[Community-service] Helping Others is Good for Your Health

[Community Service Content]

Greetings all,

Below is an interesting article I came across this morning. Just one
more great reason to do what we do!

Helping Others Is Good For Your Health: An Interview with Stephen G. Post, PhD

posted by
Beyond Blue |
6:02am Tuesday October 18, 2011

Helping Others Is Good For Your Health: An Interview with Stephen G. Post, PhD
Mahatma Gandhi once said that “The best way to find yourself is to
lose yourself in the service of others.” I have benefited from that
advice, for sure,
especially in the months that I was crawling out of a very severe depression.

An expert on the perks that come with helping others is bestselling
author Stephen G. Post, author of
The Hidden Gifts of Helping: How the Power of Giving, Compassion, and
Hope Can Get us Through Hard Times
 (Jossey-Bass, 2011). He is Professor of Preventive Medicine, Heard of
the Division of Medicine in Society, and Director of the Center for
Medical Humanities,
Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. Visit him
on his website at
www.stephengpost.com/hiddengifts.

I have the privilege of conducting an exclusive interview with him.

1. What are some of the proven health benefits of giving oneself to others?

Dr. Post: In light of our experience, I was struck by the 2010 Do Good
Live Well Survey (www.VolunteerMatch.org) of 4,500 American adults. 41
percent of
Americans volunteered an average of 100 hours a year. 68 percent of
those who volunteered reported that it made them feel physically
healthier; 89% that
it “has improved my sense of well-bring” and 73% that it “lowered my
stress levels.” Not bad! It worked for us.

The therapeutic benefits of helping others have long been recognized
by everyday people. This concept was first formalized in a highly
cited and often reprinted
article by Frank Riessman that appeared in 1965 in Social Work.
Riessman defined the “helper therapy” principle on the basis of his
observations of various
self-help groups, where helping others is deemed absolutely essential
to helping oneself. These are grassroots groups that nowadays involve
tens of millions
of Americans.

As the saying goes, “if you help someone up the hill, you get closer
yourself.” Whether the group is focused on weight loss, smoking
cessation, substance
abuse, alcoholism, mental illness and recovery, or countless other
needs, a defining feature of the group is that people are deeply
engaged in helping
one another, and are in part motivated by an explicit interest in
their own healing.

2. Why does something as simple as just thinking about helping offer
physical benefits?

Dr. Post: In one famous study that has been replicated, study subjects
are given a list of charities to which they might contribute. They are
wearing an
fMRI device that shows where the brain is active. When they decide to
contribute to a particular item on the list and check a box next to
it, the mesolimbic
pathway lights up. This is area of the brain associated with joy and
the release of feel good chemicals like dopamine.

This reward mechanism is deeply evolved, and is probably related to
the fact that helping behavior is so important for the survival of
groups. As Darwin
pointed out, sympathy is evolutionarily advantageous because it is the
basis of the altruism and prosocial helping that allows any tribe or
group to flourish
and survive. A lot of writing these days is on “group selection,”
which explains human nature in ways that “individual selection” (the
purely gladiatorial
image of conflict between individuals) does not.
Learn more about the Hidden Gifts of Helping

3. What are some ways that people can make helping others a daily practice?

Lots of things can help. Of course meditation, which deflects
attention away from self . Adherence to moral principle, such as “Do
unto others as you would
have them do unto you,” can be important. Being part of a community of
volunteers is useful, as is being around good role models and the
right friends.

But more practically, we should focus our efforts on some needful
group that we feel called toward. For me this is the deeply forgetful
(people with dementia),
and I have been involved in providing caregiver respire for many
years. Also, we should help in a way that uses our talents and skills
optimally. This
allows people to feel effective.

As I give talks around the country to volunteer groups, however, I
invariably encounter those numerous exceptions to the rule of a
helper’s high. These
are people who feel that their experiences as volunteers have been
frustrating, and who do not last long in their efforts. I recently
spoke with a group
of “volunteer coordinators,” who often have full-time jobs working for
hospitals, schools, hospices, and so many other organizations. The
questions they
ask are important:

block quote
* Are we caring for our volunteers?
* Are we acknowledging them thankfully and rewarding them?
* Are we preparing them well enough for their tasks?
* Are we giving each volunteer the right task?
* Are they flourishing and developing?
* Are we providing the right overall vision?
* Are we overwhelming any of them?
* Do they feel joyful in their activity?
* Are they doing this from passion?
* Are they being affirmed and told how valuable their actions are?

block quote end

When these kinds of questions are ignored, and volunteers are not
nurtured, many will come to see volunteerism as drudgery. This is the
case especially
when volunteers have been given poorly conceived tasks, have not
received proper training, or are just filling up a slot without any
thought given to their
natural gifts and strengths. We need to ask who this volunteer is, and
what special talents and gifts he or she brings to a wider effort. We
need to ask
volunteers if what they did felt meaningful, if they felt joyful and
energized in their activities, and it they felt that it was a good fit
for them.

Originally published on
Psych Central.