Generosity helps you stay healthy, studies find
If there’s a magic pill for happiness and longevity, we may have found it.
Countless studies have found that generosity, both volunteering and charitable donations, benefits young and old physically and psychologically.
The benefits of giving are significant, according to those studies: lower blood pressure, lower risk of dementia, less anxiety and depression, reduced cardiovascular risk and overall greater happiness.
“Volunteering moves people into the present and distracts the mind from the stresses and problems of the self,” said Stephen G. Post, founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York. “Many studies show that one of the best ways to deal with the hardships in life is not to just centre on yourself but to take the opportunity to engage in simple acts of kindness.”
Studies show that when people think about helping others, they activate a part of the brain called the mesolimbic pathway, which is responsible for feelings of gratification. Helping others doles out happiness chemicals, including dopamine, endorphins that block pain signals and oxytocin, known as the tranquillity hormone. Even just the thought of giving money to a specific charity has this effect on the brain, research shows.
Intuition tells us that giving more to oneself is the best way to be happy. But that’s not the case, according to Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics and psychology at Duke University.
“If you are a recipient of a good deed, you may have momentary happiness, but your long-term happiness is higher if you are the giver,” Ariely said. For example, if you give people a gift card for a Starbucks cappuccino and call them that evening and ask how happy they are, people say they are not happier than if you hadn’t given it to them. If you give another group a gift card and ask them to give it to a random person, when you call them at night, those people are happier.
“People are happier when they give, even if they’re just following instructions,” Ariely said. “They take credit for the giving and therefore are happier at the end of the day.”
The way we give is important, too, Ariely said. Taxes are a form of giving that typically does not make people happy. “If you give directly from a paycheque, we don’t pay attention to it,” he said. “It’s the way we give and how we give that makes us happy. The key is to give deliberately and thoughtfully, so that other people benefit from it.”
Research supports this, and researchers started from a baseline of equal physical characteristics among study participants, so it wasn’t a case of healthier people being more willing to volunteer.
A 2012 study in the journal Health Psychology by Sara Konrath and a team at the University of Michigan found that older adult volunteers had a lower risk of dying in a four-year period than non-volunteers, as long as they volunteered for altruistic versus self-oriented reasons.
“In order to gain a personal benefit from volunteering, you have to focus on how your giving helps other people,” said Konrath, now director of the Interdisciplinary Program for Empathy and Altruism Research and assistant professor at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. “We have the ability to shift our focus, and many of us do have an other-oriented reason for giving. If we can just focus on that aspect rather than what we can get out of it, chances are it will be better for our own health, too.”
An online national survey of 4,500 American adults (the 2010 United Healthcare/Volunteer Match Do Good Live Well Study) found that people who volunteer have less trouble sleeping, less anxiety, less helplessness and hopelessness, better friendships and social networks, and a sense of control over chronic conditions.
Even as a way to manage chronic pain, volunteering holds great potential. “If you could say that on a scale of one to 10, insulin as a treatment for diabetes is a 9.5, drugs for Alzheimer’s disease are 0.05, volunteering is somewhere up around a 7,” Post said. “If you were somehow able to package this into a compound, you’d be a billionaire overnight.”
A recent review of studies published in the November 2014 Psychological Bulletin found that, among seniors, volunteering is likely to reduce the risk of dementia and is associated with reduced symptoms of depression, better self-reported health, fewer functional limitations and lower mortality.
Volunteering has even been shown to lower blood pressure. In a June 2013 study from Carnegie Mellon University, adults over 50 who volunteered at least 200 hours in the past year (four hours per week) were 40 per cent less likely to develop high blood pressure than non-volunteers.
There are several possible explanations, said study author Rodlescia Sneed, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Volunteerism may boost self-esteem and protect people from social isolation, both of which are linked to better health in older adults, she said.
Helping others also may promote the release of stress-buffering hormones that may reduce cardiovascular risk.