in and out of our lives. When disaster strikes, gratitude provides a perspective from which we can view life in its entirety and not be overwhelmed by temporary circumstances. Yes, this perspective is hard to achieve—but my research says it is worth the effort.

Remember the bad
Trials and suffering can actually refine and deepen gratefulness if we allow them to show us not to take things for granted. Our national holiday of gratitude, Thanksgiving, was born and grew out of hard times. The first Thanksgiving took place after nearly half the pilgrims died from a rough winter and year. It became a national holiday in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War and was moved to its current date in the 1930s following the Depression.

Why? Well, when times are good, people take prosperity for granted and begin to believe that they are invulnerable. In times of uncertainty, though, people realize how powerless they are to control their own destiny. If you begin to see that everything you have, everything you have counted on, may be taken away, it becomes much harder to take it for granted.

So crisis can make us more grateful—but research says gratitude also helps us cope with crisis. Consciously cultivating an attitude of gratitude builds up a sort of psychological immune system that can cushion us when we fall. There is scientific evidence that grateful people are more resilient to stress, whether minor everyday hassles or major personal upheavals. The contrast between suffering and redemption serves as the basis for one of my tips for practicing gratitude: remember the bad.

It works this way: Think of the worst times in your life, your sorrows, your losses, your sadness—and then remember that here you are, able to remember them, that you made it through the worst times of your life, you got through the trauma, you got through the trial, you endured the temptation, you survived the bad relationship, you’re making your way out of the dark. Remember the bad things, then look to see where you are now.

This process of remembering how difficult life used to be and how far we have come sets up an explicit contrast that is fertile ground for gratefulness. Our minds think in terms of counterfactuals—mental comparisons we make between the way things are and how things might have been different. Contrasting the present with negative times in the past can make us feel happier (or at least less unhappy) and enhance our overall sense of well-being. This opens the door to coping gratefully.

Try this little exercise. First, think about one of the unhappiest events you have experienced. How often do you find yourself thinking about this event today? Does the contrast with the present make you feel grateful and pleased? Do you realize your current life situation is not as bad as it could be? Try to realize and appreciate just how much better your life is now. The point is not to ignore or forget the past but to develop a fruitful frame of reference in the present from which to view experiences and events.

There’s another way to foster gratitude: confront your own mortality. In a recent study, researchers asked participants to imagine a scenario where they are trapped in a burning high rise, overcome by smoke, and killed. This resulted in a substantial increase in gratitude levels, as researchers discovered when they compared this group to two control conditions who were not compelled to imagine their own deaths.

In these ways, remembering the bad can help us to appreciate the good. As the German theologian and Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.” We know that gratitude enhances happiness, but why? Gratitude maximizes happiness in multiple ways, and one reason is that it helps us reframe memories of unpleasant events in a way that decreases their unpleasant emotional impact. This implies that grateful coping entails looking for positive consequences of negative events. For example, grateful coping might involve seeing how a stressful event has shaped who we are today and has prompted us to reevaluate what is really important in life.

Reframing disaster
To say that gratitude is a helpful strategy to handle hurt feelings does not mean that we should try to ignore or deny suffering and pain.

The field of positive psychology has at times been criticized for failing to acknowledge the value of negative emotions. Barbara Held of Bowdoin College in Maine, for example, contends that positive psychology has been too negative about negativity and too positive about positivity. To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.

So telling people simply to buck up, count their blessings, and remember how much they still have to be grateful for can certainly do much harm. Processing a life experience through a grateful lens does not mean denying negativity. It is not a form of superficial happiology. Instead, it means realizing the power you have to transform an obstacle into an opportunity. It means reframing a loss into a potential gain, recasting negativity into positive channels for gratitude.

A growing body of research has examined how grateful recasting works. In a study conducted at Eastern Washington University, participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing groups that would recall and report on an unpleasant open memory—a loss, a betrayal, victimization, or some other personally upsetting experience. The first group wrote for 20 minutes on issues that were irrelevant to their open memory. The second wrote about their experience pertaining to their open memory.

Researchers asked the third group to focus on the positive aspects of a difficult experience—and discover what about it might now make them feel grateful. Results showed that they demonstrated more closure and less unpleasant emotional impact than participants who just wrote about the experience without being prompted to see ways it might be redeemed with gratitude. Participants were never told not to think about the negative aspects of the experience or to deny or ignore the pain. Moreover, participants who found reasons to be grateful demonstrated fewer intrusive memories, such as wondering why it happened, whether it could have been prevented, or if they believed they caused it to happen. Thinking gratefully, this study showed, can help heal troubling memories and in a sense redeem them—a result echoed in many other studies.

Some years ago, I asked people with debilitating physical illnesses to compose a narrative concerning a time when they felt a deep sense of gratitude to someone or for something. I asked them to let themselves re-create that experience in their minds so that they could feel the emotions as if they had transported themselves back in time to the event itself. I also had them reflect on what they felt in that situation and how they expressed those feelings. In the face of progressive diseases, people often find life extremely challenging, painful, and frustrating. I wondered whether it would even be possible for them to find anything to be grateful about. For many of them, life revolved around visits to the pain clinic and pharmacy. I would not have been at all surprised if resentment overshadowed gratefulness.

As it turned out, most respondents had trouble settling on a specific instance—they simply had so much in their lives that they were grateful for. I was struck by the profound depth of feeling that they conveyed in their essays, and by the apparent life-transforming power of gratitude in many of their lives.

It was evident from reading these narrative accounts that (1) gratitude can be an overwhelmingly intense feeling, (2) gratitude for gifts that others easily overlook most can be the most powerful and frequent form of thankfulness, and (3) gratitude can be chosen in spite of one’s situation or circumstances. I was also struck by the redemptive twist that occurred in nearly half of these narratives: out of something bad (suffering, adversity, affliction) came something good (new life or new opportunities) for which the person felt profoundly grateful.

If you are troubled by an open memory or a past unpleasant experience, you might consider trying to reframe how you think about it using the language of thankfulness. The unpleasant experiences in our lives don’t have to be of the traumatic variety in order for us to gratefully benefit from them. Whether it is a large or small event, here are some additional questions to ask yourself:

• What lessons did the experience teach me?
• Can I find ways to be thankful for what happened to me now even though I was not at the time it happened?
• What ability did the experience draw out of me that surprised me?
• How am I now more the person I want to be because of it? Have my negative feelings about the experience limited or prevented my ability to feel gratitude in the time since it occurred?
• Has the experience removed a personal obstacle that previously prevented me from feeling grateful?

Remember, your goal is not to relive the experience but rather to get a new perspective on it. Simply rehearsing an upsetting event makes us feel worse about it. That is why catharsis has rarely been effective. Emotional venting without accompanying insight does not produce change. No amount of writing about the event will help unless you are able to take a fresh, redemptive perspective on it. This is an advantage that grateful people have—and it is a skill that anyone can learn.

Gratitude helps us cope with adversity, but that’s certainly not its only benefit. For more reasons why to practice gratitude, check out this infographic created by Here’s My Chance.

These three factors put her at risk for gestational diabetes or hypertension and her unborn baby at risk for potential birth complications and low birth weight. But even with those risks, the stress of Julia’s life undermined her efforts to control her weight during pregnancy. This is no surprise: Studies have found that people under a lot of stress who don’t have the skills to handle it are more likely to overeat, retain fat, and become obese.

But then Julia began an eight-week course at the University of San Francisco’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Run by Elissa Epel, a researcher who studies stress and eating, the program trains low-income, obese, pregnant women in the skills of mindful eating—using moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations to eat more healthily.

Julia had never heard of mindful eating before starting the program, but she soon learned that there were many benefits. “It helped me to appreciate more the taste and texture of food,” says Julia. “I learned how hungry I really was and how to make better choices around eating.”

Julia says that the mindful eating program taught her to pay more attention to when she was full, which helped with portion control. The breathing exercises she learned in class were very relaxing, allowing her to better handle the stress in her life. And, during her pregnancy she didn’t gain weight…in fact, she lost 35 pounds.

“When you eat slowly, you become much more aware of how much food you eat,” says Julia. “It makes you feel so much better.”

Elissa Epel and her colleagues are conducting studies to discover if a mindful eating program can help women like Julia to reduce their stress and keep their weight gain under control—and the results so far show the program is working. Not only that, the researchers hope to prove that, by giving these women mindfulness training, they are also improving the ability of the women’s unborn babies to manage the stress that affects fat retention, helping to break a cycle of obesity that is often generational.

It’s a line of research whose implications go well beyond the small group under study, to reveal key ways in which our minds and bodies are connected—and how all of us can live healthier, more balanced lives.

Learning to appreciate food
Many of us do not pay much attention to what we eat, shoveling down our meals with little effort to truly taste it. The proliferation of fast and processed food in the United States speaks to how little we pay attention to what our bodies really need nutritionally.

Mindful eating is a way of combating that tendency. Since mindfulness involves learning how to pay attention to your present experience without judgment, it can help one become more aware of hunger and satiety cues, understand how emotions impact hunger, and learn to savor food. Some of the goals of mindful eating programs include helping people have a more positive relationship to food, reducing their stress, and controlling their weight.

According to Epel, stress is a trigger for many women to overeat because it signals the body to produce cortisol, a hormone that both increases high calorie food craving and fat retention. She became interested in how this plays out in high stress environments, like those found in impoverished neighborhoods, and wanted to see how obese pregnant women living in these conditions might maintain optimal weight during their pregnancies.

Her study, called the Maternal Adiposity, Metabolism, and Stress Study—or MAMAS for short—is looking at whether mindful eating can help these women reduce stress and eat more healthily. To date, 100 women have been enrolled in the study—all of them overweight or obese, and living in highly stressful situations.

After initial assessments on their life stress levels, body fat and weight, and mindfulness levels—their awareness of their emotions, ability to accept change, and tolerance for difficult feelings, for example—the women attended the course on mindful eating offered at the Osher Center. They were then reassessed on these measures and compared to a group of about 70 women who are being followed medically in the traditional way—without the mindful eating intervention.

Preliminary results show that women in the mindfulness group had lower stress levels, higher mindfulness measures, and lower weight gains during pregnancy than those who didn’t go through the class. Forty percent of the women in the mindfulness group gained weight in the recommended range compared to none in the control group.

“I’m very excited about this result,” says Epel. “Pregnancy is a critical time and we have a chance to see how malleable obesity is.”

Another study participant, Kendra S., says she learned about the concept of “chasing flavor,” and how often she ate without really tasting her food after the first few bites. By slowing down her eating and understanding her cravings, she had more control over her food intake. She also claims that the mindfulness helped her from making bad choices, like eating at McDonald’s.

“I only ate when I was hungry, or when I made a decision to eat something special, like a little ice-cream,” says Kendra. “The class made me more aware; it made me make more healthy choices.”

Like Julia, Kendra learned that by using the mindfulness techniques—like deep breathing and learning to experience the transience of her emotions “like a train passing through a station”—she could be calmer and cope better with the stresses of her life, like her troubled relationships.

“When you use these techniques, it helps you not get upset,” says Kendra. “I don’t stress out as much any more.”

Passing the benefits to babies
Although Epel’s study has shown that mindful eating can help women like Kendra and Julia with stress and weight gain during pregnancy, she and her colleagues are still assessing whether it can affect the women’s babies as well.

Nicole Bush at the UCSF Center for Health and Community is now studying the babies born to the MAMAS women to look for those effects—and she and her colleagues have some exciting results to report. So far, 60 of the women in Epel’s study have given birth and had data on their babies collected and analyzed by Bush. That data included birth weight-to-height ratios, body fat levels, and post-delivery complications, as well as an independent assessment within a month of delivery to determine the babies’ “stress reactivity”—that is, the intensity of their stress response.

Bush was interested in measuring stress reactivity, because it plays a role in fat retention—when stressed, people with high stress reactivity tend to crave more calories, especially fats and sugars. Babies don’t think about eating consciously, of course. But their bodies do have to put more energy into stress management if they have high stress reactivity, says Bush, which affects their normal development. It’s as if the body knows it needs to allocate more energy to the stress response system; so it doesn’t have as many resources to devote to cognition and attention.

Preliminary findings on the mother-infant pairs in the study suggest that those offspring born to the mothers who went through the MAMAS program had healthier birth weights and better ability to manage stressful experiences than those who were born to mothers in the control group. Better birth weights translate into long-term health, and lower stress reactivity means less chance of having illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, addictive behaviors, and mental health issues, such as depression, anger, and impulsivity, all of which cost society, both emotionally and fiscally.

“We worry about people who are fat when they’re adults; that’s what costs us a lot of money,” says Bush. “Well, it turns out that fat kids are more likely turn into fat adults, and it turns out that fat infants are more likely to become fat kids.”

But what’s most exciting to Bush is that these changes seem to be happening in utero. She says that her results help show how a baby’s metabolism and stress response may be not just be programmed through genetics, but through some kind of metabolic “communication” between a mother and her unborn baby while the baby is still in the womb.

“There’s something about the maternal hormones and the maternal nutrients during gestation that are communicating and providing signals to the offspring about the environment they are about to be born into,” says Bush. “It’s as if their systems are giving a message to their unborn babies that they are about to be born into a highly stressful environment; so they’d better prepare their metabolisms to deal with that…which generally means greater fat retention.”

Although researchers have found correlations between maternal weight and baby weight and between maternal stress and stress in babies, no one has really looked at the connections between the two or tried to manipulate them using an intervention, says Bush. By starting this far back in a baby’s chain of development—while the baby is still in utero—she hopes that intervening with moms will make a big difference in the future health of at-risk babies, helping prevent them from becoming obese.

“If some of these things are passed on inter-generationally, it’s more optimal to get that baby before their physiology is programmed,” she says.

Epel is particularly excited about Bush’s results. She believes that this in utero translation of stress reactivity to babies could have long-term consequences for their childhoods, creating a positive feedback loop that could impact their future eating patterns, emotional life, and learning outcomes.

“This might be the most meaningful study we’re ever done,” she says. “We could be calibrating the health of these offspring for their lifetime.”

Julia found that the benefits of the mindful eating intervention go beyond giving birth to a healthy baby. The program has also helped her to be more patient with her two-year-old girl. Now if her little girl gets upsets or whines, she can step back, give her daughter a little space, and breathe.

“As a parent, I have way more self-control,” says Julia. “It’s something I can use for the rest of my life.”

1. Overdosing on gratitude. When it comes to keeping track of your gratitude, the adage “more is better” doesn’t necessarily apply. If you set too high of a goal for your gratitude, you may find yourself falling short, which paradoxically could leave you feeling less grateful and happy than if you hadn’t tracked your gratitude at all. In a study of gratitude journaling, people who tracked their gratitude once per week were happier after six weeks, whereas those who wrote tracked their gratitude three times per week were not. If you find yourself hesitating when putting pen to paper, you may begin to think your life isn’t that good or you don’t have that much to be grateful for. If that is the case, take a step back and focus on quality over quantity.

2. Focusing on feeling grateful for someone or something who isn’t worthy. If you are in a bad relationship with someone who is emotionally or physically abusing you—or who just can’t make you happy—gratitude may be the wrong choice. By focusing on all the ways you appreciate your partner, boss, or roommate, you may choose to stay where you are—when you should be finding a way to get out of an unhealthy situation. Account for the entire relationship, not just the good parts!

3. Using gratitude to avoid a serious problem. Gratitude helps you focus on what is important instead of getting caught up in the little annoyances of everyday life. However, not all problems are little annoyances, and focusing your attention on things you appreciate may provide only temporary relief from serious problems. In cases like these, a negative emotion like anger may actually be more constructive. In one study of romantic couples, expressing anger was more beneficial than being positive, when discussing a severe problem—because the anger helped them address and resolve the issue rather than sweeping it under the rug.

4. Downplaying your own successes through excessive gratitude. After something good happens to you, you will only benefit from thinking about and thanking the people who helped make it possible. But of equal importance is acknowledging your own role in the process. If you are someone who focuses on thanking everyone else, downplaying your own hard work and talent to a fault, you may be hiding low self-esteem behind your gratitude. Don’t let gratitude get in the way of appropriately taking credit for your own part in success.

5. Mistaking gratitude for indebtedness. Gratitude is the positive emotion you feel when someone else helps you out. Indebtedness, on the other hand, generally leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth—someone helped you and now you owe them. If you mistake feelings of gratitude for indebtedness, you may find yourself working hard to repay a favor not to express your appreciation but to take the weight of a debt off your shoulders. In close relationships, this need to repay tit-for-tat can actually lead to negative feelings between partners. Repaying someone who matters to you too quickly may be a sign that you don’t want a close relationship.

Have you had other experiences where feeling grateful led you down the wrong path?

These plans have been met with angry protests from teachers and parents who argue that the closures will force students to cross dangerous gang lines on their way to school. In Chicago at least, officials have promised to give these children “safe passage” to and from school, and to provide counselors to help them adjust.

It won’t be enough. If the closings go as planned, the districts’ work will have only just begun. But if the cities heed lessons from sociology and social psychology, they may be able to keep a difficult situation from getting even worse—and, in the process, improve relationships between kids from clashing neighborhoods.

Research that one of us (Trinh Tran) has conducted suggests that the threats to displaced students may even go beyond stray bullets on the way to school; they’re also at risk to have their class sizes balloon and their teachers leave their jobs at a higher rate.

What’s more, when kids from different neighborhoods are merged into the same school, they face greater risks of conflict within school. That’s in part because the school becomes a battleground for warring neighborhood identities.

These are all findings from Trinh’s fieldwork in the south side of Philadelphia, an area demographically similar to the neighborhoods affected by Chicago’s and D.C.’s school closings. There she studied the experiences of students from low socio-economic neighborhoods who attend either their neighborhood school or a magnet school in another part of town. Even within neighborhood schools, kids told her that they don’t feel safe. For decades, some of the streets where they live have been warring with another street a few blocks over—and these turf battles continue in the school hallways.

“It’s about the block you live on,” one student told her. “I live near 27th Street and apparently that’s one of the most hated streets. … After a while, I just stop telling people where I live [or] I’m gonna find myself hurt somewhere.”

That’s the situation even at neighborhood schools; at magnet schools, which pull from many more neighborhoods, the potential for conflict is much worse.

Yet Trinh has also found that conflict in the magnet schools is often less than in neighborhood schools. How is that possible?

The answer lies in the way these magnet schools have managed to foster a new collective identity that trumps students’ neighborhood identities. Creating this identity requires members of conflicting neighborhoods to come together—sometimes a tall order, given the groups’ histories. But Trinh found that magnet school students identified more with their school than their neighborhood, in part because of the strong school spirit and cross-neighborhood friendships encouraged by the magnet schools.

Indeed, these findings show how when bringing together students from conflicting groups, districts can not only help these students adjust to their new schools but help promote peace between opposing neighborhoods.

Of course, magnet students choose to be at their school; kids impacted by the closures might resent that they’re forced to change schools or to open their doors to rival neighborhoods.

But time and again, social psychology research has found that personal contact between members of different groups can actually help those groups overcome prejudice and conflict, even when group members are less motivated to intermingle—as along as certain important conditions are in place. So what are those conditions?

First and foremost, the interactions need to be friendly and endorsed by authority figures. In schools welcoming new students, this could mean that principals take the lead in creating a “buddy” or mentor program, where existing students take a new one under their wing, under the supervision of a teacher, counselor, or other adult at the school. Without this initial “friendly” interaction, group cohesion will be difficult to create.

Another important condition is that both parties feel like they’re of equal status. This means that returning students shouldn’t get first choice of cubbies, lockers, classes, or extracurriculars; instead, schools should convey that newcomers are just as much a part of the school community as anyone. They could even involve students in choosing a new mascot and school colors, soliciting equal input from old and new students alike.

Finally, to promote peace between groups, group members need to have common goals and a sense of interdependence that gives them incentive to cooperate. For instance, early in the school year, principals might create an academic or athletic competition within the school, grouping the students into teams that intentionally cut across neighborhood boundaries.

None of this will be easy; weathering these transitions will require hard work and commitment from all involved. But, in the end, these efforts may yield a benefit that everyone can get behind: safer neighborhoods and schools.

Here are 10 research-tested actions you can take to become a successful giver at your work or in your life.

1. Test Your Giver Quotient. We often live in a feedback vacuum, deprived of knowledge about how our actions affect others. So to help you start stepping up your giving, I’ve designed a series of free online tools that you can use to track your impact and assess your self-awareness. Along with filling out your own survey, you can invite people in your network to rate your reciprocity style, and you’ll receive data on how often you’re seen as a giver, taker, and matcher.

2. Run a Reciprocity Ring. What could be achieved in your organization—and what giving norms would develop—if groups of people got together weekly for 20 minutes to make requests and help one another fulfill them? This is a “Reciprocity Ring,” and you can learn more about how to start one in your organization by visiting Cheryl and Wayne Baker’s company, Humax, which offers a suite of social networking tools for individuals and organizations. They’ve created materials to run a Reciprocity Ring in person and a Ripplleffect tool for running it online. People typically come together in groups of 15 to 30. Each person presents a request to the group members, who make contributions, using their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request.

3. Help Other People Craft Their Jobs—or Craft Yours to Incorporate More Giving. People often end up working on tasks that aren’t perfectly aligned with their interests and skills. A powerful way to give is to help others work on tasks that are more interesting, meaningful, or developmental. In 2011, a vice president named Jay at a large multinational retailer sent emails to each of his employees announcing a top-secret mission, with details to be shared on a need-to-know basis in one-on-one meetings. When employees arrived individually for the meetings, Jay asked them what they would enjoy doing that might also be of interest to other people. He then sent them out into the company to pursue their mission with three rules: It has to (1) appeal to at least one other person, (2) be low or no cost, and (3) be initiated by you.

In the secret missions, Jay encouraged his employees to engage in job crafting, a concept introduced by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, management professors at Yale and the University of Michigan, respectively. Job crafting involves innovating around a job description, creatively adding and customizing tasks and responsibilities to match personal interests and values. A natural concern is that people might craft their jobs in ways that fail to contribute to their organizations. To address this concern, Amy, Justin Berg, and I partnered with Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle, who run a people and innovation lab at Google. In a study across the United States and Europe, we randomly assigned Google employees working in sales, finance, operations, accounting, marketing, and human resources to a job-crafting workshop. The employees created a map of how they’d like to modify their tasks, crafting a more ideal but still realistic vision of their jobs that aligned with their interests and values. Six weeks later, their managers and coworkers rated them as significantly happier and more effective.

To help people craft their jobs, Justin, Amy, and Jane have developed a tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. It’s what we used to conduct the Google workshops, and it involves creating a “before sketch” of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then developing a visual “after diagram” of how you’d like to modify your job. The booklets can be ordered online and completed in teams or individually to help friends and colleagues make meaningful modifications to their jobs.

4. Start a Love Machine. In many organizations, givers go unrecognized. To combat this problem, organizations are introducing peer recognition programs to reward people for giving in ways that leaders and managers rarely see. A Mercer study found that in 2001, about 25 percent of large companies had peer recognition programs, and by 2006, this number had grown to 35 percent—including celebrated companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos.

Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life, developed a fascinating approach called the Love Machine. In a high-tech company, many employees aim to protect their time for themselves and guard information closely, instead of sharing their time and knowledge with colleagues. The Love Machine was designed to overcome this tendency by enabling employees to send a Love message when they appreciated help from a colleague. The Love messages were visible to others, rewarding and recognizing giving by linking it to status and reputations. One insider viewed it as a way to get “tech geeks to compete to see who could be the most helpful.” Love helped to “boost awareness of people who did tasks that were sometimes overlooked. Our support staff, for instance, often received the most Love,” says Chris Colosi, a former Linden manager.

To try out the Love Machine in your organization, look up a new electronic tool called SendLove. It’s available from LoveMachine, a new start-up that will first have you choose a recognition period for your team’s Love messages. Team members can send each other short messages recognizing giving, and the messages are all publicly visible.

5. Embrace the Five-Minute Favor. Ask people what they need and look for ways to help at a minimal personal cost, such as giving honest feedback and making an introduction. Here’s a simple exercise to get started as a connector. Start by going through your Rolodex, LinkedIn, or Facebook network. Identify pairs of people who share an uncommon commonality. Then, pick one pair a week and introduce them by email. You might also reconnect with dormant ties—not to get something, but to give. Once a month, reach out to one person with whom you haven’t spoken in years. Find out what they’re working on and ask if there are ways that you can be helpful.

6. Practice Powerless Communication. Becoming a giver often requires a change in habits—from talking to listening, self-promoting to advice-seeking, and advocating to inquiring. Jim Quigley, a senior partner at Deloitte who previously served as CEO, decided to work on his powerless communication. He set a goal in meetings to talk no more than 20 percent of the time. “One of my objectives is listening. Many times, you can have bigger impact if you know what to ask, rather than knowing what to say. I don’t learn anything when I’m speaking. I learn a lot when I’m listening,” Quigley told me. As he shifted from answers toward questions, Quigley found himself gaining a deeper understanding of other people’s needs. “It doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it’s a habit, and you can form that habit.” For more on the power of powerless communication, visit the blogs by Susan Cain, author of the recent book Quiet, and Jennifer Kahnweiler, author of The Introverted Leader.

7. Join a Community of Givers. To find other givers, join a Freecycle community, where you can give away goods and see what other people need. Another inspiring community of givers is ServiceSpace, the home of a series of Giftivism initiatives started by Nipun Mehta. Headquartered in Berkeley, California, ServiceSpace has over 400,000 members and sends over 50 million emails a year. Yet they still operate by three rules: “no staff, no fundraising, and no strings attached.” Through ServiceSpace, Nipun has created a platform for people to increase their giver quotients, divided into three categories: gift economy projects, inspirational content, and volunteer and nonprofit support. One of the gift economy projects is Karma Kitchen, where the menu has no prices. When the bill arrives, it reads $0.00 and contains just two sentences: “Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it forward for those who dine after you.”

8. Launch a Personal Generosity Experiment. If you’d rather give on your own, try the GOOD 30-day challenge. Each day for a month, GOOD suggests a different way to give. For more examples of random acts of kindness, check out Sasha Dichter’s 30-day generosity experiment and Ryan Garcia’s year of daily random acts of kindness. Dichter, the chief innovation officer at the Acumen Fund, embarked on a monthlong generosity experiment in which he said yes to every request for help that he received. Garcia, a sales executive at ZocDoc, is performing one random act of kindness every day for an entire year and keeping a blog about his experience, from stepping up as a mentor to thanking a customer service representative. As research shows, this generosity experiment is likely to be most psychologically rewarding if you spend somewhere between two and 11 hours a week on it, and if you distribute it into larger chunks—multiple acts once a week, instead of one act every day.

9. Help Fund a Project. Many people are seeking financial support for their projects. On Kickstarter, known as the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, you can find people looking for help in designing and launching movies, books, video games, music, plays, paintings, and other products and services. On Kiva, you can identify opportunities to make microloans of $25 or more to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Both sites give you the chance to see and follow the progress of the people you help.

10. Seek Help More Often. If you want other people to be givers, one of the easiest steps is to ask. When you ask for help, you’re not always imposing a burden. Some people are givers, and by asking for help, you’re creating an opportunity for them to express their values and feel valued. By asking for a five-minute favor, you impose a relatively small burden—and if you ask a matcher, you can count on having an opportunity to reciprocate. Wayne and Cheryl Baker note that people can “start the spark of reciprocity by making requests as well as helping others. Help generously and without thought of return; but also ask often for what you need.”

For students in a first-grade class at Park Day School in Oakland, California, the most in-depth project of their young academic careers involved several months spent transforming their classroom into an ocean habitat, ripe with coral, jellyfish, leopard sharks, octopi, and deep-sea divers (or, at least, paper facsimiles of them). Their work culminated in one special night when, suited with goggles and homemade air tanks, the boys and girls shared what they had learned with their parents. It was such a successful end to their project that several children had to be gently dragged away as bedtime approached.

By the next morning, however, something unexpected had occurred: When the students arrived at their classroom at 8:55 a.m., they found yellow caution tape blocking the entrance. Looking inside, they saw the shades drawn, the lights out, and some kind of black substance covering the birds and otters. Meeting them outside the door, their teacher, Joan Wright-Albertini, explained: “There’s been an oil spill.”

“Oh, it’s just plastic bags,” challenged a few kids, who realized that the “oil” was actually stretched-out black lawn bags. But most of the students were transfixed for several long minutes. Then, deciding that they were unsure if it was safe to enter, they went into another classroom, where Wright-Albertini read from a picture book about oil spills.

The children already knew a little bit about oil spills because of the 2010 accident in the Gulf of Mexico—but having one impact “their ocean” made it suddenly personal. They leaned forward, a few with mouths open, listening to every word. When she finished, several students asked how they could clean up their habitat. Wright-Albertini, who had anticipated the question, showed them footage of an actual cleanup—and, suddenly, they were propelled into action. Wearing gardening gloves, at one boy’s suggestion, they worked to clean up the habitat they had worked so hard to create.

Later, they joined their teacher in a circle to discuss what they learned: why it was important to take care of nature, what they could do to help, and how the experience made them feel. “It broke my heart in two,” said one girl. Wright-Albertini felt the same way. “I could have cried,” she said later. “But it was so rich a life lesson, so deeply felt.” Indeed, through the mock disaster, Wright-Albertini said she saw her students progress from loving the ocean creatures they had created to loving the ocean itself. She also observed them understand a little bit about their connection to nature and gain the knowledge that, even as six and seven year olds, they could make a difference.

It was a tender, and exquisitely planned, teachable moment that reflected what 
a growing number of educators have begun to identify as a deeply felt imperative: To foster learning that genuinely prepares young people for the ecological challenges presented by this entirely unprecedented time in human history.

“Ecoliterate” is our shorthand for the end goal of this kind of learning, and raising ecoliterate students requires a process that we call “socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy”—a process that, we believe, offers an antidote to the fear, anger, and hopelessness that can result from inaction. As we saw in Wright-Albertini’s classroom, the very act of engaging in some of today’s great ecological challenges—on whatever scale is possible or appropriate—develops strength, hope, and resiliency in young people.

Ecoliteracy is founded on a new integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence—forms of intelligence popularized by Daniel Goleman. While social and emotional intelligence extend students’ abilities to see from another’s perspective, empathize, and show concern, ecological intelligence applies these capacities to an understanding of natural systems and melds cognitive skills with empathy for all of life. By weaving these forms of intelligence together, ecoliteracy builds on the successes—from reduced behavioral problems to increased academic achievement—of the movement in education to foster social and emotional learning. And it cultivates the knowledge, empathy, and action required for practicing sustainable living.

To help educators foster socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy, we have identified the following five practices. These are, of course, not the only ways to do so. But we believe that educators who cultivate these practices offer a strong foundation for becoming ecoliterate, helping themselves and their students build healthier relationships with other people and the planet. Each can be nurtured in age-appropriate ways for students, ranging from pre-kindergarten through adulthood, and help promote the cognitive and affective abilities central to the integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence.

1. Develop empathy for all forms of life

At a basic level, all organisms—including humans—need food, water, space, and conditions that support dynamic equilibrium to survive. By recognizing the common needs we share with all organisms, we can begin to shift our perspective from a view of humans as separate and superior to a more authentic view of humans as members of the natural world. From that perspective, we can expand our circles of empathy to consider the quality of life of other life forms, feel genuine concern about their well-being, and act on that concern.

Most young children exhibit care and compassion toward other living beings.
This is one of several indicators that human brains are wired to feel empathy and concern for other living things. Teachers can nurture this capacity to care by creating class lessons that emphasize the important roles that plants and animals play in sustaining the web of life. Empathy also can be developed through direct contact with other living things, such as by keeping live plants and animals in the classroom; taking field trips to nature areas, zoos, botanical gardens, and animal rescue centers; and involving students in field projects such as habitat restoration.

Another way teachers can help develop empathy for other forms of life is by studying indigenous cultures. From early Australian Aboriginal culture to the Gwich’in First Nation in the Arctic Circle, traditional societies have viewed themselves as intimately connected to plants, animals, the land, and the cycles of life. This worldview of interdependence guides daily living and has helped these societies survive, frequently in delicate ecosystems, for thousands of years. By focusing on their relationship with their surroundings, students learn how a society lives when it values other forms of life.

2. Embrace sustainability as a community practice

Organisms do not survive in isolation. Instead, the web of relationships within any living community determines its collective ability to survive and thrive.

By learning about the wondrous ways that plants, animals, and other living things are interdependent, students are inspired to consider the role of interconnectedness within their communities and see the value in strengthening those relationships by thinking and acting cooperatively.

The notion of sustainability as a community practice, however, embodies some characteristics that fall outside most schools’ definitions of themselves as a “com- munity,” yet these elements are essential to building ecoliteracy. For example, by examining how their community provisions itself—from school food to energy use—students can contemplate whether their everyday practices value the common good.

Other students might follow the approach taken by a group of high school students in New Orleans known as the “Rethinkers,” who gathered data about the sources of their energy and the amount they used and then surveyed their peers by asking, “How might we change the way we use energy so that we are more resilient and reduce the negative impacts on people, other living beings, and the planet?” As the Rethinkers have shown, these projects can give students the opportunity to start building a community that values diverse perspectives, the common good, a strong network of relationships, and resiliency.

3. Make the invisible visible

Historically—and for some cultures still in existence today—the path between
a decision and its consequences was short and visible. If a homesteading family cleared their land of trees, for example, they might soon experience flooding, soil erosion, a lack of shade, and a huge decrease in biodiversity.

But the global economy has created blinders that shield many of us from experiencing the far-reaching implications of our actions. As we have increased our use of fossil fuels, for instance, it has been difficult (and remains difficult for many people) to believe that we are disrupting something on the magnitude of the Earth’s climate. Although some places on the planet are beginning to see evidence of climate change, most of us experience no changes. We may notice unusual weather, but daily weather is not the same as climate disruption over time.

If we strive to develop ways of living that are more life-affirming, we must find ways to make visible the things that seem invisible.

Educators can help through a number of strategies. They can use phenomenal web-based tools, such as Google Earth, to enable students to “travel” virtually and view the landscape in other regions and countries. They can also introduce students to technological applications such as GoodGuide and Fooducate, which cull from a great deal of research and “package” it in easy-to-understand formats that reveal the impact of certain household products on our health, the environment, and social justice. Through social networking websites, students can also communicate directly with citizens of distant areas and learn firsthand what the others are experiencing that is invisible to most students. Finally, in some cases, teachers can organize field trips to directly observe places that have been quietly devastated as part of the system that provides most of us with energy.

4. Anticipate unintended consequences

Many of the environmental crises that we face today are the unintended consequences of human behavior. For example, we have experienced many unintended but grave consequences of developing the technological ability to access, produce, and use fossil fuels. These new technological capacities have been largely viewed as progress for our society. Only recently has the public become aware of the downsides of our dependency on fossil fuels, such as pollution, suburban sprawl, international conflicts, and climate change.

Teachers can teach students a couple of noteworthy strategies for anticipating unintended consequences. One strategy—the precautionary principle—can be boiled down to this basic message: When an activity threatens to have a damaging impact on the environment or human health, precautionary actions should be taken regardless
of whether a cause-and-effect relationship has been scientifically confirmed. Historically, to impose restrictions on new products, technologies, or practices, the people concerned about possible negative impacts were expected to prove scientifically that harm would result from them. By contrast, the precautionary principle (which is now in effect in many countries and in some places in the United States) places the burden of proof on the producers to demonstrate harmlessness and accept responsibility should harm occur.

Another strategy is to shift from analyzing a problem by reducing it to its isolated components, to adopting a systems thinking perspective that examines the connections and relationships among
the various components of the problem. Students who can apply systems thinking are usually better at predicting possible consequences of a seemingly small change to one part of the system that can potentially affect the entire system. One easy method for looking at a problem systemically is by mapping it and all of its components and interconnections. It is then easier to grasp the complexity of our decisions and foresee possible implications.

Finally, no matter how adept we are at applying the precautionary principle
and systems thinking, we will still encounter unanticipated consequences of our actions. Building resiliency—for example, by moving away from mono-crop agriculture or by creating local, less centralized food systems or energy networks—is another important strategy for survival in these circumstances. We can turn
to nature and find that the capacity of natural communities to rebound from unintended consequences is vital to survival.

5. Understand how nature sustains life

Ecoliterate people recognize that nature has sustained life for eons; as a result, they have turned to nature as their teacher and learned several crucial tenets. Three of those tenets are particularly imperative to ecoliterate living.

First of all, ecoliterate people have learned from nature that all living organisms are members of a complex, interconnected web of life and that those members inhabiting a particular place depend upon their interconnectedness for survival. Teachers can foster an understanding of the diverse web of relationships within a location by having students study that location as a system.

Second, ecoliterate people tend to be more aware that systems exist on various levels of scale. In nature, organisms are members of systems nested within other systems, from the micro-level to the macro-level. Each level supports the others to sustain life. When students begin to understand the intricate interplay of relation- ships that sustain an ecosystem, they can better appreciate the implications for survival that even a small disturbance may have, or the importance of strengthening relationships that help a system respond to disturbances.

Finally, ecoliterate people collectively practice a way of life that fulfills the needs of the present generation while simultaneously supporting nature’s inherent ability to sustain life into the future. They have learned from nature that members of a healthy ecosystem do not abuse the resources they need in order to survive. They have also learned from nature to take only what they need and to adjust their behavior in times of boom or bust. This requires that students learn to take a long view when making decisions about how to live.

These five practices, developed by the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy, offer guideposts to exciting, meaningful, and deeply relevant education that builds on social and emotional learning skills. They can also plant the seeds for a positive relationship with the natural world that can sustain a young person’s interest and involvement for a lifetime.

Sadly, a number of these resources are newly relevant after yesterday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon, including the resources from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) to help children make sense of traumatic events, these tips from the National Association for School Psychologists, and Educators for Social Responsibility’s excellent guide to “Talking with Children about War and Violence in the World.” We recommend parents, educators, and anyone who works with kids to review them for their children’s—and their own—well-being.

Of course, children are not the only ones affected by the terrible events in Boston; for people of all ages, the bombing may raise concerns about congregating at large public events or in prominent public places. While the Newtown tragedy focused attention on school safety and gun control, yesterday’s events may evoke more general fears and anxieties about everyday terrorism.

Obviously, these fears are stoked by the extensive media coverage of the bombing. Indeed, one significant difference between yesterday’s events and many other traumas that preceded it is the sheer volume of photos and videos documenting the horror. The bombing, after all, took place at a major public celebration, the kind where iPhones and other cameras are ubiquitous in the hands of the press, spectators, even the participants themselves. Just moments before the explosions, many lenses were trained on the exact location where the bombs went off.

As a result, we were almost immediately flooded with images of chaos and carnage. Many first-hand accounts of the scene described it as a “war zone.” While most Americans have been spared the trauma of finding ourselves thrust into such a scene, a quick search on YouTube can now give an all-too-real feeling of what it’s like for an American oasis to be transformed into a war zone—and raise the distressing thought that it’s possible for our own lives to intersect with such senseless violence. We saw similar images on 9/11, to be sure, but 9/11 was years before smart phones, years before Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, years before many people even had digital cameras.

“[Boston] was such a graphic attack, and then there were so many cameras there to capture the graphic attack,” says J. Brian Houston, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Missouri, where he co-directs the Terrorism and Disaster Center. “In this country, I can’t remember anything like it.”

When the professional news media cover similar attacks, adds Houston, they often shield the public from the most horrific images. But since so many of the images from Boston were capture by non-professionals, who can distribute them through social media or other online platforms, viewers’ exposure to the horror will be practically unfiltered.

Research has documented real costs to this kind of exposure. A few years ago, Houston himself analyzed the results of 23 prior studies on the effects of media coverage of terrorism, particularly the 9/11 attacks. He found a significant link between media exposure and symptoms of PTSD. This link was strongest among children and, counter-intuitively, people who lived further from the attacks, perhaps because more of their experience of the event came directly from the media. For adults and kids alike, this could mean heightened risk of anxiety, depression, problems sleeping or eating, and, for kids, regression to younger developmental behavior, like by clinging more to their parents. (Much of the research on how the media’s coverage of traumatic events impacts the public has been helpfully summarized by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.)

So what should we do in the face of all this coverage? Houston and other experts have identified some effective strategies, many of which have been highlighted by his Terrorism and Disaster Center (formerly based at the University of Oklahoma), which works to promote recovery and resilience among children, families, and communities affected by disaster. Here are some of the top tips.

Limit your exposure—and your kids’. Houston recognizes that this can be easier said than done. “We want to understand what happened,” he says. “But at a certain point, we’re watching the same images over and over again. For adults, you have to take a break and disengage.”

For younger children, Houston recommends restricting as much as possible. A fact sheet he and his colleagues compiled for parents suggests this is a sound strategy for kids younger than eight. But he acknowledges that completely restricting access may not be possible for older kids, especially since they’re often online more than their parents—which motivates the next tip.

Find out what kids know. With his own kids, ages seven and 10, Houston has been surprised in the past by how much they’ve heard about certain tragedies, though the information is not always accurate. “Asking them what they’ve heard and what they know allows me to get a sense of what I need to talk with them about,” he says.

In general, kids have a harder time making sense of trauma and disasters. Through his research, Houston found that after 9/11, many kids thought that hundreds of buildings in New York had fallen down because they saw the collapse of the World Trade Center replayed so many times. So asking kids what they know also allows parents to clarify misconceptions.

“It’s easy for kids to have little bits of the truth, then extrapolate from there, often very wildly,” he says. “So if you can clarify misconceptions, answer questions, you can root them a little better in reality—which is bad enough, but sometimes their imaginations are much worse.”

Remind kids—and yourself—of the good in the world. Blood and explosions might make for more sensational video, but they should not overshadow the countless acts of kindness and heroism that often follow a disaster. Such goodness was clearly on display in Boston, with videos showing first responders running toward the explosion sites even as the crowd was running away, and stories emerging of civilian bystanders like Carlos Arredondo who rushed in to help people in need.

It’s easy to think that stories like these are the exception, but we hear about them time and again after tragedies—a fact my colleague Jeremy Adam Smith pointed out in his December article about the reminders of human strength and goodness we saw after Sandy Hook. Indeed, research by sociologist Lee Clarke has found that “people rarely respond to disaster with extreme panic, recklessness, and selfishness”; instead, they help each other. This, of course, echoes a finding that is fundamental to our work here at the Greater Good Science Center: that the human propensity for compassion is a real, deep, and even defining part of our nature.

In her excellent post yesterday on Scientific American, Melanie Tannenbaum points out all the reasons why, according to social psychology, people at the marathon should have been disinclined to help—and yet they helped anyway. “Even when everything around us ... combines in perfect synchrony to create the exact blend of factors that should push anyone away from helping,” she writes, “we can’t underestimate the power of that drive within us all that doesn’t care about what the textbook says and pushes us towards doing good anyway.”

Tannenbaum reminds us of the old quote from Fred “Mister” Rogers that has, for tragic reasons, become quite timely over the past few months:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.

Identify ways you can take action and help. Terrorist attacks and other acts of violence can make us feel powerless and see the world as evil, says Houston. One of the hardest things for us psychologically about an attack like the one in Boston is that we don’t have any explanation for it—we don’t know the perpetrators, the motive, anything. The excess of images combined with a dearth of explanations “might be very distressing for adults and children,” he says.

An empowering response is to find ways we can help other people. This could mean doing something to benefit victims in Boston, like giving blood or making a donation to the Red Cross. But even lending a hand to someone in your own community could improve your mental health, says Houston, by reaffirming your own efficacy and your ability to make a positive impact on the world. A great deal of research backs this up, as Meredith Maran has reported in her Greater Good article on the “activism cure.”

While yesterday’s events were terrifying and heartbreaking, and the resulting images can feel overwhelming, the work by Houston and other researchers shows how it’s possible for adults and kids alike to respond with resilience. For more tips, I suggest reading:

• The Terrorism and Disaster Center’s fact sheets for parents and for teachers and school staff;
• The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s useful links for coping with violence and traumatic events;
• And mental health professionals may want to check out the information on trauma and PTSD put out by the National Center for PTSD.

Stress brings high health care and turnover costs. In a study of employees from various organizations, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress were 46 percent greater than at similar organizations without high levels of stress. In particular, workplace stress has been linked to coronary heart disease in retrospective (observing past patterns) and prospective (predicting future patterns) studies. Then there’s the impact on turnover: 52 percent of employees report that workplace stress has led them to look for a new job, decline a promotion, or leave a job.

But there’s a different way. A new field of research is suggesting that when organizations promote an ethic of compassion rather than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an improved bottom line.

Consider the important—but often overlooked—issue of workplace culture. Whereas a lack of bonding within the workplace has been shown to increase psychological distress, positive social interactions at work have been shown to boost employee health—for example, by lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and by strengthening the immune system.

Happy employees also make for a more congenial workplace and improved customer service. Employees in positive moods are more willing to help peers and to provide customer service on their own accord. What’s more, compassionate, friendly, and supportive co-workers tend to build higher-quality relationships with others at work. In doing so, they boost coworkers’ productivity levels and increase coworkers’ feeling of social connection, as well as their commitment to the workplace and their levels of engagement with their job. Given the costs of health care, employee turnover, and poor customer service, we can understand how compassion might very well have a positive impact not only on employee health and well-being but also on the overall financial success of a workplace.

So why does compassion provide such a boost to employee well-being? One reason may be its impact on social connection. Research by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman suggests that connecting with others in a meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery from disease; research by Stephanie Brown at Stonybrook University has shown that it may even lengthen our life.

Despite this research, managers may shy away from compassion for fear of appearing weak. Yet history is filed with leaders who were highly compassionate and very powerful—Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few. They were such strong and inspiring leaders that people would drop everything to follow them. Wouldn’t any manager wish for that kind of loyalty and commitment?

Support for this view comes from research by Jonathan Haidt at New York University. His research shows that seeing someone help another person creates a heightened state of well-being that he calls “elevation.” Not only do we feel elevation when we watch a compassionate act, but we are then more likely to act with compassion ourselves.

When Haidt and his colleagues applied his research to a business setting, he found that when leaders were fair and self-sacrificing, their employees would experience elevation. As a consequence, they felt more loyal and committed and were more likely to act in a helpful and friendly way with other employees for no particular reason. In other words, if a manager is service-oriented and ethical, he is more likely to make his employees follow suit and to increase their commitment to him or her.

Elevation may even be a driving force behind creating a culture of compassion and kindness, whether in a workplace or in society at large. Social scientists James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicolas Christakis of Harvard have demonstrated that helping is contagious: Acts of generosity, compassion, and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. This is how culture is formed. Isn’t that the kind of workplace culture you would want to work in or lead?

Research on compassion is setting a new tone for the workplace and management culture. But this field is still new. Scientists are exploring the most effective ways to foster compassion in the workplace, and to help these best practices spread across organizations.

Doing that successfully will require a robust dialogue between the research world and the business world. This is the kind of dialogue we are trying to promote at the Compassion and Business Conference on April 30 at Stanford University, hosted by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), of which I am the associate director.

If you’re interested in being part of the movement to infuse businesses with compassion, I hope you’ll register and join us.

That’s one of the conclusions I took away from the annual meeting of the Council on Contemporary Families, which convenes scholars and writers from around North America to discuss new scientific findings about the family.

This year’s conference at the University of Miami focused on immigrant families, and I heard from researchers whose discoveries undercut much of the “conventional wisdom” around immigration. For example, so-called “illegals” are remarkably law-abiding, in part because they live in fear of deportation and so won’t do anything that might entangle themselves with law enforcement. But, as I describe below, the undocumented condition—and the constant threat of deportation that comes with it—can have profoundly adverse psychological affects on children.

You may not be an immigrant, but the implications of this research go well beyond immigrant families and echo other new findings about the family. Here are three cutting-edge insights that should concern all Americans—and inform public policy debates.

1. Rigid gender roles are a mental health issue

During the past few years we’ve seen more and more studies showing that adherence to strict ideas about what a man should do and what a woman should do interfere with the ability to thrive in the twenty-first century. This insight emerges in many different, sometimes unexpected, domains—and in Miami, it turned up in research into immigrant families.

For example, Vanderbilt University sociologist Pallavi Banerjee discussed her study of 43 immigrant Indian couples in which one spouse has permission to work in the United States and the other does not. This kind of visa is designed to support “stable” and “traditional” families, but it also creates situations of dependency and social invisibility for the can’t-work spouse—which has a psychologically devastating effect on both sexes, but especially on men who have been conditioned to see themselves as breadwinners.

“I am a loser, loser, loser,” said one husband, “for coming as a dependent on a woman and now I am the bad one. I took to drinking and smoking, what else could I do? When men are unhappy they drink because we can’t cry but then we drink and we cry inside.”

But Banerjee’s research also revealed the benefits of creatively adapting gender roles to current economic conditions. “As a man I needed to make sure my family is okay and my wife was getting this opportunity to help our family and for that I would have to sacrifice a little and I was ready for that,” said another husband.

Some of the men were able to derive satisfaction from their caregiver roles at home. “My children really love me,” said one. “If they need anything or if they have to share anything, the first person they run to is me, not their mother. It makes me feel important.” The same was true for breadwinning women: If they could see themselves as a success in that role (instead of failures as caregivers), then they seemed happier.

In a time when women’s workforce participation and economic power have been steadily rising, these are lessons that all men and women should take to heart! Note that none of this implies that gender differences must disappear; the findings only imply that the twenty-first-century economy demands a certain flexibility and tolerance in our gender attitudes.

2. Effective interventions are inclusive & holistic

“Intervention” is the somewhat cryptic term scholars use to refer to programs designed to produce some change in behavior. In Miami, I heard researchers present rigorous scientific evaluations of programs designed to reduce domestic and dating violence, manage addiction, increase father involvement, and spread safe sex practices, all within immigrant populations.

One winning formula emerged: These programs work when they attempt to involve all family members as well as peers, in a culturally sensitive and community-based way.

For example, University of Miami nursing professor Rosa Gonzalez-Guarda’s Proyecto JOVEN succeeded in limiting Latino teen dating violence by developing its approach with schools and the community, and involving both parents and peers in the process.

Julia Perilla of Georgia State University described a domestic violence intervention for Latinos that involved both spouses—an approach that horrified native-born domestic violence advocates. But, said Perilla in her presentation, “we listened to the women and they kept saying that the program needed to involve their husbands, too.” She elaborated on this perspective in an email to me, which serves as a useful case study for inclusive, community-driven intervention:

Basically, the fact that Latinas (and, we suspect, women from many different parts of the world) remain in relationships in which there has been violence is due to a number of reasons. Of specific importance to the women with whom we work, first-generation Latina immigrants from Mexico (approx. 79%) and other parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the centrality of family, the importance of their roles as caretakers of the family, their immigration status, their prior experience in their home countries, their level of income, among many other of the intersectionalities of which I spoke, make it difficult for them to decide to leave their partner.

In addition, my experience of over 17 years working with men who have used violence against their family is that, as I also mentioned, overwhelmingly they are not JUST “batterers,” or “violent men.” As we work with the men over the weeks and months we begin to see positive characteristics that give us clues as to why their partners are willing to continue living with them. I want to emphasize that this is NOT true for ALL men with whom we work. There are men who are not interested in changing their behavior, do not see anything wrong with the violence they perpetrated, blame their partner or their children for his behavior, and are actually much more capable of using what they learn in the program to “fine-tune” their violent behaviors.

Incidentally, both Gonzalez-Guarda and Perilla’s presentations echoed Pallavi Banerjee’s insights—that adherence to rigid gender roles fuels unhappiness, and even violence, in relationships.

A similar result emerged from a presentation by UC Berkeley’s Philip and Carolyn Cowan about their program for supporting father involvement among low-income Latino immigrants—which they found needed to involve both spouses in order to be effective, as opposed to just working with the fathers. The Cowans’ most concrete and provocative finding is that a more stable, happier relationship between immigrant parents led to higher incomes—an average of $8,000 more per year.

3. Immigration policies are hurting children’s mental health

This was one of the strongest, most urgent messages of the research presented in Miami.

In her keynote, UCLA psychologist Carola Suárez-Orozco described how many “immigrant” families actually contain mixed legal statuses. They are undocumented children and adolescents, but also legal and citizen children of undocumented parents—and many exist in a gray area with temporary status or some kind of documentation in process. About 5.5 million children live in mixed status homes, and an estimated one million are themselves undocumented. In 2010 (the most recent year statistics are available), an estimated 193,621 children had some experience with deportation.

Children in such situations grow up with secrecy and social invisibility. Their parents cannot travel, work in most jobs, apply for many government services, or legally drive a car, among other limitations—and this is a legacy that extends to their children.

University of Texas psychologist Luis H. Zayas presented a series of case studies of children growing up “in the shadows” of undocumented status. One of his patients, “Virginia,” was six years old—and her father was facing removal to Mexico. Zayas found that life in the shadows had stunted her verbal development; she had come to fear that speaking up at school would inadvertently reveal something that would lead to her parents’ deportation, and she chose to remain silent instead. She did not speak in school for over 15 months, and the result, wrote Zayas in his evaluation, was “[pre-school] verbal production.” Virginia “occasionally stays in corner of the classroom and curls into a fetal position.”

Suárez-Orozco provided more of a empirical perspective on psychological issues faced by children in mixed status home, including:

• Worries about family deportations
• Food & housing insecurity
• Dawning awareness of status
• Worries about future education access
• Negative experience with authorities
• Frequent exposure to negative media portrayals

Both Zayas and Suárez-Orozco also described negative health, cognitive, educational, social-emotional, and economic outcomes. And yet even here, the researchers were able to identify immigrants who thrived in adversity. Zayas told the story of “Miguel,” a 14 year old raised by a single father who was facing deportation. As Zayas wrote in his evaluation, “This is a remarkably well-adjusted young man…bright, engaging, respectful.”

The recipe for resilience did not seem very different from any other kind of family: love and stability in the home and a narrative that helped families see themselves as resilient.

But it’s not hard to see how current immigration policies can undermine that resilience. Under the Obama Administration, the pace of deportations has actually accelerated, and families continue to face visa restrictions like the ones described by Pallavi Banerjee. One can only hope that the research presented in Miami will find its way into the minds of people who set immigration policies, and help push them in a direction that will keep families intact instead of tearing them apart.

6. Focus on quality, not quantity, of time with kids.

When the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children what they would change about their parents’ work and how it affects family life, only 10 percent of kids wished their mothers would stay home more and 15 percent wanted that from their fathers.

What did kids really want? For moms and dads “to be less stressed and tired”—which tells me that a) parents need to get a grip; and b) it’s the quality, not quantity, of time with parents that matters most to children.

But kids are different, and you don’t have to take the word of the Family and Work Institute. Have you ever asked your kids what’s most important to them? They might not care if you’re in the bleachers for every track meet—but they may want you to be home for dinner every night. Listening to your kids will help you prioritize and improve your time with them.

There’s another way to jack up quality of time: do stuff that you like or need to do. If you sit in front of a computer all day, make it a point to ride bikes or play sports with your kids. If you work with your hands, play mind-stimulating games or take the kids to museums.

7. Make time for your spouse—not just for your kids.

The cumulative stress of commuting, working, and fathering will ultimately kill you. But first, it will kill your erections—a fate that is, debatably, worse than death. And here is a scientist to explain the impact of stress on your sex life:

I am aware that there’s more to marriage than sex. There’s also mowing the lawn, bickering about the dishes, and watching 30 Rock re-runs. But isn’t it funny how, in long-term marriages, those stupid things can seem more important than grabbing a moment of pleasure and intimacy with each other?

For even when arousal is no problem—I mean, I know erections aren’t a problem for you; it’s those other guys I’m worried about—many working parents struggle to find the time for nookie.

A study by the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives and Families, published this month in the book Fast-Forward Family, found that while both moms and dads were spending more time with kids, they were spending far less time with each other—three fewer hours per week since 1975, according to one survey. This trend wreaks hell on marriages.

Welcome to the world of scheduled sex, if you don’t already live there. Of course, there’s more going on here than intercourse. Sex is an opportunity is to stare into each other’s eyes and build up some of that hot “positivity resonance” that psychologist Barbara Fredrickson talks about.

You know all this, I’m sure. This is just a friendly reminder that there’s more to life than working and parenting.

8. Wherever you are, be there—be present.

“This one a long time have I watched,” says Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, which I recently re-watched with my son. “All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.”

Yoda’s talking about Luke Skywalker, but working fathers should take his advice to heart. I’m certainly no Jedi master. Wherever I am, my mind is almost always somewhere else. I know it leads me to the dark side—and I also know I’m not alone there. That scattered, preoccupied feeling is the bane of many, many working parents.

As it happens, science agrees with Yoda. Allow me to quote my colleague Christine Carter on a recent study about mindfulness—non-judgmental, moment-to-moment awareness that emerges through deliberately paying attention:

Practicing mindfulness doesn’t just lead to decreased stress and increased pleasure in parenting, but it also brings profound benefits to kids. Parents who practiced mindful parenting for a year were more satisfied with their parenting skills and their interactions with their children… Amazingly, over the course of the year-long study, the behavior of these mindful parents’ kids also changed for the better: they got along better with their siblings, were less aggressive, and their social skills improved. All their parents did was practice mindfulness!

Simply put, this is about being at work when you’re at work and being at home when you’re at home—which breaks out into specific parenting skills, like listening with full attention; nonjudgmentally accepting yourself and the people in your life; and cultivating compassion for yourself, your spouse, and your child.

Benefits extend to work, by the way: One study published this month in the journal Psychological Science found that just two weeks of mindfulness training “improves reading ability, working memory, and task-focus.”

I encourage you to read more about the practice—and then give it a try.

9. Give yourself a little credit—and say “thanks” to your spouse.

As psychologist Jeff Cookston writes, “Men need to appreciate and value what they are doing—not beat themselves up over what they can’t do! Couples need to define what ‘involved’ means to them given their circumstances, so that fathers can try to live up to the right ideals.”

So when you’re feeling down and ragged, take just a moment to list your contributions to the household and to the world, whatever they may be. If you approach it with honesty, you’ll likely find this exercise reassuring. During particularly bad periods, you might even consider starting a journal.

And while you’re at it, try giving other people some credit as well, especially your spouse. Because it is very, very easy for working parents to take each other for granted—and that, my friends, is the road to marital hell. As we never tire of mentioning here at the Greater Good Science Center, gratitude improves your relationships as well as your mental and physical health.

It’s not hard to figure out why gratitude can make working parents happier. Your spouse needs you to serve as witness to his or her life—and your gratitude tells them that their work is visible and honored. Researchers Jess Alberts and Angela Threthewey have found that expressing gratitude can have a feedback effect in couples—the more you appreciate someone, the more they appreciate you in turn, which makes everyone happier.

10. Make your choices and own the consequences.

Traditional masculinity? In general, I’m not a fan. But there are virtues I’d like to preserve, with the caveat that they are not the exclusive property of men.

First among them is a sense of responsibility for our choices and a willingness to live with the consequences. I don’t have any science to throw at you for this item. But I believe that owning the consequences of your choices will bring you piece of mind.

Most grown-ups understand that you can’t “have it all”—you have to decide what’s most important to your family and then make the necessary trade-offs. It could fall to you to support a partner and children, in which case you’re just not going to make every soccer game. You could also end up becoming the primary caregiver—which will sidetrack your career. In a world of choices, it’s inevitable for us to be haunted by the roads we didn’t take.

The trick is to love the one we’re walking—and keep going. But accepting your own choices isn’t enough: It’s also critical for you to accept your partner’s choices, and for your partner to be content with yours. That’s no magic formula for making that happen—just a constant process of communication, negotiation, and empathy.

As I look back on these ten items, it occurs to me that they might stress you out. I’m supposed to make time for my kids AND my wife AND myself—AND I’m supposed to get the perfect job?! So let me end with this note: It’s OK to fail. It’s OK to not be perfect. We’re going to be OK, and so will our kids. Forgive yourself, and give yourself a little compassion.

I think most parents know this. The same Pew report that showed dads were stressed out also found that both moms and dads thought they were doing a pretty good job as parents. Speaking of which, I have to stop writing. It’s time for me to pick up my son at school!

“The report finds that dads are spending more time than ever with kids,” the producer told me over the phone. “But they still feel like they aren’t spending enough.”

I had just picked up my eight year old from school and we were both in my office. As I talked on the phone, my son jumped into my lap and said, loudly enough for the producer to hear: “I’m bored! Can we go home yet?”

The producer and I shared a laugh—he was a working dad, too. And of course, my son had inadvertently underscored the point of the conversation: Today’s dads are struggling alongside moms to fit paid work with family responsibilities. But even though our time with kids has tripled since the mid-sixties, the Pew Report finds that we’re two times more likely than moms to say we’re not spending enough.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Expectations for dads’ participation at home have risen steadily over three generations—but the need to make a living hasn’t gone away. As a result, many of today’s fathers feel caught between the pincers of home and work. Though moms have struggled on both fronts for decades, the juggle is new and shocking to men, as the Pew Study reveals. (Note: The Pew report only looked at heterosexual couples.)

To test this assertion, Google “how to be a happy working parent,” as I did a minute ago—the first 100 hits were targeted at moms. This suggests we as a culture haven’t given a lot of thought to the happiness of working fathers—and there are consequences to seeing work-life issues through a maternal lens, including a sense that a man’s individual problems represent personal, not societal, failures. When it comes to work-life fit, this is the message we hear as men: Suck it up.

But after I hung up the phone, I looked at my son and realized something important: After parenting for eight years and reading every peer-reviewed study I could find about work and family, I’ve gradually arrived at a place of equilibrium. Here are my 10 tips—drawn from a combination of scientific research and personal experience—for how to be a happy working dad. (This is part one, with five tips; here’s part two with five more.)

1. Find yourself a family-friendly workplace—and decide how much money that’s worth to you.

My employer, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, doesn’t pay me a whole lot, but it’s an ideal workplace for parents.

Formal policies permit a lot of flexibility, and our offices are adjacent to one of the university’s preschools, both of which contribute to a profoundly child-friendly atmosphere. My co-worker Emiliana breastfeeds her new baby during staff meetings; my son does his homework in the lobby.

When I was weighing this job against another that paid more money, I actually monetized that flexibility. How much was I willing to pay for the ability to pick up my son from school, take him to the dentist, bring him by the office? My answer was $5,000 a year. In other words, that’s the amount I was willing and able to sacrifice to be the working father I wanted to be.

Your answer will not be the same as mine, of course; different families have different values and needs. And in fact, your values and needs will change over time. What you need in one stage of parenthood might become less important as time goes on. If you find yourself feeling dissatisfied, ask yourself what you need right now—and then come up with a plan to get those needs met.

2. Advocate for family-friendly policies.

I recognize that I am extremely fortunate to work at an institution that offers, for example, paid leave and telecommuting options to parents.

In fact, only one out of 10 American men have access to paid paternity leave, and it’s perfectly legal for employers to fire a man for taking a day off to care for a sick child. Even when companies offer flextime, men (and women) can be informally penalized for taking advantage of it.

Sure, I have it good now—but I might not be so lucky at my next job. That’s why it’s in my long-term interest as a working father to advocate for family-friendly workplace policies. When I vote for a politician, I look at his or her record on family issues. I routinely sign petitions and speak out on behalf of policies like paid leave. This week, for example, Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Rosa DeLauro reintroduced the Healthy Families Act, “which would enable workers to earn up to seven paid sick days a year to take care of themselves or sick family members.”

Tellingly, advocates suggested supporters tweet about the act using the #StandUpForWomen hashtag, as if paid sick days were exclusively a mother’s concern. Yes, it is insulting to dads who take sick days for our kids. And yes, these are typically framed as “women’s issues”—but guys, that won’t change until we speak up.

Will doing so make you a happier working dad? Actually, the evidence says yes—volunteering and activism bring substantial mental and physical health benefits.

3. Kill your commute.

I know… cutting commute times is easier said than done.

My family recently moved from San Francisco to Berkeley—which gave me two extra hours a day with my son and vastly reduced my daily stress. Unfortunately, just as we were moving, my wife got a new job in San Francisco. Now she’s the one who commutes, for two to three hours a day on public transit. 

I tell this story to acknowledge that these days, commutes are hard to eliminate. But it’s a goal worth striving for: A 2011 study by researchers at Umea University in Sweden found that couples with long commutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce, largely because of the stress a commute causes.

So the more you can close the distances between your workplace, your partner’s workplace, and your kids’ school, the happier you’re all likely to be. This is another thing I monetized—I rated a commute as being worth $1,500 per year for every 30 minutes per day. So reducing my commute from 90 to 30 minutes is worth about $3,000 a year in pay, if given a choice.

Again, your exact number will be different—my colleague Elise puts it at $5,000—but try thinking about how much you’d pay to kill your commute. At minimum, you might find the exercise cathartic!

4. Get your team in place—and on the same page.

We don’t raise kids alone, and that’s especially true when both parents work.

As a working father, you need to see yourself as a senior manager in a department whose personnel will change over the years, but whose goal remains the same: to raise healthy, happy kids.

Who is on that team? There’s the other parent, to whom you might or might not be married. He or she shares authority with you, and you’ll need their buy-in on major decisions. To get that, you’ll need to cultivate skills like listening, empathy, negotiation, and compromise.

With the other parent, you’ll manage a progression of nannies, preschools, schools, afterschools, and summer camps. Budget permitting, you may also need to outsource certain functions, like housework and dog walking. Don’t leave all the details to your co-parent; instead, divide up responsibilities according to your complementary skills and interests, so that you feel involved and challenged.

Who else is on the team? Extended family, of course, as well as friends and social networks. In the first years of parenthood, join or form a playgroup for fathers. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, including babysitting; take the risk of confiding in friends when you feel overwhelmed. I met my friend Viru because he started organizing all-dad outings to museums and playgrounds. “You have to work very hard to have a community here,” he once told me. “It requires planning.”

5. Embrace flexible gender roles and the resiliency that comes with it.

When I was interviewing couples for my book The Daddy Shift, I found the happiest ones were those who weren’t hung up on ideas about what a man should do and what a woman should do. Mom didn’t look down on Dad if she made more money than him, and Dad didn’t waste time resenting the burdens of child care.

In fact, embracing flexible gender roles can make couples extremely happy—largely, I’d argue, because those beliefs are more adaptive to our 21st-century economic reality. “Given today’s precarious economic situation, the ‘happy working parent’ needs to be able to adapt and adjust,” said Baruch College sociologist Caryn Medved in an email, referring to a series of studies she conducted of two-income and reverse-traditional couples. “Gender flexibility allows, we argue, greater ability to successfully and dynamically balance work and family.”

And as the Pew study reveals, the roles and attitudes of men and women are indeed converging—men are developing more emotional and interpersonal skills; more women are going to school and to work. There’s a good reason why that’s happening. When layoffs can come at any moment, both partners need to be capable of making money and making dinner.

In other words, this flexibility and redundancy add up to greater resilience in the face of economic shocks—and it has the happy side effect of enriching men’s emotional lives and freeing both sexes from the prison of gender expectations. The point, guys, is that it doesn’t help to yearn for the good old days. We’ll all be happier when we can appreciate the positive changes and new possibilities that have emerged since our grandparents’ day.

This is part one. Here is part two, which looks more deeply at how to manage stress and your relationships.

But little do we realize, bingers like us are cheating ourselves out of happiness.

That’s the lesson from new research in the field of positive psychology. What this research shows is that indulging in life’s pleasures in smaller doses, or even giving them up for stretches of time, helps us enjoy them significantly more.

In one new study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth Dunn had 55 people eat a piece of chocolate and report how they felt. Then the researchers instructed some of those people to abstain from chocolate for a week, told others to eat as much chocolate as they wanted, and gave a third group no special instructions.

When all 55 people ate another piece of chocolate at the end of the week, the people who had abstained from chocolate reported significantly greater happiness than either the bingers or the people left to their own devices.

In fact, the bingers reported feeling less happy after their end-of-week chocolate than they’d felt after eating their piece at the start of the week.

While this is the first study to find that temporarily giving up something pleasurable may be good for our happiness, it builds on years of similar results. One study found that people enjoyed an episode of the old sitcom “Taxi” more if it included commercials than if it did not. In another recent paper, people said they took greater enjoyment from positive experiences (sitting in a massage chair, listening to Japanese hip-hop) when those experiences were briefly interrupted.

As it turns out, people tend to get used to sources of joy and pleasure very quickly, soon taking them for granted. And when you have more of something pleasurable, it becomes easier to take it for granted, and harder to savor it. The result is a psychic numbing to the good things in life.

And it gets worse. While that numbing effect may sound obvious, we’re generally unaware of it in our own lives: Studies show that people (mistakenly) think that getting more of the things they value will make them happier.

At the same time, we tend to underestimate how consuming in moderation might boost our enjoyment—and happiness—in the long run: Participants in the “Taxi,” massage chair, and Japanese hip hop studies all thought the experience would be more enjoyable without interruptions. They were wrong.

Indeed, so much of our everyday behavior is driven by the misconception that more is better. We celebrate our most important holidays by cooking twice as much food as we need, then scarfing it down. We work hard to get a promotion—then after getting it, start thinking about how to get the next one. We stay up all night tearing through “House of Cards” or the latest season of “Mad Men.”

What’s more, this same misconception about happiness leads many people to covet wealth and material things. Research suggests that more money can bring us more happiness, but only until we earn up to about $75,000/year. After that, there seems to be a negligible increase in happiness from making more money, meaning that many of us waste a lot of time pursuing a happiness we’ll never reach. Or worse, our single-minded pursuit of wealth stresses us out, compromises our values, and strains our relationships—without bringing that elusive boost in happiness.

All of this research points to a paradox of happiness: It’s not tied to abundance but to recognizing and appreciating what we do have. Once we meet our basic needs, our lives become more satisfying if we can savor and be grateful for the good that’s already around us, before we strive for more.

This can be easier said than done. But coincidentally, millions of Americans have been getting a jumpstart on moderation over the past month with their observance of Lent.

For Christians, this is supposed to be a period of repentance and self-denial, of course, a time to give up meat, chocolate, sex, and other indulgences as a way to atone for sins. But Quoidbach and Dunn’s research suggests it may carry some other benefits: Temporarily denying themselves certain pleasures for 40 days may ultimately make people happier than consistently indulging in them. In other words, a religious ritual of renunciation might actually feel pretty good in the end.

At a time when science and religion are often seen as at odds with one another, it’s encouraging to see them both validate a basic, counter-intuitive message: Sometimes we get a lot from giving stuff up.

It was shaped over millions of years of sequential adaptation in response to ever-changing environmental demands. Over time, brains grew in size and complexity; old structures were conserved and new structures emerged. As we evolved into social beings, our brains became incredibly sensitive to our social worlds.

This mixture of conservation, adaptation, and innovation has resulted in an amazingly complex brain, capable of everything from monitoring respiration to creating culture. This added complexity came with a cost. Not only do all of these systems have to develop and interconnect, but they also have to stay balanced and properly integrated for optimal performance.

This evolutionary history poses a challenge for educators. While findings from social neuroscience can provide some welcome guideposts for teachers, they cannot substitute for the flexibility needed in the classroom to accommodate a range of students. Students and teachers are not uniform raw materials or assembly-line workers, but a diverse collection of living, breathing human beings with complex evolutionary histories, cultural backgrounds, and life stories.

If we are going to move forward, we will have to admit that a one-size-fits-all model of education is doomed to fail the majority of students and teachers.

And through understanding how students’ brains actually work and using that knowledge to benefit classroom learning, we may be able to positively influence classroom education and prepare students to better face unknowable futures. Here are nine scientific insights that educators might want to keep in mind.

1. The brain is a social organ. 

Our brains require stimulation and connection to survive and thrive. A brain without connection to other brains and without sufficient challenge will shrink and eventually die—moreover, the modern human brain’s primary environment is our matrix of social relationships. As a result, close supportive relationships stimulate positive emotions, neuroplasticity, and learning. 

That’s why it pays for teachers to create positive social experiences in the classroom. From a neurobiological perspective, the position of the teacher is very similar to that of the parent in building the child’s brain. Optimism, encouragement, and giving someone the benefit of the doubt have been shown to positively impact performance—and so does a caring and positive regard for students. Promoting social-emotional learning programs that decrease student conflict and create positive social climates in the classroom are invaluable to learning. 

Tips for Applying Brain Science to the Classroom

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2. We have two brains. 

The cerebral hemispheres have differentiated from one another and developed specialized functions and skills. In general, the left hemisphere has taken the lead on language processing, linear thinking, and pro-social functioning while the right hemisphere specializes in visual-spatial processing, strong emotions, and private experience.

Most tasks, though, involve contributions from both hemispheres. So, it is important to understand how to engage both in the classroom context. 

Good teachers intuitively grasp this in their students, and they will seek to balance the expression of emotion and cognition, encouraging overly rational students to be aware of and explore their feelings while helping anxious students develop the cognitive capabilities of their left hemispheres to regulate their emotions.

Storytelling can help here, as stories can serve as powerful organizing tools for neural network integration. A story that is well told, containing conflicts and resolutions and thoughts flavored with emotions, will shape brains and connect people. 

3. Early learning is powerful. 

Much of our most important emotional and interpersonal learning occurs during our first few years of life, when our more primitive neural networks are in control. Early experiences shape structures in ways that have a lifelong impact on three of our most vital areas of learning: attachment, emotional regulation, and self-esteem. These three spheres of learning establish our abilities to connect with others, cope with stress, and feel that we have value. 

Every time children behave in a way they (or we) don’t understand, a teacher has the opportunity to engage in an exploration of their inner world. When painful experiences can be consciously thought about, named, and placed into a coherent narrative, children gain the ability to reintegrate dissociated neural networks of affect, cognition, and bodily awareness.

Encouraging students to write about their experiences in diaries and journals can help, as it lets students become the masters of their experience and reducing anxiety and stress. Research has shown that writing about your experiences can increase well-being and help with emotional regulation, which may have been impaired through early traumatic experiences. 

4. Conscious awareness and unconscious processing occur at different speeds, often simultaneously. 

Conscious awareness and explicit memory are but a small fraction of the vast amount of neural processing that occurs each millisecond.

Think of how many things you do without having to think about them: breathing, walking, balancing, even constructing the syntax of a sentence, is handled automatically. The brain is able to process incoming information, analyze it based on a lifetime of experience, and present it to us in half a second. The brain then creates the illusion that what we are experiencing is happening right now and that we are making decisions based on our conscious thought processes. 

Because of this, it is especially important to teach students to question their assumptions and the possible influences of past experiences and unconscious biases on their feelings and beliefs.

This is especially true when thinking about prejudice. Because fear conditioning does not require conscious awareness, the brain’s knee-jerk reaction to individuals of other races is unrelated to our conscious attitudes. Open discussion and increased interracial exposure can work against prejudice being turned into conscious beliefs and negative behaviors. 

5. The mind, brain, and body are interwoven.

Physical activity exerts a stimulating influence on the entire brain that keeps it functioning at an optimal level. Exercise has been shown to stimulate the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus and to pump more oxygen through the brain, stimulating capillary growth and frontal-lobe plasticity. 

Proper nutrition and adequate sleep are also essential to learning. Although the brain is only a fraction of our body’s weight, it consumes approximately 20 percent of our energy, which makes good nutrition a critical component of learning. Sleep boosts cognitive performance and augments learning while sleep deprivation limits our ability to sustain vigilance and attention. Sleep deprivation has also been shown to impair flexible thinking and decision-making. 

An awareness of these biological realities can lead to changes in school start times, lunch programs, and recess schedules. Teachers can teach students about the importance of sleep and make suggestions for better sleep habits, such as how to create a good sleep environment and promote relaxation. Good nutrition and regular exercise can be incorporated into the school environment. Teaching about the interconnections among the brain, the body, and how we learn will provide students with important scientific knowledge, which could improve their academic performance and physical health. 

In addition, learning can be enhanced by certain environmental conditions and hampered by others. Inadequate school facilities, poor acoustics, outside noise, and inadequate classroom lighting all correlate with poorer academic performance. Chairs with poor support hamper blood supply to the brain and impede cognition while temperatures above 74–77 degrees Fahrenheit have been shown to correlate with lower reading comprehension and math scores. A more hospitable climate for learning can help performance by providing for the physical needs of the body. 

6. The brain has a short attention span and needs repetition and multiple-channel processing for deeper learning to occur.

Curiosity, the urge to explore and the impulse to seek novelty, plays an important role in survival. We are rewarded for curiosity by dopamine and opioids (feel-good chemicals in the brain), which are stimulated in the face of something new. Because our brains evolved to remain vigilant to a constantly changing environment, we learn better in brief intervals.

This is likely one reason why variation in materials, breaks, and even intermittent naps facilitate learning. It is probably important for teachers to reestablish attention in their students every five to 10 minutes and continue to shift the focus of attention to new topics. 

Learning also involves the strengthening of connections between neurons. “What fires together wires together,” say neuroscientists, which is why repetition supports learning while the absence of repetition and exposure results in its decay. Teachers would do well to make sure they repeat important points in their lessons to deepen learning. 

Given that visual, semantic, sensory, motor, and emotional neural networks all contain their own memory systems, multichannel learning engaging each of these networks increases the likelihood of both storage and recall. We have an amazing capacity for visual memory, and written or spoken information paired with visual information results in better recall. There is a greater likelihood that learning will generalize outside the classroom if it is organized across sensory, physical, emotional and cognitive networks. 

7. Fear and stress impair learning. 

Evolution has shaped our brains to err on the side of caution and to trigger fear whenever it might be remotely useful. Fear makes us less intelligent because amygdala activation—which occurs as part of the fear response—interferes with prefrontal functioning. Fear also shuts down exploration, makes our thinking more rigid, and drives “neophobia,” the fear of anything new.

Stressful situations trigger the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which interferes with neural growth. Prolonged stress impairs our ability to learn and maintain physical health. 

Success in school depends upon a student’s ability to somehow decrease their stress. The inclusion of stress-management techniques into the curriculum is an obvious application of neuroscience to education that can improve learning, emotional well-being, and physical health. Teachers can use their warmth, empathic caring, and positive regard to create a state of mind that decreases fear and increases neuroplasticity and learning.

8. We analyze others but not ourselves: the primacy of projection.

Our brains have evolved to pay attention to the behaviors and emotions of other people. Not only is this processing complex, but it is lightning fast, shaping our experience of others milliseconds before we even become consciously aware of their presence. We automatically generate a theory of what is on their mind—our ideas about what they know, what their motivations may be, and what they might do next. As a result, we are as quick to think we know others as we are slow to become aware of our own motives and faults. 

Taking our thoughts about others and trying them on for size has the potential to teach us about ourselves and increase our empathic abilities. Simple exercises that guide students to examine what and how what they think and feel about others may be true for themselves can open a window of self-awareness, empathy, and insight. Teachers can ask students to examine the lives of historical figures and characters from books and movies to help them gain a third-eye perspective on their own strengths, motivations, and flaws.

9. Learning is enhanced by emphasizing the big picture—and then allowing students to discover the details for themselves.

When problems are represented at higher levels of abstraction, learning can be integrated into larger schemas that enhance memory, learning, and cognitive flexibility. Starting with major concepts and repeatedly returning to them during a lecture enhances understanding and memory, a phenomenon that increases when students create their own categories and strategies of organizing information. Chunking material into meaningful segments makes it easier to remember, and improves test performance while increasing prefrontal activity during encoding. 

When it comes to discovering the details, bear in mind that our brains evolved to learn is through trial-and-error exploration. This is true of learning and adapting to both our social and physical environments. Therefore, using what we learn to attempt to solve real-world problems and adjusting our behaviors or ideas based on the results augments the retention of skills and information. We are born to explore, and teachers who make use of that will probably find more success in the classroom.

This school seemed to be on to something, and I secretly wondered whether the students needed our help at all. When I got to class, I asked the children to tell me about the signs, and what it meant for them to be kind.

“Just be nice,” one child said. “Don’t be mean,” said another. 

I was sure it was fairly easy for them to be kind to their friends, but I wondered whether they could extend this kindness to others. I asked if they could be kind to someone who had bullied them.

“No way!” yelled one child.  “Probably not,” said another. Some of the other children looked puzzled. 

I knew from that moment that we had work to do. Many of us recognize the benefits of kindness and compassion, but how do we learn to be more kind—even to those who commit unkind acts? 

Training compassion

My colleagues and I at Emory University believe people have a natural capacity for empathy, love, and compassion, and that it can be deliberately deepened and expanded—to include even so-called “bullies”— through training. 

Compassion involves both the heartfelt wish that others be free from suffering and the readiness to act on their behalf. It arises from a deep sense of affection for others, coupled with a sensitivity to their pain and the recognition that their suffering can be transformed. 

Most of us find it easy to feel compassion for those that are close to us. The closer we feel to someone, the more unbearable it seems to witness their pain. It is more difficult, however, to feel compassion or even concern for strangers, those that are not like us, or those who have harmed or wronged us in some way. When it comes to those we dislike strongly, we may feel little if any discomfort in seeing their suffering, or may even, in the worst cases, take pleasure in it.

In order to learn to extend our compassion in ever-widening circles, including to those whom we have had difficulties with, we need to cultivate impartiality. To enhance our feelings of closeness and connection to others, we must generate affection toward them. One strategy for this is to cultivate gratitude for others by reflecting on the kindness of others and the countless ways in which we depend on others to survive. These two conditions—impartiality and affection—are necessary for compassion. 

Feeling moved by suffering is not necessarily the same as compassion, however. Sometimes witnessing pain can overwhelm or even paralyze us. Thus it is just as important to foster inner strength and courage as it is to cultivate sensitivity to others’ pain. We gain this strength in part by deepening our insight into the causes of suffering and recognizing that it can be overcome. When we realize that we have the capacity to transform our suffering, we gain the confidence and determination to do so. This courageous practice of open-heartedness, insight, and vulnerability is what we call self-compassion. 

These three ingredients—impartiality, affection, and self-compassion—form the basis of our Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program. CBCT, a secular compassion program developed by Geshe Lobsang Negi at Emory University, draws from the lojong or “mind training” tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and involves the systematic practice of gradually training the mind in compassion until compassion becomes spontaneous. 

The program is “cognitively-based” in that it relies on analytical meditations that encourage us to actively work with our emotions and cognitive appraisals in order to release hostility and indifference toward others and develop deep feelings of affection for, and positive connection with, others. This style of meditation does not involve simply thinking about something in a purely intellectual or detached way. We have to make it personal. The point of these reflections is to gain insight into the ways we think of and relate to others, and to deepen these insights through repeated reflection and practice until they transform the ways in which we treat others. 

Be kind (it’s good for you)

Simply wishing to be kind, or telling our children to do so, won’t necessarily make us caring or compassionate (just as simply wishing for money won’t make us wealthy!). But if we develop and cultivate the conditions for compassion, it will arise and deepen naturally. 

Being kind isn’t just about being nice or polite; it is also good for us. Our research has shown that CBCT training can reduce stress as well as the activation of autonomic and immune pathways that have been implicated the development of a host of chronic, stress-related illnesses, including depression, heart disease, and diabetes. But these benefits don’t simply come from attending classes or thinking about being more kind or compassionate. One of the most important implications from these studies is that practice matters: one needs to meditate regularly in order to effect real change. 

CBCT training also helps us build skills necessary for sustaining and enhancing our personal relationships. Practicing CBCT enhances our empathic accuracy—that is, our ability to infer others’ mental states—which is essential for building our social relationships. These skills are especially important for many adolescents in foster care who have difficulty forming new, healthy relationships in part because of past trauma or neglect. Compassion training seems to help these children build inner strength and gain the emotional tools necessary for opening to and connecting more deeply with others. 

CBCT aims to help participants gain psychological flexibility, learn to reduce suppression or avoidance of intrusive thoughts and emotions, and increase positive emotions and social connectedness, all of which may promote coping and resilience. Although CBCT was not designed to treat trauma specifically, our team is exploring its potential application as an adjunctive therapy for the treatment of PTSD. Members of our team are also investigating the efficacy of CBCT for suicide attempters at a local hospital in Atlanta, GA. 

We have also begun to explore ways in which CBCT can promote prosociality and well-being in schools. Our team developed curricula for elementary school children (ages five to nine) that not only teaches them the practices of mindfulness and attention but also facilitates their emotional intelligence and moral development through the practices of self-compassion, impartiality, empathy, affection, and engaged compassion for others. We are currently evaluating the effects of this program on prosocial behavior, bullying, social exclusion, stereotyping, and bias at a local school.

It is our hope that further research can help us learn the most effective and developmentally appropriate ways to help our children (and ourselves) learn both why and how to be more kind, compassionate, and caring. 

Though we have not published the results of this program yet, our work in elementary schools seems to be making a difference. We spent a lot of time during the course working towards cultivating compassion for bullies. A few weeks into the program, I asked the children how they would feel if their best friend got in trouble at school for saying something unkind to another student. One girl said that she would feel very bad, because she knows that her best friend is a really good person, and that she would only ever say something like that if she were really upset. 

I understood what she meant—it’s certainly easier for us to forgive those that are close to us, for we are able to see them as complex beings, capable of doing or saying unkind things from time to time, even if deep down they are really good people. Then I asked if she would also feel bad for the school bully if she got in trouble for saying something unkind to another student. “Well, no, but….” she said, pausing for a moment. “Well, I might feel a little bad. Maybe she was just upset, too.” 

Something clicked in that moment: part of learning to relate to others, even bullies, is learning to recognize them as just like us in wanting to be happy and free from suffering. Learning why others are unkind is part of the path of learning how to be kind.

As a Buddhist practitioner, I had always believed that the transformation of the mind and heart was possible for every human being. It was clear to me that these contemplative practices that I had known personally to be transformative could change health care. But only recently has scientific evidence emerged that validated these beliefs.

That’s why in 2008, Stanford launched a dialogue between experts in the contemplative traditions, principally Tibetan Buddhism, and Western scientists from a variety of fields. I postponed my retirement to help spread one of the results of that dialogue: the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), a secular model for helping people develop resilience in the face of suffering.

To me, such a program is timely and necessary: Health care providers have always confronted pain as part of their jobs, but today they must navigate a changing landscape that makes it more difficult than ever to sustain compassion over the long run. The emergence of compassion training holds the promise of helping health care meet those challenges.

Fighting burnout

Health care in the United States is facing major changes. As the health care train barrels full speed into the future, some think that it is a train wreck in slow motion. Even if it is not, health care givers may experience it that way. Not only are there political and financial challenges to transforming care for the US population, but ominously the care delivery system could end up with wounded or absent caregivers.

Already this may be the case. In 2012, JAMA Internal Medicine published the first comprehensive study of physician burnout—and found that 46 percent reported at least one symptom of burnout, especially those who work on the front line of care.

Indeed, research suggests that physicians are more likely to burn out than any other category of workers in the US. And according to various studies, at least one-third of nurses who work in high-risk settings may be suffering from burnout at any given time. This has implications for patients: There may be a relationship between the symptoms of compassion fatigue and the risk of committing medical errors and patient dissatisfaction with care.

Why should this be such an issue? Constant exposure to pain and suffering is an occupational risk intrinsic to health care. A case may be made that working in high-risk health care settings is similar in some ways to battlefield combat: prolonged stress, risk and complexity that degrades working memory, emotional regulation, and can result in secondary trauma or PTSD. These issues will never go away.

But there is much about the current economic and policy climate that actually puts health care workers at greater risk for burnout. As we address the issues of health care quality, safety, retention, access and funding, we also introduce complexity, time constraints, volume, and demands for new knowledge and skills for people in health care.

To cope with the future, health care professionals will need new resilience in the face of suffering, expanded capabilities to pay attention in more complex environments, and greater emotional intelligence in their relationships to care for others while also caring for themselves.

Training for compassion

In recent years, the science of compassion has made enormous strides. We are beginning to understand that compassion brings mental and physical health benefits to those who feel it—and research also suggests that compassion is a skill we can strengthen through training. The Center for Compassion, Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine was founded on this understanding that compassion can be cultivated by every human being—and that applications to the fields of education, medicine, business and government could profoundly change our lives.

CCARE developed the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) in collaboration with Thupten Jinpa, Tibetan scholar and principal translator for the Dalai Lama, and senior researchers at Stanford. It consists of Six Steps that gradually help participants develop the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements of the skills of compassion—which we define as the intention or wish and action to relieve suffering. Through progressive experiential training, it helps participants to compassionately focus on a loved one, then move that focus to oneself, to the stranger, to the difficult person, and then to all living beings.

Through strengthening of intention and attention, awareness of body sensations, cultivation of loving-kindness for self and others, and offering a vision of shared common humanity, CCT facilitates a transformation of how people relate and respond to their own suffering and to that of others.

CCT consists of nine weekly two-hour classes that include lectures, guided compassion cultivation exercises, and group discussions. The class is cumulative so that each session builds on the previous sessions. The goal of the training is to provide a practical framework for developing compassion for one’s self and others. The CCT teacher-training manual suggests that cultivating compassion may lead to improved communication, increased resilience to stress, and enhanced feelings of well‐being.

Cultivating compassion in hospitals

In 2011 we introduced the first Compassion Cultivation Training at Sharp Health care in San Diego, California. Sharp Health care is a regional nonprofit with seven hospitals, two medical groups, a health plan, 2600 physicians, and 15,000 employees.

We approached the introduction of CCT into Sharp Health care with a strategy of bottom up and “organic” development, assuming that the positive results for individuals would spread by word of mouth, touching the deepest personal needs of employees struggling with the challenges of health care delivery.

We were right. We held the first classes in the Sharp Memorial Hospital Rehabilitation conference room for 25 participants who heard about the program by word of mouth. The class was free and taken on employees’ free time. We selectively invited key Sharp leaders in order to develop CCT champions within corporate leadership. By the second series of classes we had waiting lists and the strong interest from leaders in clinical and administrative departments.

We are now teaching our third nine-week series of two classes per week. We have trained over 150 Sharp employees and some community members. Participants have been nurses, physicians, directors, CEOs, social workers, physical therapists, chaplains, IT and finance employees. From the community have come educators, a chef, massage therapist, executive coach, and therapists of different disciplines. We are now able to offer CEU, CME, and CPE credits. We have interest from three university research departments to partner with us to begin research on the applications and effectiveness of CCT.

Although we think that all of this is a measure of early success, the stories of transformation from our participants are the real evidence of success.

It is the chaplain with 25 years of experience who confessed to burnout from death and dying in the emergency rooms; after CCT this chaplain abandoned plans to change jobs , experiencing an ability to be present with the pain of patients and be energized by the work of relieving suffering. It is the older physician observed by nursing staff to hold the hand of a patient for maybe the first time. It is the director of corporate finance, whose focus is admittedly on the “bottom line,” who is implementing mindfulness and compassion training so that employees have a healthier work environment and the skills to manage their work stress.

There are countless reported stories of participants experiencing compassion that changes work, family and marital relationships, feelings about their own self-worth, management of physical pain, relief from anxiety, and deepening of religious faith and spiritual practice. The monthly follow up class for CCT graduates has become a community that supports the motivation and continued growth in the practice of cultivating compassion. 

The success of CCT at Sharp Health care is anecdotal, but real. We trust that future research in our program will join with the work being done at Stanford CCARE and other academic centers to identify the evidenced based practices of compassion that empower people to meet the challenges of the future. Health care does not have to be a train wreck. It can be an opportunity for people in health care to thrive, even as they relieve the suffering of others.

At the monastery, I vaguely understood the teachings of the beautiful Thai monk who instructed me to pay attention to the breath coming in and out of my nostrils. It sounded easy enough. So I sat down and attempted to pay attention, 16 hours a day, and very quickly I had my first big realization: I was not in control of my mind.

I was humbled and somewhat distraught by how much my mind wandered. I would attend to one breath, two breaths, maybe three—and then my mind was gone, lost in thoughts, leaving my body sitting there, an empty shell. Frustrated and impatient, I began to wonder, “Why can’t I do this? Everyone else looks like they’re sitting so peacefully. What’s wrong with me?”

On the fourth day, I met with a monk from London, who asked how I was doing. It was the first time I had spoken in four days, and out of my mouth came a deluge of the anxieties I had been carrying around with me. “I’m a terrible meditator. I can’t do it. I am trying so hard, and every time I try harder, I get even more tangled up. Meditation must be for other, more spiritual, calmer kinds of people. I don’t think this is not the right path for me.”

He looked at me with compassion and a humorous twinkle in his eye. “Oh dear, you’re not practicing mindfulness,” he told me. “You are practicing impatience, judgment, frustration, and striving.” Then he said five words that profoundly affected my life: “What you practice becomes stronger.” This wisdom has now been well documented by the science of neuroplasticity, which shows that our repeated experiences shape our brains.

The monk explained to me that mindfulness is not just about paying attention, but also about how you pay attention. He described a compassionate, kind attention, where instead of becoming frustrated when my mind wandered, I could actually become curious about my mind meandering about, holding this experience in compassionate awareness. Instead of being angry at my mind, or impatient with myself, I could inquire gently and benevolently into what it felt like to be frustrated or impatient.

In this way, I began to cultivate kindness toward myself, as well as a sense of interest and curiosity for my lived experience. I started to practice infusing my attention with care and compassion, similar to a parent attending to a young child, saying to myself, “I care about you. I’m interested. Tell me about your experience.”

Understanding this connection between mindfulness and compassion has been transformational, helping me embrace myself and my experience with greater kindness and care. It has also deeply informed my clinical and academic work. In my writing and research, I’ve explicitly articulated a model of mindfulness that includes the attitudes of how we pay attention. Instead of trying to control or judge our experience, we take an interest in it with attitudes of compassion and openness. We are cultivating awareness, yes, but it is important to acknowledge the human dimension of that awareness. It is not a sterile, mechanical awareness. Rather, it is a kind, curious, and compassionate awareness.

Research has started to document empirical evidence of this connection between mindfulness and compassion, consistently finding over the past two decades that mindfulness increases empathy and compassion for others and for oneself.

For example, in my first research publication, published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine in 1998, we found that Jon Kabat-Zinn’s eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program significantly increased empathy in medical students.

Another study that my colleagues and I conducted, published in the International Journal of Stress Management in 2005, concluded that MBSR training increased self-compassion in health care professionals. More recently, we examined the impact of mindfulness training on counseling psychology students and discovered that it significantly increased self-compassion—which, in turn, led to declines in stress and negative emotion and increases in positive emotion.

Basically, the research shows that mindfulness increases empathy and compassion for others and for oneself, and that such attitudes are good for you. To me, that affirms that when we practice mindfulness, we are simultaneously strengthening our skills of compassion—evidence that mindfulness isn’t simply about sharpening attention.

Yet what we don’t know is precisely how mindfulness produces these positive effects. Answering this question is an important next step for future research and exploration, so that we can better understand the precise elements and active ingredients essential to mindfulness training.

Although there is not much research focused specifically on how mindfulness helps us cultivate compassion and empathy, I can offer some ideas, based on my years of research and practice and discussions with other experienced meditators.

First, as I explain above, I believe truly practicing mindfulness helps us learn how to become more compassionate toward ourselves—which, evidence suggests, is intertwined with being more compassionate toward others. One study I often cite, especially when teaching psychotherapists and students who are training to become therapists, demonstrates that how we treat ourselves is highly correlated with how we treat others: When therapists rated how compassionate they were with themselves versus how critical and self-blaming, their ratings correlated highly with how they related to their patients.

It’s just as the wise monk from London taught me years ago: What we practice becomes stronger. If you think about it, we are relating to ourselves 24 hours a day—we are practicing this way of relating constantly. So if mindfulness truly does, as I believe, involve a kind, open, curious attitude toward yourself, it builds the self-compassion that helps foster compassion toward others. That’s why I tell my students, “Cultivate self-compassion—do it for your future patients!”

I think it is important to clarify, however, that self-compassion doesn’t mean we are always filled with happiness and lovingkindness. Simply put, what it means is that our awareness of what’s happening is always kind, always compassionate. So even if I’m feeling angry or frustrated, I am embracing my experience with a compassionate awareness. When we begin to welcome our experience in this way, we are better able to be with it, see it clearly, and respond appropriately to it—and, research suggests, we’ll be strengthening the skills that help us extend compassion toward others.

In this way, I like to think of mindfulness as a big cooking pot. I put all of my experiences into this pot. This pot is always kind, always welcoming, even if the stuff I put into it is not (e.g., anger, sadness, confusion). I cook all of it—the pain, the confusion, the anger, the joy—steadily, consistently holding it in this kind, compassionate pot of mindfulness. By relating to my experiences in this way, I am better able to digest and receive nourishment from them, just as when you put a raw potato in a pot and cook it for many hours, it becomes tasty and nourishing.

Another way that mindfulness cultivates compassion is that it helps us see our interconnectedness. For example, let’s say that the left hand has a splinter in it. The right hand would naturally pull out the splinter, right? The left hand wouldn’t say to the right hand, “Oh, thank you so much! You’re so compassionate and generous!” The right hand removing the splinter is simply the appropriate response—it’s just what the right hand does, because the two hands are part of the same body.

The more you practice mindfulness, the more you begin to see that we’re all part of the same body—that I as the right hand actually feel you, the left hand’s pain, and I naturally want to help. Mindfulness cultivates this interconnectedness and clear seeing, which leads to greater compassion and understanding of the mysterious web in which we all are woven.

Shauna Shapiro will join Jon Kabat-Zinn on March 8, 2013, to discuss mindfulness and compassion. Register now to attend in person or through Live Webcast.

A third reason mindfulness appears to cultivate empathy and compassion is that it guards against the feelings of stress and busyness that make us focus more on ourselves and less on the needs of other people.

This was famously demonstrated in the classic Good Samaritan experiments conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson in the 1970s. Darley and Batson assigned seminary students at Princeton University to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan. While on their way to their presentation, the students passed someone (working with the researchers) who was slumped over and groaning. The researchers tested all kinds of variables to see what might make the students stop to help, but only one variable mattered: whether or not the students were late for their talk. Only 10 percent of the students stopped to help when they were late; more than six times as many helped when they were not in a hurry.

This study suggests that people are not inherently morally insensitive, but when we’re stressed, scared, hurried, it’s easy to lose touch with our deepest values. By helping us stay attuned to what’s happening around us in the present moment, regardless of the time, mindfulness helps us stay connected to what is most important. As the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi teaches, “The most important thing is to remember the most important thing.”

For me, the most important thing is to continue to explore, with an open heart and mind, what mindfulness truly is, and help illuminate how it can be of greatest benefit. We clearly do not have all the answers yet; I think what is most interesting is to ask the questions. As Rilke said, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

The exploration of mindfulness requires great sensitivity and a range of methodological glasses. Our science—and our lives—will benefit by looking through all of them, illuminating the richness and complexity of mindfulness.

But new scientific findings suggest that Mrs. Obama may need to add another component to her program: volunteering.

In a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, 106 10th-grade students were asked to volunteer in after-school programs where they worked with elementary-aged children for 60 to 90 minutes per week for 10 weeks; another group of 10th graders, who were waitlisted for volunteering, served as a control group.

Compared to the non-volunteers, the students who volunteered showed a steep drop in risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including cholesterol levels and body mass index, at the end of 10 weeks. These benefits were even more pronounced for students whose empathy and altruistic behaviors increased the most and whose negative moods lessened over those 10 weeks.

So, while the study didn’t focus on decreasing obesity specifically, it did show that volunteering may prevent one of its potential consequences: heart disease. And it has the added value of increasing kind, helpful (or “pro-social”) behavior—a nice alternative to the low self-esteem and academic troubles that can result from childhood obesity.

The findings add an exciting new physical dimension to what scientists know about the many social and emotional benefits volunteering brings students, including: higher levels of positive emotions; a stronger ability to regulate their emotions; lower levels of risk behavior, such as early pregnancy and drug use; increased civic engagement and moral reasoning; and a greater likelihood of volunteering in adulthood.

So for schools that already provide volunteer opportunities for their students—keep up the great work! Research tells us that you’re benefiting your students not only mentally and emotionally but physically as well.

But for those schools that haven’t yet integrated volunteering into the curriculum, or for those that would like to make student volunteering more effective, here are some research-based tips.

1) Make service social. As much as possible, provide opportunities for students to engage directly with people who are receiving the service. One study discovered that student volunteers who worked directly with people versus those who didn’t afterwards felt a stronger connection to other people in general, along with the belief that they could make a difference in the world. Another study showed that direct contact made students more likely to take a stand on issues they cared about, for instance by demonstrating or boycotting about those issues. In general, research has found that social connection provides a vast array of physical and mental health benefits, whereas loneliness weakens our cardiovascular and immune systems.

While the authors of the JAMA study didn’t test different kinds of service, I think it’s quite possible that volunteering helped the students’ hearts because it fostered greater connections between them and younger students; indeed, if they felt stronger empathic connection to others, these cardiovascular benefits increased even more. I know when I was a teacher, I saw a significant change in my older students when they were given the responsibility of working with kindergartners. It was as if they had taken an empathy pill—one that made them more patient, understanding, and kind.

2) Service-learning vs. community service—take your pick! Some schools mandate community service through formal service-learning programs, while others make service voluntary through more informal community service opportunities.

According to researchers, it doesn’t matter which way you go—both have the same positive impact on students, particularly when compared with students who never volunteer. So, what’s important is that students are volunteering—period.

However, I would add from personal experience that requiring service might help students who would never consider volunteering try it out—and they just might fall in love with it. Case in point: One of my best friends was required to do community service in high school and found that working with autistic children changed his life. Rather than becoming a lawyer, he decided to teach high school and start his own fabulous service-learning program.

3) Consider the people and organizations receiving service. While most of the studies on service-learning and volunteering focus on the students who perform the service, some researchers decided to turn the lens around and ask those receiving service about their experience. And what they found isn’t all roses.

Imagine this scenario: An enthusiastic 16-year old arrives at your workplace, ready to save the world. However, this teen has very few skills and even less knowledge about the work your organization does. Oh—and can only help three hours a week for six weeks total. Needless to say, the organizations interviewed for the study responded with a hearty, “AAACKK!!”

So when you’re sending your students off to volunteer, be sure to communicate with the organizations ahead of time to find out what their needs are and consider if your students have the skills and time to fill those needs.

I take heart that so many schools already have volunteer programs in place—together, you’re creating a world of do-gooders. And as we’re learning, so many activities that are good for the world are also good for students’ own minds, bodies, and hearts.

I’d love to hear from those of you who work with student volunteer programs about what does and doesn’t work. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to share your experience with other readers.