Bullying Hurts Your Health. Kindness Boosts It.

We have been trained to see bullying behaviors as signifying power, but from a health perspective, they are actually a sign of weakness. Our culture wires us to look at bullies as if their degradation and dehumanization of others is a manifestation of strength, but once again, from a medical perspective, these bullying acts actually reveal symptoms that occur when someone is falling ill.

Likewise, we are taught that kindness is “good” behavior. It is seen as an ethical gesture that we do for the sake of others and for the care of others. But from a medical perspective, we are now learning just how much acting with kindness is critically important for our own health. As much as bullying can harm our health, make us ill and weak, kindness can boost our health, making us resilient and strong.

First, we will do a quick overview of a social view of bullying behaviours, in order to compare and contrast it with what medical and neuroscientific research says about these anti-social behaviours, followed by a look at kindnesses as pro-social behaviours on the other end of the spectrum.

Bullying Through Society’s Lens

From an early age, we are told that bullying results from a power imbalance. The power-play needs a bully, a victim, and bystanders. In this drama, it’s understood that bullies harm or humiliate victims for power and control. They gain in power by hurting and shaming victims, while they increase control by creating fear in those who see their aggression. The ultimate victory is to have their bullying—a display of their power—witnessed by others. The bully’s show acts as a threat to any who question their power which increases their control.

Many adult behaviours cannot be compared to children’s conduct; however, bullying remains comparable. This anti-social behaviour occurs in essentially the same form whether it occurs on a playground or onstage surrounded by cameras. Whether the audience is children or adults, the behaviour remains surprisingly similar: name-calling, imitating, threats of violence, mocking, put-downs, and so on. The adult at the “bully pulpit” uses the same techniques as a youth at school to hurt and humiliate others, but with the possibility of far more serious repercussions.

Bullying Through Medicine’s Lens

Considering our concerns with both child and adult health outcomes, we are at a turning point whereby we can rethink bullying not as an act of power, but instead, as an act of weakness regardless of what the audience thinks or how they respond. The audience may laugh, or clap, repeat the bully’s phrases to amplify them, but this does not factor in, from a medical point of view, the bully’s display of being mentally unwell, nor does it respond to the bully’s behaviour as a display of self-harm.

As detailed in The Bullied Brain, while genetics may play a role, it’s well-established in psychological research that bullying behaviours in both childhood and adulthood frequently are correlated with a childhood marred by abuse and neglect. When a child or adult is bullying, the audience may be witnessing an individual with high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that can do physical damage to brain and body when released frequently.

What society says is a sign of power is, in fact, a sign of mental suffering, an unhealthy brain showing symptoms of mental illness. Even children who bully are described in the literature as “callous, un-empathic.” As explained in The Science of Evil, adults in what psychology refers to as the Dark Triad – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy – may well have “empathy erosion.”

Bullies who callously humiliate others, are hurting them, but they are also hurting themselves. They are doing self-harm to the affective empathy neural circuits in their own brains. It’s extremely serious because eroded empathy is what society refers to as the “evil” of psychopaths. The destruction of their capacity to feel emotions like guilt and remorse for hurting others is a high price to pay for smear campaigns, lying, belittling, berating, threatening, mocking, and so on.

Bullying Essential Reads

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What Are the Differences Between a Bully and a Narcissist?

Kindness Through Medicine’s Lens

Kindness is good for your health

Source: Jupi Lu / Pixabay

A repeat influx of the corrosive stress hormone cortisol occurs when bullying, while a repeat influx of the “healing” hormone oxytocin occurs when being kind. Leading researchers are now referring to oxytocin as “Nature’s Medicine” because it is correlated with immense health benefits to many, if not all, bodily systems.

Oxytocin has been called the “cuddle hormone” and the “love hormone.” It’s been studied as key to inducing labour and facilitating nursing. It is understood in research as a key component of our survival as a species via the “oxytocin-mediated drive a mother has to take care of her offspring and not abandon kin,” as noted by David Fryburg. In more recent years, researchers such as Sue Carter are learning that oxytocin is activated in our brains and bodies through all kinds of pro-social behaviors like kindness.

Our brains have dedicated “[n]euroanatomy responsible for empathy, compassion, and connection, along with neurohormonal effects (eg, oxytocin, serotonin)” and this circuitry reveals “an intricate system designed to encourage and sustain kindness and altruism.” The impulse to help others, care for them, support and help, is not only good for social bonding, but it’s really good for your health.

Strength in Numbers

Researchers who now see oxytocin as "Nature's Medicine" are learning just how much our health is correlated with being connected to others. One of the most striking examples of the relationship between bonding and well-being is the expert recognition that being lonely and isolated, as David Fryburg documents, is equal to smoking seventeen cigarettes a day. Medical insights into how what we practice influences our health in significant ways could not be more pronounced with bullying versus kindness.

Bullying ramps up cortisol, which, as noted, is really damaging to our health, whereas kindness up-regulates oxytocin, which is being recognized more and more as a critical component of our health. Oxytocin works like a “natural medicine” that is “capable of both preventing and treating various disorders and influencing a broad range of diseases.”

It’s time we changed our view of bullying into a more encompassing medical understanding of anti- and pro-social behaviours and their impact on our health. The antidote or remedy to bullying is kindness, not just in a social sense but also in a medical sense. Frequently, bullying is part of a chronic stress cycle that starts with abuse and neglect, and in the worst-case scenarios, ends in psychopathic behaviours.

What if there was a way to calm down our sympathetic stress response that can lead to the “fight” response of bullying? One of the ways to set in motion this calming effect is to practice kindness. Altruistic and kind behaviours have—as pointed out by Sue Carter and her colleagues—“particular importance in the face of chronic stress.” They are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the harmful effects of bullying. “Chronic, antistress effects of social support can down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system, allowing the expression of protective and restorative functions” of the nervous system.

Stress is known as a silent killer. Research shows that immensely powerful “antistress effects” come from caring about each other, treating one another with compassion, building kindness into our daily routines as a health practice equal to aerobic exercise and sleep hygiene.