How Can Helping Others Help Our Health?

Helping others and acting out of altruism have long been known to support our mental and physical well-being. Whether it’s volunteering at a food drive for the disadvantaged, studying nursing online to work a career helping others, or doing small acts of kindness—looking after each other is one of humanity’s most basic instincts, and in the timeline of the world’s evolution, it appears that altruistic behaviors are what set the stage for complex social groups in the animal kingdom, and eventually humanity. Today we’re going to look at some of the major health benefits of acting altruistically.

Brain Makes Happy Chemicals

The actual power that the brain has over our bodies is both widely experienced and severely misunderstood. The brain is a complex organism, and the messages and signals it sends to the body quite literally control everything we do, think, and feel.

But how do these messages get sent in the first place?

The neurological postal service begins with external stimuli. The brain receives information through the senses and then releases certain neurotransmitters in response to that stimuli. These neurotransmitters are taken up by certain receptor structures in the brain, which then trigger the nerve impulses that create emotion, form thought, and control our bodies.

Studies have shown that the brain is capable of producing a number of “happy” chemicals, or rather, neurotransmitters that create feelings of joy, happiness, contentment, or fulfillment when received by neuroreceptors. Acts of kindness and selflessness have been proven to release oxytocin (a neurotransmitter associated with love and social bonds), serotonin (associated with mood regulation and satisfaction), and dopamine (stimulates feelings of reward and pleasure).

In other words, kindness and selflessness actively produce the neurotransmitters that make us happy, and happiness in and of itself is linked to numerous health benefits.

Alleviation of Stress

The things that make us happy provide many benefits, not least of which is the alleviation of stress and mental pressure. Stress has been linked to several health issues, even some extremely severe ones. Research in the UK in 2018 found that 74% of people were overwhelmed with stress and had significant difficulty coping.

The world is a stressful place to be at the moment. Coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic that the world is still recovering from socially and economically, geopolitics are fraught with conflict which provides a plethora of existential concerns for common people, and rapidly advancing technologies are leaving a lot of people concerned about their place in the world. 

However, while no one would downplay the severity of these concerns, it is important to seek things that relax you to mitigate the effect stress has on your mental and physical health. Fortunately, research shows that helping others actively decreases stress and helps manage the sensation of being overwhelmed. 

There are a few different reasons for this. Helping others can remind people of their own fortune, foster a sense of connection, promote feelings of usefulness, provide a distraction, and give people a sense of purpose. The best thing about this is that the good you do doesn’t have to be some big grand gesture. It just has to be something that makes someone else feel good, even if momentarily. Call a friend, take a family member out for a meal, compliment a stranger, or do something special for a loved one. All of these are small, simple acts of demonstrative, intentional affection and altruism that pay dividends for those who do them in happiness.

Make the World a Better Place

There is a narrative that seems to permeate a significant portion of the global population—that the world is inherently difficult. That life itself is somehow always set against you, and that the only way to survive is by being tough, resilient, and strong.

Now no one would say rightly that toughness, resilience, and strength are bad things, but those who espouse the aforementioned narrative tend to think of these traits as being callous, cruel, and selfish. These people have overlooked a simple fact. The world and the things that happen in it are made up of people and therefore only as callous, cruel, and selfish as the people that inhabit it.

Life is what we make it, and with 8 billion people in the world there are a lot of people making, but never forget that there is always a choice in how you act. The world is not cruel by nature, and therefore you do not need to be. As long as people are kind, there will always be kindness in the world. Even with everything going on, we fortunately still have the freedom to choose to be kind to one another, and the beautiful thing about that is the more kindness we show, the more kindness others are likely to show.