The Power of a Simple Slogan

Few slogans have carried as much cultural weight as Nike’s Just Do It. Three short words turned into a global call to action, stripping away hesitation, excuses, and overthinking. The brilliance of the phrase lies in its simplicity: when in doubt, move. Take the shot, lace up your shoes, run the mile. Action clears the fog of indecision.

Now imagine a companion slogan with similar punch but a different target. One that doesn’t push us to lift weights or crush goals, but instead primes us for how we meet people, stress, and the world itself. That slogan is:

Just Send Love.

Like Just Do It, it is not a judgment, nor a sentimental platitude. It is a strategy. It is active, not passive; strong, not weak. To send love is not to roll over or to ignore hard truths. It is to prime your nervous system and your mind to show up in the best possible way.

Why Love?

We live in a world saturated with competing strategies for self-improvement: toughness, grit, productivity hacks, resilience training. All valuable in their context, but often delivered with an undertone of “push through the pain” or “suppress your feelings.”

But here’s the thing: anger, resentment, jealousy, frustration, and anxiety all feel terrible. They lock us into narrow perspectives. They close doors instead of opening them. They may have their evolutionary value in short bursts, but as chronic states, they make us less effective, less compassionate, and less connected.

Love, on the other hand, feels good. And because it feels good, it’s also practical. When you send love—even silently, internally—to the person you’re nervous to meet, to the person who cut you off in traffic, or to the colleague who frustrates you, you immediately change your internal state. You shift from constriction to openness. That shift doesn’t guarantee the outcome you want, but it puts you in a better place to navigate whatever comes next.

Beyond Resistance

We are told constantly to “push through” resistance. Go to the gym even when you don’t feel like it. Wake up early even when you want to sleep in. Have the tough conversation even if it terrifies you. And yes, discipline matters.

Resistance often shows up most fiercely around the very things we want to do. We want to exercise, but dread the effort. We want to eat well, but crave the shortcut. We want to write, but fear the blank page. The instinct is to fight resistance with more resistance—pushing, forcing, muscling through. But there is another way. Instead of fighting, notice the resistance and send it love. Ask yourself, what do I find hard about this? Then send love directly to that difficulty. Love doesn’t deny the challenge, but it removes fear’s grip. With exercise, for example, sending love to the ache, the fatigue, or the insecurity takes away the power they hold. Fear contracts; love expands. And in expansion, resistance loses its teeth.

Sending Love Is an Active Practice

It’s easy to dismiss “just send love” as corny, soft, or unrealistic. But sending love is not about sentimentality—it’s about effectiveness. It changes the state you’re in, right now. Love steadies your breath, softens your body, and widens your perspective. It takes the sharp edge off defensiveness and opens the door to clarity.

When you’re about to walk into a difficult conversation, sending resentment or dread primes you to defend. Sending love primes you to connect. When you’re angry, adding more anger only escalates. Sending love de-escalates—not by pretending the problem doesn’t exist, but by giving you the composure to address it without poisoning yourself.

This doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice. At first, sending love may feel awkward or forced, almost like you’re going through the motions. But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. With repetition, love begins to take you out of yourself. It broadens your view. It shifts your perspective from “me versus them” to “we.” Love doesn’t erase conflict, but practiced consistently, it equips you to meet conflict without losing your center—and to connect more deeply with the people around you.

Sending Becomes Feeling

At first, sending love may feel silly. You pause, breathe, and deliberately choose to direct love toward someone or something. It can feel awkward, artificial, even contrived. But that’s how all training begins. Repetition is what reshapes us. Over time, the act of sending starts to dissolve into the direct experience of love itself. What once felt like effort becomes ease. The more you practice, the more genuine warmth arises on its own. Eventually, you stop thinking of it as something you do and begin experiencing it as something you are. This is the real transformation: the practice of sending love evolves into the lived feeling of love.

Metta Practice: love training

In Buddhist traditions, the deliberate cultivation of love is formalized as metta or “loving-kindness” meditation. The practice is simple, but profound:

Sit quietly and breathe.
Begin by sending phrases of goodwill to yourself: May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be at peace.
Expand outward: to a loved one, a neutral person, even a difficult person. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be at peace.
Expand further still: to all beings everywhere.

What’s radical about metta practice is that it’s not based on who “deserves” your love. The difficult person—the one who frustrates or angers you—gets the same wish as your dearest friend. Not because you excuse their behavior, but because you refuse to let their behavior corrupt your inner state.

It is resilience that draws its power from compassion. It is training the muscle of love the way you train biceps or lungs.

The Reports Are Consistent: Love Is All There Is

Across traditions, across cultures, across altered states of consciousness, a single theme repeats:

Love is the fundamental reality.

Mystics have said it for centuries. “God is love,” wrote the apostle John.
Sufi poets like Rumi equated love with the very fabric of existence.
Yogic traditions frame the heart as the seat of union, compassion, and liberation.
Psychedelic research reports again and again that at the height of mystical experiences, participants feel “overwhelmed by unconditional love.” People emerge from sessions declaring that love is not just an emotion but the essence of reality itself.

Whether or not you subscribe to religion or altered-state exploration, the message is strikingly consistent: love is not optional fluff. It is the deepest thread holding us together.

Love by Other Names

Sometimes “love” feels too loaded. It conjures romance, sentimentality, or unrealistic ideals. But love has many doorways all leading to the same place:

Gratitude – the deliberate act of appreciating what you already have.
Kindness – the disposition to act in ways that promote the flourishing and well-being of others.
Acceptance – the ability to meet reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.
Compassion –the recognition of another’s suffering as bound up with one’s own humanity.

Each of these states produces a similar shift as love: a move from constriction to openness, from resistance to receptivity. They are love wearing different faces.

The Science of State

Modern science backs what spiritual traditions have long said. When you send love—or gratitude, kindness, or compassion—you trigger measurable changes:

Increased oxytocin (the bonding hormone).
Reduced cortisol (the stress hormone).
Activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the fight-or-flight response.
Strengthening of neural circuits associated with empathy and perspective-taking.

These are not abstract ideals. They are chemical, neurological realities. When you send love, your biology shifts. And that shift primes you for clearer decisions, better relationships, and greater resilience.

The “Corniness” Problem

Let’s address it outright: yes, this can sound corny. In a culture that prizes toughness, stoicism, and irony, speaking openly about love can feel vulnerable, even embarrassing.

But here’s the paradox: the very act of leaning into that vulnerability is what makes it powerful. To send love is to risk sincerity in a world that hides behind sarcasm. It is to choose strength not by armoring up, but by opening up.

If the practice feels corny, that’s okay. Instead of getting stuck on appearances, ask the simple question: is it useful? If sending love brings calm, clarity, or connection, then it’s serving its purpose. And even the vulnerability you feel in that moment—the awkwardness, the self-consciousness—can itself be met with love. Send love to the part of you that feels exposed. In doing so, the very thing that felt corny becomes another doorway back to love.

Love in Action

To “just send love” does not stop at intention. It spills into behavior:

In conversation: by listening fully instead of rehearsing your counterargument.
In conflict: by addressing the problem without dehumanizing the person.
In leadership: by creating an environment where people feel valued and empowered.
In self-care: by choosing rest, nourishment, and movement out of self-respect rather than punishment.

Love translates into simple shifts: a softening of tone, a pause before reacting, a willingness to smile. Over time, these subtleties scale into cultures—families, teams, and communities where trust outweighs fear.

Concrete Examples

To make this practical, imagine moments of everyday life:

Worried about your children? Just send them love. Instead of spiraling in fear, you anchor yourself in care and connection. Love doesn’t erase the worry, but it transforms it into something that strengthens you rather than weakens you.
As a movement professional: We can get so focused on diagnosing, prescribing, and correcting that we forget the most fundamental thing—caring. Instead of dwelling on what a client needs to change, just send them love. It doesn’t replace technique or science, but it infuses both with humanity.
In relationships: Instead of rehearsing how to win the argument, send love to the person across from you. The tone of the conversation will shift instantly.
In self-care: Instead of berating yourself for falling short, send love to the part of you that’s tired, scared, or struggling. That compassion fuels forward momentum far better than self-criticism ever could.

Love is not a replacement for action—it’s the ground on which effective action stands.

You Will Fail

You will fail. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re human. This is not a practice of moral perfection—it’s a practice of faith. Faith that when things are hard, love will never let you down. Love is always there, waiting, whenever you choose to tap back into it. And yes, you will forget. You will get caught in anger, swallowed by fear, or distracted by resentment. That forgetting is inevitable. The work is simply to return. To train your mindfulness so that you come back to love as often as you can—without judgment. Because judgment only tries to hold love down, to smother it under shame. Love doesn’t require anything from you. It doesn’t measure, compare, or demand perfection—it simply waits for you to notice it.

The Final Word

Nike taught us that hesitation kills momentum. Just Do It cut through analysis paralysis and made action the baseline.

Just Send Love is its sibling strategy. It cuts through emotional paralysis and makes openness the baseline. Not because it’s noble, but because it’s practical. Love feels good. Love primes you for clarity. Love connects you to others and to yourself.

We don’t have to wait for mystical experiences, religious revelation, or psychedelic journeys to glimpse it. The direct experience of love is available here, now, at the cost of a single choice.

Yes, it may feel corny. But corny is nothing compared to the weight of carrying resentment, fear, and anger.

And remember—you will fail, you will forget, but that’s part of the practice. Each time you return, you strengthen the habit. With repetition, sending love becomes less about trying and more about being. It stops feeling like a strategy you pull out in hard times and starts becoming the ground you walk on.

So try it. Practice it. Return to it again and again. Because love is always waiting.

Just Send Love.

References:

Oxytocin & Bonding

Carter, C. S. (2014). Oxytocin pathways and the evolution of human behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 17–39.
Feldman, R. (2012). Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans. Hormones and Behavior, 61(3), 380–391.

Cortisol Reduction

Pace, T. W. W., et al. (2009). Effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, innate immune and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34(1), 87–98.
Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 822–848.

Parasympathetic Activation (Calming the Nervous System)

Kok, B. E., et al. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1123–1132.
Fredrickson, B. L., et al. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1045–1062.