Behind the headlines - One good deed...

It's been all over the media: a new study has found that kindness can be more effective at treating depression, stress and anxiety than long-established methods that form part of CBT. We catch up with the study's co-author, Dr David Cregg, to find out how helping others could help us help ourselves

- Dr David Cregg

Q. Tell us a bit about the background to your study...

'We all think that what makes us happy is money, or academic success, or physical attractiveness, but research shows that these things don't really tend to be that predictive of happiness - it's social connection that counts. So I began to think: what if we used kindness as sort of a clinical tool or intervention for folks who are experiencing some significant anxiety and depression symptoms?

'We gathered a group of people with anxiety and depression, and split them into three groups. One group was assigned to do enjoyable social activities with other people for two days a week for five weeks. Another group was assigned to use a tool from CBT called an automatic thought record, to capture recurring negative thought patterns and reframe them to be more healthy. And the third group were asked to perform three acts of kindness a day, for two days out of the week, for five weeks.' 

Q. What does 'acts of kindness' mean in this sense?  

'We defined it as actions that benefit others or make others happy, and that typically involve some cost to yourself, either in terms of time, energy, or other resources, such as money.

But, other than that, we pretty much left it up to people to decide what to do; they were free to choose actions that were as big and as grandiose as they liked, or as small and sustainable as they liked.