Start By Tuning Yourself
How you pay attention and act with generosity, though, starts with yourself. “Your brain is tied to your heart,” explains Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. The more you tune into others, “the healthier you become, and vice versa.”
That heart-to-head connection exists thanks to your vagus nerve, which among many things, helps calm a stressed, scared, or anxious racing heart and attunes your ear to human voices. The strength of this friendly nerve is measured by vagal tone—the relationship between heart rate and breathing rate. The higher the tone, the better your physical and emotional health—from your cardiovascular system and glucose levels to superior regulation of emotion, cognitive flexibility, and social connection with others.
Through her research, Fredrickson found that vagal tone can be strengthened like a muscle. Study participants practiced a form of Buddhist meditation called metta, or loving-kindness, cultivating benevolent feelings of goodwill and compassion towards themselves and to others. The result was increased vagal tone, as well as increased positive emotions and social connectedness. Further research by Fredrickson and her colleagues uncovered how “people’s perceptions of their positive social connections with others accounted for the causal link between positive emotions and improved vagal tone.”
Taking the time to connect with and tune into yourself and others and boosting your perception of your social connections have resounding effects, improving a whole spectrum of health—physical, emotional, and social. And doing that, according to Fredrickson, creates a positive feedback loop, all starting from within.