50).Volunteering offers a multitude of health benefits, including keeping your heart young and strong. Whether it’s due to fostering friendships and combating depression or providing an enjoyable way to increase your physical activity, volunteering pays rich health dividends for you while helping your community at the same time. From museums to community centers, all kinds of organizations depend on volunteers, so you’re sure to find one that matches your interests and skills (or helps you learn something you’ve always been interested in!). You can reap the health benefits by volunteering just two hours a week, or about 100 hours a year, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service. Find a service opportunity at www.VolunteerMatch.org, or if there’s a specific place you’d like to volunteer, ask at the front desk how you can get involved.
“If I had to pull out the biggest benefits of volunteering, it would be social connection and fighting depression,” says Sarah Lovegreen, M.P.H., health manager with OASIS, a national organization that promotes lifelong learning and service for adults age fifty and older. Depression increases your chances for heart problems even aside from traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, high cholesterol, increased body mass index, a history of cardiovascular issues, and disease severity, notes a 2009 study in the journal Stress. And other evidence indicates that social isolation—common in older adults, and a key factor in depression—can double your risk of dying from coronary artery disease. Just how depression affects your heart is less clear, although some research suggests it might increase inflammation, influence clotting, and affect your autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for raising or lowering your heart rate, constricting blood vessels, and increasing blood pressure. Scientists aren’t yet sure whether treating depression reduces risk of cardiovascular disease and death, but early evidence shows that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) might help.
A 2009 study in the journal Age and Ageing found that older adults who volunteered or continued working past retirement age had fewer depressive symptoms, better mental well-being, and greater life satisfaction than those who retired without volunteering. And a 2010 study in the Journal of Aging and Health found that volunteering actually helps lift depression in people over sixty-five years old.
Volunteering helps combat depression by giving you a sense of purpose and connection, which is especially valuable if you don’t currently get that from a job. Being socially active has a cyclical benefit too—if you connect with others, it can reduce depression, which in turn makes you more likely to stay socially engaged.
Volunteering is a great way to boost your physical activity and stay young. A 2009 study in the Journal of Urban Health found that older adults who volunteered fifteen or more hours a week in an elementary school described themselves as having increased strength and energy and were able to walk and climb stairs faster than before they began volunteering. Another study looking at the same group of volunteers found that they burned almost twice the calories of their nonvolunteering counterparts, and they sustained that higher level of physical activity over time. That extra exercise, even if it’s not enough to qualify as your daily workout, can benefit your heart (50).
If you’re retired, or thinking about retiring, volunteering can help you stay active. A 2007 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people who retired lost the work-related physical activity (such as transportation to and from work) formerly built into their day, and they didn’t make up for that change by increasing participation in sports or other leisure-time activities. Other research shows that even when retirees continue with sports and exercise participation, they also increase the time they spend in sedentary activities like watching television. Volunteering gets you up off the couch, and the additional movement in your daily routine might be enough to offset an aging metabolism (22), helping you stay slim and reducing a key risk factor for heart disease.
