Kindness Media Rapidly Inspires Viewers and Increases Happiness, Calm, Gratitude, and Generosity in a Healthcare Setting

Cultivating Self-Compassion to Protect Nurses From Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress

Nursing burnout, a result of prolonged occupational stress, has always been a challenge in health care, but recently the COVID-19 pandemic made this issue into a national priority. In fact, burnout among health care workers is one of the four priorities of the U.S. Surgeon General. Health care leaders and organizations are eager to implement strategies to improve nurses' well-being and, thus, enhance their mental health. Much of the literature has focused on the antecedents and consequences of nursing burnout, but there is limited information on strategies that protect perinatal nurses from burnout. Self-compassion is emerging as one strategy that has a positive correlation with nurse well-being and a negative association with burnout, depression, and anxiety. In this article, we identify and translate strategies to promote self-compassion in perinatal nurses.

Kindness Isn't Just about Being Nice: The Value Proposition of Kindness as Viewed through the Lens of Incivility in the Healthcare Workplace

The healthcare workplace is a high-stress environment. All stakeholders, including patients and providers, display evidence of that stress. High stress has several effects. Even acutely, stress can negatively affect cognitive function, worsening diagnostic acumen, decision-making, and problem-solving. It decreases helpfulness. As stress increases, it can progress to burnout and more severe mental health consequences, including depression and suicide. One of the consequences (and causes) of stress is incivility. Both patients and staff can manifest these unkind behaviors, which in turn have been shown to cause medical errors. The human cost of errors is enormous, reflected in thousands of lives impacted every year. The economic cost is also enormous, costing at least several billion dollars annually. The warrant for promoting kindness, therefore, is enormous. Kindness creates positive interpersonal connections, which, in turn, buffers stress and fosters resilience. Kindness, therefore, is not just a nice thing to do: it is critically important in the workplace. Ways to promote kindness, including leadership modeling positive behaviors as well as the deterrence of negative behaviors, are essential. A new approach using kindness media is described. It uplifts patients and staff, decreases irritation and stress, and increases happiness, calmness, and feeling connected to others.

Kindness as a Stress Reduction-Health Promotion Intervention: A Review of the Psychobiology of Caring

Chronic stress is a ubiquitous problem shouldered by many people worldwide. Although the stressors are myriad (eg, loneliness, finances, health, discrimination), the corporal response to them either causes or exacerbates mental and physical illness, including depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease. Identifying efficient ways to help people buffer their response and promote resilience and wellness is critical to improving overall health. Positive interpersonal connection is a proven way to promote resilience and happiness. It is associated with decreased mortality and markers of better health. Kindness and caring are prosocial behaviors that build positive interpersonal connections and can uplift both the giver and receiver. Simply seeing kindness and caring activates the neuropsychology of kindness, elevating the viewer and promoting generosity, interpersonal connection, and inclusion. That augmenting positive emotions, enhancing interpersonal connection, and inducing prosocial behavior change are possible through seeing kindness opens the opportunity to bolster resilience in higher stress settings like health care. In a recent study, watching kindness media in a health care setting rapidly increased self-reported feelings of happiness, calm, gratitude, and being inspired. Viewers were significantly more generous. Providing staff and patients with a nonjudgmental lift to enhance caring interactions through kindnesses media can be an important, low-cost adjunct to improving the healthcare environment.

What's Playing in Your Waiting Room? Patient and Provider Stress and the Impact of Waiting Room Media

Patients enter the healthcare space shouldering a lot of personal stress. Concurrently, health care providers and staff are managing their own personalstressors as well as workplace stressors. As stress can negatively affect the patient-provider experience and cognitive function of both individuals, it is imperative to try to uplift the health care environment for all. Part of the healthcare environmental psychology strategy to reduce stress often includes televisions in waiting rooms, cafeterias, and elsewhere, with the intent to distract the viewer and make waiting easier. Although well-intentioned, many select programming which can induce stress (eg, news). In contrast, as positive media can induce desirable changes in mood, it is possible to use it to decrease stress and uplift viewers, including staff. Positive media includes both nature media, which can relax and calm viewers and kindness media, which uplifts viewers, induces calm, and promotes interpersonal connection and generosity. Careful consideration of waiting room media can affect the patient-provider experience.