Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 4 | Written Reflection

It’s a beautiful, sunny morning here in Montana. There’s something about being surrounded by snow-capped mountains, sunlight spilling through the valleys and little streams running between the trees that makes you pause for a moment, everything a little slower, a little quieter, and perhaps when the world around you goes quiet enough, you start noticing things you’d otherwise rush past. Lately, I’ve been thinking about kindness. Not the polished version we sometimes talk about as though it’s a fixed personality trait, but the everyday kind, the kind that happens in ordinary interactions without anyone else noticing, easy to overlook precisely because it rarely feels significant enough to call a good deed.

That’s actually been something I’ve had to rethink in myself. Growing up, the world could feel quite harsh to me, but my community often felt warm, and a lot of that warmth was tied to church and religion. That was where I first learnt to associate kindness with action. I remember watching my family make offerings at church even when I knew money wasn’t abundant, not because there was plenty to spare but because giving was part of what they believed in. Every mass, without fail, there’d be an offering. I watched people pray for the world, sacrifice their time, dedicate themselves to helping others and show up for people who needed them. I became heavily involved in my own religion too, my family are very passionate Catholics, but there was also something about service itself that genuinely appealed to me. I was an altar server for years, and looking back, it was one of the first responsibilities I experienced that felt completely selfless, something satisfying about doing what needed doing without expecting anything in return.

Then life happened. Some of what I experienced hardened me. I stopped attending church as much and started making excuses, growing less connected to that part of myself. Prayer, interestingly, never really left, it had been instilled too deeply for that. I think sometimes we don’t completely lose our values, we just lose our connection to them. For me, that connection started returning during COVID. I began thinking about how I could be of service to other people and create a little more lightness during a period that felt incredibly heavy, becoming involved in community projects and volunteer work, some of it genuinely difficult, because when you spend time around people who are struggling, you can’t remain untouched by what you see. It brings you face to face with how much people carry.

Then came the riots in Durban. A lot of the hard work my family had been involved in was destroyed, and watching that happen was painful, but what stays with me just as strongly is what happened afterwards. A group of us in the community came together to protect what we could and rebuild what had been damaged, and there was something deeply moving about that experience. I felt fulfilled, but not superficially, I wasn’t simply helping other people, I was helping my own family too, a real sense of purpose in being part of something bigger than my own immediate circumstances. People had every reason to feel defeated, yet they still showed up.

Living in different countries has given me an interesting perspective on community, suffering and how people relate to one another. I’ve noticed differences in how visible hardship is, and how much people are exposed to the struggles of those around them, and I’ve noticed too that sometimes the places where people have the least seem to produce the most extraordinary generosity. That doesn’t mean suffering automatically makes people kinder, and I wouldn’t want to romanticise hardship. But I do think regular exposure to other people’s struggles makes you more aware that everyone is carrying something, and perhaps that awareness is where kindness genuinely begins.

This year, I’ve been trying to become more intentional about that. My journal has actually played a surprisingly important role, one of its prompts asking me to write down a daily act of self-care alongside a daily good deed or act of kindness. At the start of the year, I found the good deed section far harder than expected, sitting there wondering what I’d actually done that counted, because I’d created a very specific idea of what a good deed was supposed to look like, something grand, something significant, something worthy of writing down. Eventually I realised I was making kindness far more complicated than it needed to be. Once I started paying attention to the smaller moments, the entries became much easier. Letting someone go ahead of me. Leaving money in a vending machine for a stranger. Holding a door open. Complimenting someone or checking in on a person having a difficult time. None of it particularly remarkable, most of it taking almost no effort, but perhaps that’s exactly why it matters. We often assume we need more time, money or resources before we can meaningfully contribute to someone else’s life, imagining kindness as something requiring a sacrifice large enough to be noticed. My journal made me realise I was overlooking the opportunities already sitting inside my ordinary day.

I’ve also become far more aware of appreciation, particularly at work. Someone helps you, covers something for you, makes your day easier, and because everyone’s busy, it’s easy to move straight on to whatever’s next without acknowledging it. I’ve noticed that in myself too. We sometimes assume people know we appreciate them, but there’s something different about actually saying it. Telling a colleague, thank you, you really helped me today, costs almost nothing, but it lets them know their effort wasn’t invisible, and I think that’s one of the quieter forms of kindness, simply making another person feel seen.

Kindness becomes slightly more complicated with strangers, of course, no relationship to rely on, no obligation to fulfil, just a choice to be considerate. Even something like being a courteous driver has become part of my own thinking here. We spend so much time surrounded by complete strangers on the road, each absorbed in their own deadlines and frustrations, with no idea what kind of day the person beside us is having. That doesn’t mean becoming an endlessly patient saint behind the wheel, but there’s a real choice in how much hostility we bring into an interaction that could otherwise stay entirely neutral. Sometimes kindness is simply deciding that another person’s mistake doesn’t need to become your anger. There are bigger ways of practising this too, of course, volunteering, soup kitchens, beach clean-ups, reading with children, supporting a local organisation, fundraising or contributing financially, all meaningful ways of turning concern into action. I’ve also become particularly interested in supporting people already doing good work within their own communities. Sometimes kindness isn’t about leading everything yourself. Sometimes it’s recognising someone else’s effort and helping them continue it.

There’s a tendency to think of kindness as something soft and purely emotional, but there’s a genuinely interesting psychological side to it too. Acts of kindness fall under what’s called prosocial behaviour, behaviour intended to benefit another person, and research in positive psychology has explored the relationship between prosocial behaviour, wellbeing, social connection and a sense of meaning, with evidence linking helping others to reduced stress and more positive emotional experience. There’s even a term for it, the helper’s high, that real feeling of satisfaction after doing something for somebody else, our brains and bodies responding to social connection and rewarding experience in ways that can become genuinely reinforcing. But I don’t think kindness should be reduced to a psychological hack for feeling better. That misses the point entirely. If I help somebody purely for the emotional reward afterwards, the act becomes strangely transactional, another wellness strategy to optimise because it makes me feel good. For me, there’s something far more meaningful in the fact that kindness takes us outside of ourselves. We spend so much of life inside our own heads, thinking about our problems, our disappointments, our goals, the things that haven’t gone the way we wanted. All of that is part of being human. But shifting attention toward somebody else’s experience offers a genuinely different perspective. Someone else needs help. Someone else needs encouragement. Someone else might simply need to know they’ve been noticed, and sometimes we have the capacity to give exactly that.

Compassion isn’t something fixed, either, which I find genuinely useful to remember. We can practise it, become more attentive to other people’s emotional states, and journaling, mindfulness and other reflective practices can help us notice our own behaviour and how we respond to other people. Nobody wakes up one morning and becomes perfectly compassionate. We’re still going to be impatient, still going to have bad days, still going to get irritated by people, I certainly do. But becoming aware of those responses gives us the opportunity to interrupt them, which is what I like about practising kindness as an idea. It doesn’t require perfection. It requires attention. My journal has made me pay attention in a way I wasn’t before, and if anything it makes me question myself more honestly rather than proving I’m a good person. Was I actually paying attention to other people today. Did I notice an opportunity to help. Did I express appreciation, or assume people already knew. Did I give because I wanted to, or because I wanted recognition. Did I have enough capacity to give without completely neglecting myself.

That last question matters more than it might sound, because the same journal that asks me to record a good deed also asks me to record an act of self-care, and I like that they sit beside each other. There’s a version of kindness that becomes exhausting when we forget that we’re included in the equation too, so focused on being useful, generous and available that eventually there’s nothing left. That isn’t sustainable kindness. Taking care of yourself doesn’t make you less compassionate, sometimes it’s exactly what allows you to show up for other people without resentment or the sense that you’re constantly sacrificing yourself. For me, that’s been part of learning what service actually means, not giving everything away, but understanding what you have to give, giving it intentionally, and knowing when to step back and replenish yourself.

Moving between very different environments has made me notice how much our surroundings shape the way we see one another. There are places where people feel more connected to community because community is genuinely necessary, and places where independence is valued so highly that people can go through an entire day without a meaningful interaction with another person. Neither experience is simply good or bad, but I do think there’s something we risk losing when efficiency becomes more important than humanity, in a world where more interactions are automated, reduced to transactions or filtered through screens. Sometimes the simplest way of bringing humanity back into an interaction is remembering there’s another person on the other side of it. Not a username. Not a customer. Not the person slowing you down. A person, with a family, a history, a difficult day, something they’re worried about and probably a few things you’ll never know they’re carrying.

That awareness has changed the way I think about good deeds. I don’t want kindness to become something performed when there’s an audience. I want it to quietly influence how I move through ordinary life, and that doesn’t mean becoming some endlessly selfless version of myself. I can still have boundaries, still say no, still be frustrated, still prioritise myself, still recognise when someone’s taking advantage of my generosity. Being kind doesn’t mean being endlessly available. For me it means refusing to let the difficult parts of life completely harden me. I’ve had enough experiences to know it would be easy to become cynical, easy to convince myself everyone’s simply looking out for themselves and that softness is something you eventually have to grow out of. I don’t want that, and maybe that’s why this has become such a personal focus this year, not because I think I’m particularly enlightened about kindness, quite the opposite, but because I believe that if something matters to us, we can practise it. We don’t have to wait for a major crisis to rediscover our humanity. The riots taught me what collective action looks like when people have no choice but to come together. My upbringing taught me what generosity can look like when people don’t have much to give. My work and volunteering have shown me what happens when you sit close enough to other people’s struggles to realise how much everyone is carrying. And my journal has taught me something simpler still. I don’t have to wait for the next big moment. There are opportunities to be kinder scattered throughout an ordinary day, and sometimes I notice them, sometimes I don’t. The point, for me, is to keep getting better at noticing, because maybe changing the world isn’t always about doing something extraordinary. Maybe sometimes it’s about making sure the person who crosses your path today leaves the interaction feeling a little more human than they did before. And perhaps that’s a good enough place to start.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.