Exercise, healthy nutrition, quality sleep and… helping others. The first three are recognized as key to living a healthy life. But most of us probably wouldn’t think helping others affects our health. Because the main benefits are to the person we’re helping, right? Yet more and more research is telling us how helping others can make you healthier.
The Selfish Gene?
When we see someone in urgent need, like someone collapsing on a bus, an accident on the road, or a child who’s fallen off a swing, a lot of us will jump in wanting to help. We don’t even think twice about it. However, most of our days aren’t nearly that eventful. Despite this, I’m sure we can recall when we might have given someone directions. Or let someone go ahead of us in a line or picked up their dropped keys.
Why is it that we’re willing to help someone so readily? Even if we don’t know the person, many of us would go out of our way to open a door for someone. Is it because we are told as kids it’s the right thing to do. Or do we actually get something out of it ourselves? Making what might be an altruistic act of helping someone into a selfish act of getting personal benefit.
To scientists, it’s obvious why people in the same family help each other. That family wants to preserve their genetic line. This isn’t done consciously such that I help my kids grow in order to preserve their DNA. But from an evolutionary point of view, much of how we have developed as humans is founded in ensuring we pass on our DNA. This is referred to as The Selfish Gene theory.
So how does this theory apply when we help others not related to us? If we’re all that selfish, we would be far less pleasant and less likely to open doors for others. One can say this is because we’re being polite. And maybe that’s true. Maybe we’re more worried about the bad looks we get if we don’t give up our seat on the bus to the person with crutches.
Helping Others Makes You Feel Better
If you ask someone who volunteers or works at a job helping others, they’ll often say they enjoy it or that helping others makes them happy. And there’s evidence to support that. Helping others, compared to receiving help, engages certain areas of our brain related to reward activity. By comparing giving with receiving, researchers found that we feel better giving something than getting something.
We also tend to feel better about ourselves when making decisions we feel are fair. And these decisions seem to be instinctive such that when participants in a study were forced to make a decision quickly while playing a game, they were more likely to make cooperative than selfish decisions.
It’s possible that these are still learned behaviours, and of course, with any behaviour, the environment you grow up in plays a key role. Could it be though, we have a natural tendency to help others? A study in toddlers found that when watching an adult struggle (such as trying to grab a ball of reach object), the children offered to help the adult. This may suggest helping others is part of who we are, and if so, there are likely benefits to it as well.
Even for people we don’t know, helping others can reduce anxiety and stress. Students with social anxiety who were instructed to perform a random act of kindness (even opening a door) daily for four weeks had lower anxiety compared to a control group. When we help others, our body releases oxytocin, which in some cases can enhance social and bonding aspects of human behaviour and may be involved in the stress reducing aspect of helping others. Even something as simple as smiling at another person can put both you in a better mood.
Will Helping Others Make You Healthier?
But what about affecting your health? Can opening a door for someone you don’t know lower your blood pressure? Perhaps. People who volunteered more than four hours per week had a lower chance of getting hypertension four years later. This may be due to the stress hormone cortisol being lower on days people volunteered compared to the days they didn’t.
Other studies have reported people who volunteer report better health and may even have lower amounts of inflammatory markers in their blood. Older adults who were asked to write a diary consisting of advice to others resulted in reduced inflammation. Similar findings have been reported in teens who volunteered. Over the long-term, volunteering may add years to your life. A review of 40 studies found that people who volunteered had a lower risk for early death. Even informal helping (such as helping a neighbour or friend), can result in lower chances for an early death.
It is possible activities such as care-giving for a relative or spouse can take a toll. People who reported ‘caregiver strain’ while caring for a disabled spouse ended up with greater chances for early death. But caregivers who did not report any strain did not have any negative effects on their health. So if you are care-giving, it’s important to practice some self-care to help minimize any strain on your health.
With all this evidence supporting the benefits of helping others, maybe the age-old adage, it is better to give than receive, has a ring of truth to it.
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This post was originally published on August 1, 2018 and updated on February 21, 2024.
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