You can’t help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.
—General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.
The total number of minds in the universe is one.
—Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize–winning Austrian physicist
Melvyn Amrine, age eighty-three, had been married to Doris for sixty years. They lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Melvyn had recently developed severe Alzheimer’s disease. He had trouble walking and he could not even remember marrying Doris. So when he disappeared on May 10, 2014 (the day before Mother’s Day), Doris got extremely worried and called the police.
Officers Brian Grigsby and Troy Dillard soon found Melvyn two miles away from his home walking quickly. They asked him to get in their car to take him home, but Melvyn refused. They asked him a few questions. He could not remember his own name, he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t have his wallet or any form of identification. He knew only one thing: He needed to buy flowers for his wife for Mother’s Day, just like he had done every year since they had their first child. Melvyn made it very clear to the police that “he wasn’t going home until he got those flowers.” The police were touched by his determination and took him to the flower shop on the way home. They helped him choose some cream-colored roses. Sergeant Grigsby even secretly paid for the flowers because Melvyn had forgotten his money.
When they brought him home, Doris cried when she saw the flowers. She said, “Even though the mind doesn’t remember everything, the heart remembers.” Grigsby and Dillard were praised in the news and felt great. They might also have made themselves healthier along the way.
The flip side of helping someone is being helped ourselves. In 2011, Professor Daniel George in Pennsylvania did a randomized trial with thirty people who had dementia. Half of them volunteered for one hour per week with school children, helping them with reading, writing, and history. The others didn’t do volunteer work. At the end of the study, stress in those who volunteered was lower than in those who didn’t. However, the study was small, so in 2013 researchers did a systematic review that combined four trials of volunteering. The studies were all quite different and had mostly positive, but mixed, results. Volunteering seemed to improve things like cognitive function, physical activity, strength, walking speed, and stress. However, it didn’t seem to have an effect on number of falls, which is important for older people. Neither did it affect purpose in life or loneliness. The authors of the review concluded that more research was necessary.
More and more recent research is establishing a link between volunteering and health. In the most recent study I am aware of, fifty-two high school students in Canada were randomized to volunteer once per week by helping younger students with their homework, sports, or other after-school activities. Another fifty-four students didn’t do any volunteer work. The researchers then took blood samples from both groups. They found that the students who volunteered lost more fat, lowered cholesterol more, and had better immune system function compared with the students who didn’t volunteer.
One study found that merely thinking about others being helpful can be beneficial. Harvard psychologist David McClelland asked one group of students to watch a film of Mother Teresa caring for orphans in Calcutta. He asked other students to watch a neutral film. After the viewings, he found those who had watched the Mother Teresa film had higher levels of an important protective immune system antibody called salivary immunoglobin A than those in the control group. Interestingly, this immune system boost occurred whether or not students agreed with Mother Teresa’s religious beliefs. This trial suggests that having altruistic thoughts can improve health by strengthening the immune system.
If you volunteer to take a dog for a walk, you are increasing your physical activity, which is good for your health. Any volunteering that connects you to people could help you reap the health benefits of social networks discussed in Chapter 11. It may also reduce stress and help us relax by taking our minds off our own problems. An evolutionary mechanism was even suggested by a National Institute for Mental Health study in the United States in which nineteen volunteers were given money and a list of good causes to which they could donate.
Brain scans showed networks of brain cells that transmit dopamine between brain regions were activated in the people who donated money. As we saw in Part III, dopamine is the brain-messaging chemical that makes us feel good when we do something beneficial to our survival. Research showing that we get a dopamine high when we are altruistic suggests we have evolved that way because our ancestors were more likely to overcome the hardships they faced if they helped each other.
In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma, Italy, discovered the existence of certain brain cells in laboratory monkeys. The cells were activated both when they performed actions and when they watched others doing so. He called these mirror neurons and went on to show that humans have them, too. Mirror neurons are located in the part of the brain called the premotor cortex. Neurons in the premotor cortex send messages that cause things like arm movement. The mirror neurons in our brain fire when we see someone else move. So if we see a person lift their arms, the neurons in our premotor cortex responsible for lifting our arms also fire. Our mirror neurons rarely fire strongly enough to actually lift our arms, but sometimes they do. Some recent studies suggest that mirror neurons also help explain why we yawn when we see someone else yawning.
For example, if you watch fans at a football game, you can sometimes see them move their bodies when the quarterback makes a challenging pass. These motor neurons seem to be important for learning through imitation. I can learn how to drive by watching someone else drive. Athletes learn to improve their game by watching other athletes. Or they can improve through visualization—which is imagining themselves doing what they would like to do as if they were someone else.
Besides mirror neurons that fire when others engage in movement and that can help us learn about movement, there are also mirror neurons for touch. We all know that being touched can trigger a variety of emotional responses, as can watching others touching. Why does watching a romantic film scene, or seeing the bride and groom kiss at a wedding, have us dabbing tears from our cheeks? Our brains are mirroring the experiences of the people we see in front of us.
The potential role of these mirror neurons in establishing empathy, through a dissolving of the separation between individuals, has led neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran to call them “Gandhi neurons.” So perhaps at the same time that we assist others by being kind, beneficial mirror neurons are also activated in us.
Just as volunteering benefits the volunteer, a number of studies show that expressing gratitude has health benefits. You probably remember your parents reminding you to say the magic words “thank you” because it is considered to be polite. What they probably did not tell you is that being grateful can also make you healthier. In a series of studies, American psychologists randomized 400 adults, some of whom had neuromuscular disorders, to receive one of three treatments:
After the participants had been doing the task assigned to their particular group for ten weeks, the investigators found those who had been listing their reasons to be grateful had improved more than the others in terms of their general outlook on life, physical symptoms of disease, and how refreshed they felt when they awoke. Focusing on being grateful seemed to make them feel better and less depressed and also reduced the symptoms of some illnesses. Simply making a list of things for which we are grateful thus can have an effect similar to that of some drugs.
Many other studies have similar results. In 2013, Lisa Bolier and her colleagues in the Netherlands did a systematic review of “positive psychology,” which I have mentioned in Chapter 4 and Chapter 8. Positive psychology encourages people to have a positive outlook on life. Instead of focusing on problems and negative things that have happened in the past, positive psychology teaches people to emphasize the good things in their lives. As part of that, it encourages them to be grateful for these good things, and to express that gratitude.
Bolier’s review covered thirty-nine studies with a combined total of more than 6,000 patients. Many positive psychology interventions had a beneficial effect on patients with depression and on their general well-being. However, the results were mixed, with some showing greater benefits than others. The more positive psychology patients had, the greater the effects seemed to be. The results cannot be attributed to the benefits of gratitude alone, because positive psychology is much broader than that. However, gratitude is certainly an important part of these approaches.
It seems that doing nice things for others, as well as being thankful for nice things others (or life) have done for us, can make us healthier. But something is fishy about this: Isn’t the point of helping people to help them? If I help others in order to help myself, doesn’t that mean I’m being selfish?
Do we ever truly do something for others, or are all our motives selfish? This is an old philosophical question about the possibility of altruism, with some saying that we never do things for others, but only for our own benefit (it makes us feel good). The first thing to say about this is that from the point of view of a starving person it doesn’t matter. If someone gives them food, the starving person might not care too much about the possibility of altruism, because they are happy to receive food.
And in response to the philosophers who claim that altruism is impossible, there are some cases in which the cost to the person helping far outweighed any benefit. For example, Mother Teresa gave up all material comforts to care for some of the sickest people in the world. Or during emergencies, some people put their own lives at risk to help others.
In a spectacular example of this, Wesley Autrey put his own life at risk to save Cameron Hollopeter. At lunchtime on January 2, 2007, Autrey was waiting for a train at the 137th Street subway station in Manhattan with his two young daughters. After having a seizure, Hollopeter stumbled and fell onto the tracks. As a bystander held his daughters back from the edge of the platform, Autrey dived off the platform. With the lights of an oncoming train getting brighter, he realized there was not enough time to lift Hollopeter up to the platform, so he threw himself over his body and held him down in a drainage trench between the tracks. Though the operator of the train applied the brakes, all but two cars passed over them, close enough to touch Autrey’s cap. It is true that Autrey got famous after the incident—he was given the nickname “Hero of Harlem.” But at the time he performed the act, it is hard to see how he thought he was doing it to help himself.
Altruism confuses some biologists, too, because evolutionary theory has trouble explaining it. You might think it makes sense in evolutionary terms: One monkey turns its back to another monkey, and the other monkey picks out parasites. Then they change roles so that both monkeys get parasites removed from their backs. Both monkeys benefit from altruism. However, according to evolutionary theory, genes mutate randomly and the random mutations that increase the chances of survival and having children get passed on. Genes that reduce the chances of survival don’t. That means an altruism gene would have arisen randomly in just one monkey, and it would have been difficult for the original altruistic gene to be passed on.
The first human, or human ancestor, to randomly get an altruism gene was almost certainly at a disadvantage. He or she would pick parasites from his or her friend’s back. Then the now parasite-free human ancestor would wander off to find food or to find a partner to procreate with. Meanwhile the altruistic human ancestor would have more parasites (and more sickness as a result) and less time to reproduce or eat, because it was spending time picking parasites from other monkeys. So, the story goes, the altruistic gene would decrease the chances of survival and die out.
Evolutionary theorists show another thing that makes the altruism gene more likely to fail: It encourages “weaker” genes to survive, weakening the species. If a species does what Autrey did, and performed altruistic acts to help someone who otherwise would not remain alive, then the altruistic individual is helping weak genes to survive. Weakening the species reduces chances of survival in the long run, which suggests that a species that developed altruism genes would die out. These evolutionary stories about the origins of altruism are just speculation. The fact is that we don’t know how altruism evolved, and evolutionary theory makes it difficult to see how it could have arisen on a wide scale in the first place.
Yet altruism is pervasive in nature in spite of the difficulties in explaining how it first evolved. Wolves and wild dogs bring back meat to pack members not present at the kill. Vervet monkeys scream to warn each other when a predator approaches, even though it attracts the predator’s attention to the monkey that screams. Mongooses support older, sick and injured animals. Many birds will help feed and raise the young of other birds. Termites will give themselves a fatal wound to release a sticky substance from a specialized gland so that invading ants get stuck.
The best evolutionary explanation for altruism, proposed by political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton in 1981, is that we share genes with our close relatives, so helping our relatives will help our genes survive. If this is right, it means it is not our individual genes that fight selfishly for survival, but our group’s genes. It seems to fly in the face of the belief that we live in an individualist dog-eat-dog world, in which the best way to allow our species to thrive is to allow the fittest individuals and their genes to rise to the top, even if that causes those people at the bottom to starve.
Altruistic behavior means helping the weak and their genes to survive, making the group weaker. But if the unit of evolution is not our individual genes, but our group’s genes, then it is good to help one another. This idea offers an evolutionary underpinning to the evidence from Chapter 11, which suggested that good relationships with family, friends, and social groups make us live longer. Maybe that is why a study showed that helping others is more beneficial for our health when our motives are altruistic.
Researchers followed the experiences of over 10,000 Wisconsin high school graduates from their graduation in 1957. In 2004, the graduates were asked:
Their reasons for doing volunteer work were then classified as selfish, such as self-exploration, looking to feel better, or to escape from troubles; or altruistic, including feeling compassion for people in need, or community service. Like other studies, this one showed that people who volunteered more were healthier—in fact, they were less likely to die early. When the researchers looked deeper, they found that the health benefits of volunteering only went to those who did so for altruistic reasons.
The research on the benefits and importance of helping others reflects the teachings of many religions. Jesus said that giving is more blessed than receiving. The Torah requires that 10 percent of a Jew’s income be allotted to righteous deeds or causes; Zakat, or helping the needy, is one of the five pillars of Islam. And charity work, known as dana, is a virtue in both Hinduism and Buddhism.
If you are helping others so much that you don’t even take care of yourself, your body and mind can become stressed and unhealthy. I witnessed this while watching my sisters raise their children. Like my mother, my sisters could not bear to hear a newborn baby cry. When their babies woke up, they woke up. This was empathetic; however, they ended up not sleeping and even becoming ill. As a result, they could not care for any of their children properly.
So they had to learn to let the babies cry sometimes in order to get enough rest themselves to be able to look after their children. This is kind of common sense. But as Voltaire said, “Common sense is not so common.” Many of us don’t do enough to help others, and I hope this chapter motivates you (as it has me) to lend a hand. But use common sense and don’t suddenly start doing so much that you end up sick yourself.
Equally, doing the wrong sort of volunteering, perhaps where an individual stands the risk of verbal or physical abuse, can be detrimental. When my sister was a teenager, she could not walk past a homeless cat or dog or person and not try to help, which is very generous. However, she once stopped her car illegally on the highway to save a cat. She almost certainly saved the cat, but she also endangered her own life.
A different kind of worry is that sometimes we think we are helping others, but we are harming them. I used to give money to homeless people (I still do at times). However, I got to know some of them, and at least in Oxford, the money is often used for drugs rather than food. Now I offer to buy them a coffee, and they usually accept. This kind of volunteering that might harm the people we are trying to help is apparently common in international volunteer work. An increase in people wanting to help in orphanages in Nepal led to a dramatic rise in the number of orphanages, some of which are involved in child trafficking. It also led to some of the children feeling abandoned, because the volunteers don’t stay long.
Karjit, a youth from Humla who grew up in a series of children’s homes in Kathmandu and Pokhara despite not being an orphan, was interviewed and he complained:
There were so many volunteers: short-time, long-time, middle-time, according to visa! . . . Sometimes they organize program and I don’t want to go. Children sometimes feel angry, because they want to do what they want. There is a nice movie and children they want to watch, but volunteers organize a football program and house managers say you have to go. And all children were angry . . . Why foreigners come to Nepal? Why do they go in orphanage? That time they come for short time and they give love to us, but then they leave, and when I write they don’t reply. I say to a volunteer, “Sister, I am very lonely,” and they say, “No problem, I am here,” but then they go their country and I write, but they don’t reply. When I was little everyone can love me, now I am big and I need love.
Cases like Karjit’s make it clear that we should think critically about how we are volunteering.
Okay, volunteering is good for us. But we are all busy, and how can we be sure that we are not accidentally doing harm, like the volunteers may have done to Karjit? There are good-news answers to both of those questions. First, volunteering a reasonable amount does not take time away from you. In fact, a study shows that it makes you feel like you have more time. This is probably because it makes you feel positive, relaxed, happy, and energized. You are right that it is impossible to know for sure whether something you do is really going to help, because we cannot see the future. At the same time, there are at least seven things you can do that are almost certainly helpful for lowering your anxiety, improving your health, and helping someone else:
Just as Sergeant Brian Grigsby and Officer Troy Dillard saved Melvyn Amrine, doing these small things will improve someone’s life in a measurable way. It will probably also make you healthier. Try it and see how it feels.
Many charities are small with underpaid staff and do a great deal of good. Unfortunately, other charities spend well over half the money they receive on administration, salaries for their staff, and other costs that have nothing to do with the cause they are supposed to promote. Others promote causes that make little sense. I heard of one charity that was reportedly providing laptop computers to undernourished children in villages with no electricity. Needless to say, laptops don’t work without electricity, and hungry children need food more than they need computers.
Fortunately, there are more than a few good charities. I am currently based in Oxford, England, and the international charity based here (Oxfam) is known to be quite good, and it spends 82 percent of the money it raises on actually relieving suffering. There are other good charities, too, and to find them all you need to do is a few minutes’ research on the internet, because charities are required by law to report how they spend their money. Nobody is perfect and no organization is perfect, but there are many excellent charities.
Focusing on long-term sustainable development will result in more lasting change. This does not mean you should force a starving person to attend your “how to fish” class. If they need food, feed them first, then teach them how to fish. But try to help in ways that go beyond their immediate needs. There are many examples of such ways, and I am aware of two of them.
One is a homeless charity in Oxford called Oxford Homeless Pathways. It gives people food and shelter but makes sure they are connected to a health service and that they have documents; it also offers courses and counseling, and even helps them to find jobs. Some of the people it serves have ended up working for the shelter. Unfortunately, some of this charity’s shelters are being decommissioned over the next year.
I know a homeless person in Oxford named Hank (not his real name) who set up his bed in a bus shelter. Someone bought him some paints and he started painting and displaying his paintings on the street, which he sold. Eventually, people helped him find a government-sponsored place to stay, and he got a job at a local restaurant. On my birthday last year, he even got me a present of a carefully wrapped box of chocolates and a card. Simply giving him money would have helped, but not as much as helping him to begin painting, or helping him get a job. To be fair, it was easy to help Hank because he is not a substance user, he is always clean, and he is always polite.
Charities committed to educating women are often good for this reason, because when women are educated they can make decisions that have a positive spillover effect into their families and the societies in which they live.
Lots of studies demonstrate that showing gratitude plays a role in reducing depression and other anxiety disorders. Make a list of the things you had reasons to be grateful for in the last week. If you feel grateful for something someone did, express it to them.