Get High on Helping

Last summer, I was at the beach watching a dad take his three-year-old into the ocean. As soon as the little boy touched the water, he was off, his little arms and legs motoring. Within seconds, he was five feet away. The dad tore off his t-shirt, tossed it to the beach and went after his bobbing toddler. The shirt landed on the beach, so close to the water’s edge that one big wave was sure to sweep it away. I got up from my beach chair, grabbed the dad’s t-shirt and moved it out of the reach of the coming tide.

It was a tiny gesture that went completely unnoticed. But as I walked back to my chair, I felt just a tiny bit happier.

That’s no surprise. There is compelling research that helping others lights up the pleasure center in our brain and delivers us a little shot of the happiness hormones oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. This feeling of joy you get by helping others has been dubbed the “helper’s high” and brain mapping has shown it is a real thing.

How awesome is that? Helping others makes us feel good. As Dr. Eva Ritvo wrote in The Neuroscience of Giving, “[h]umans are social animals, so it is no surprise that we are wired to help one another.” In fact, this instinct is so powerful that there is evidence that people who regularly volunteer and help others actually live longer than those who don’t.

Getting your daily dose of helper’s high is pretty simple. Sure, you can spend Thanksgiving serving dinner in a shelter or volunteer eight hours a week with at-risk kids -- both of which are awesome -- but you can also help an elderly woman with her grocery bags, give up your seat to someone who looks like they need it more than you do or buy coffee for the guy in line behind you. Or, as I did just this morning, bring your husband his morning coffee in bed.

And here’s the remarkable part: it doesn’t seem t matter if you are doing a kind act in part with a goal of making yourself feel better. So if you are inspired to donate time at a local soup kitchen, read at a nursing home, walk puppies at a local shelter, bring your partner coffee in bed or simply smile at the slow-moving woman behind the ticket counter because you know it will make you feel good, that’s okay too.