Today Louise Explains... the beauty of mental kindness.

"A person who has good thoughts can never be ugly though. Whether you have a wonky mouth, a crooked nose, or a double chin, if you think good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."
-Roald Dahl, The Twits p.15


This morning on the tube, I was (as ever) mildly put out by a lady whose cardinal sin was to stand a little bit too close to me, thereby obstructing the reading of my book, just a bit. As the train trudged along, I got progressively, fractionally more uptight, my head practically reeling with all of her perceived crimes, letting myself get more and more wound up about it. By the time we had gotten to Leyton, I harboured such deep resentment towards this woman that my first reaction, had she tried to leave the train at the next station and spectacularly not minded the gap, I possibly would have laughed with mirth first and gone to help second. I could practically feel the beads of sweat tracking their way down my cheek, my teeth gritted and it requiring all the self-control I could muster not to.....

CRACK. There was suddenly an angry confrontation – raised voices, someone hissing at another passenger, muttering to themselves afterwards, pure vitriol. Surprisingly, this wasn’t me – this was Exhibit Number One herself, who had obviously been too busy being annoyed at some other hapless passenger to even notice her own comportment. And at that moment, I noticed how wrinkled her face was – like she’d spent the better (or worse, I suppose) part of her life sucking lemons through a straw, and she was damn unhappy about it – and how her little angry face was contorted into an expression of such rage and antagonism, and how genuinely bothered she seemed by the whole situation which ultimately was nothing. And I giggled. My shoulders dropped, my hands unclenched, my expression softened, and I smiled for the rest of the journey to work.

This episode demonstrates extremely well why mental kindness is a great habit to get oneself into. It sounds absolutely batshit crazy, and feels it at first, until you realise that it genuinely does lift your mood and make all of those necessary transactions and encounters with the outside world that much more bearable, that it is genuinely worth perservering with. It’s not difficult to do, you’ll pick it up as you go along, but here are some basic pointers:

Practising mental kindness means doing so both to yourself and others.

To yourself, it means being a bit less hard on yourself, giving yourself some leeway and mentally patting yourself on the back from time to time and saying, ‘aw, poor me’ – and actually meaning it. There’s a clear difference between doing this, and thinking ‘I am going to have some me-time’ and plugging in your Glade Airwick, or eating a bar of Galaxy Caramel. This is a genuine attempt to be self-aware enough to recognise changes to your emotional state and your mood, try and understand why this might be the case, and give yourself a break. Rather than trying on a dress in a size 8 and then berating yourself for being fat and greedy when it doesn’t fit, how about not even getting to the stage where you end up clothes shopping in a bad/irritable mood? Mental kindness to self is infinitely more difficult than to others to successfully observe, and I struggle with this constantly, which is why it’s probably best to start this as soon as possible and get into practice. It’s hugely worth it, though, because you can overcome obstacles which don’t actually exist as they are imposed only by your own self-criticism and doubt. Before I start talking in self-help catechisms though, let’s move on to...

Others. This is slightly more simple, since it primarily involves two things:
1. Keeping things in perspective; and
2. Smiling.

Perspective means that the lemon-faced lady above wouldn’t have spent her whole life procuring an ugly face which bears the tell-tale lines of years spent thinking ugly, bitter thoughts. People almost definitely don’t realise that they’re being as annoying as they are – you probably spent a good part of your day doing the odd thing that others find annoying – give them a break. Or at least don’t let yourself get wound up about it; force yourself to smile. It needn’t be a huge, wide grin, but you will assume that at rest your face doesn’t look annoyed or pissed off: the news is that if you’ve been thinking annoyed thoughts then your face will portray this. When you try putting on an expression which is mid-neutral to ‘pleasant’, you will be surprised at first how different this feels to what it’s replacing; it will hit you how you must have looked before, and you will make a mental note to keep your face looking bright and pleasant in future. You will forget.

As mentioned, though, this isn’t a problem, because it will become more intuitive as time goes on and you keep pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and forcing yourself not to get wound up by ridiculously tiny, petty things. And I would recommend that you do keep forcing yourself; as unlikely as it sounds, people will react better to you when you practise mental kindness – I don’t necessarily buy into the aura thing, but I do genuinely think that people can sense something in what you give out to the surrounding area. If that something is barely-contained rage, you’re going to get negativity back. If you are bobbing away serenely, calmly, and pleasantly – if you force yourself to smile at people and engage in tiny snippets of small-talk, give away a seat on the tube even (god forbid)- you will have this repaid tenfold in the quality of your daily life and transport around this uptight little city. And if you do it for no other reason, do it because no amount of Estée Lauder moisturiser can prevent the horrible, ugly lines you will get after 60 years of verbal unkindness – and possibly the black-eye or two as well.