Ten Ways Giving Back Helps You

10 Ways Giving Back Helps You

By Susan Skog

There’s a deep wave of grassroots giving back sweeping the country. A surge of people across all age groups is volunteering like never before. But giving back doesn’t mean that you don’t get anything in return. Helping others reach for a new day rejuvenates us in ways that another margarita-soaked vacation, more stuff, a fatter resume, or a supersized house can’t begin to. We want to feel useful. We want to find meaning. We want to feel this alive and on fire with possibility. Here are some ways serving others can serve you--from finding your true calling to improving your health to boosting your overall sense of joy.

Check out 10 ways giving back can help you.

Susan Skog is a journalist and author of the new book The Give-Back Solution: Create a Better World with Your Time, Talents and Travel (Whether You Have $10 or $10,000). For more info: susanskog.com

Your Anxiety and Depression are Eased

Giving back helps others reach for a better day. But the delightful dividend? Volunteering helps you reach greater states of happiness and hope. You experience a potent euphoria known as "helper's high." This sense of usefulness, optimism and meaning can banish your brooding thoughts and clear out the cobwebs in your minds. Why? For one thing, giving back helps you stop fixating on your troubles and propels you to feel empowered and confident that you can make a difference.

The neural "glow" from helping others even shows up on MRI scans. Boston College researchers found that pain, depression, and disability in chronic pain patients decreased after volunteering. University of Texas and other researchers also find that volunteering eases depression.

Your Overall Health and Joy are Boosted

"There is no better exercise for your heart than reaching down and helping to lift someone up." —Bernard Meltzer

When you're generous, we're generous to yourself. Your entire being undergoes a feel-good transformation at the cellular level when you support others, which boosts everything from your psychological outlook to heart and immune system. Instead of despairing about the world, you're embracing it wholeheartedly, taking on tough challenges to try to transform them with goodwill and optimism. You're also choosing to be "other centered," which streams wellbeing back to yourself.

Service is simply, powerful medicine. Research shows that teenagers who get turned on by service learning and volunteer work are much happier and more optimistic. They also get better grades and use drugs less. Volunteering even helps you live longer, according to University of California–Los Angeles researchers.

You Can Connect With a Cool Community

Service work automatically connects you with an infectious, can-do community of kindred volunteers. In the summer of 2008, as the floodwaters rose throughout his Iowa City community, then eleven-year-old Scott Tribbey and his longtime friend Joe Britton were playing games on their Wii and PlayStation. "But then we got bored. So we decided to go and pitch in and help fill sandbags." Scott says. "It's no fun just to just gawk at the flood and just sit there and not do anything to help. It was actually pretty fun helping our community get through this."

Scott and Joe and their dads decided to join others filling sandbags. "We worked for about four hours and made about forty-five sandbags," Scott recalls. "It was really fun…And it made me really proud of my community," he adds.

You Receive Greater Clarity About Your Own Calling

Marsha Wallace, a nurse in South Carolina, was restless with her work, "earnestly searching for my path." One night, Wallace was meditating, and she was jolted "like an electrical shock" by an idea. She quickly called twenty-five friends and hosted a unique potluck. What if they pooled the money they would have spent dining out and sent it instead to a women's project in the developing world? Wallace asked them. The women loved the idea and around that table, they launched Dining for Women. DFW's 130 chapters now raise money—one meal at a time—for projects around the world. "There are so many women with expendable income, if we could all band together, we could be a huge force with which to be reckoned!"

Your Job Performance Improves

People who volunteer are resourceful, creative, – and have incredible staying power on the job. An international tax partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Oren Penn spent eight weeks on a corporate service fellowship to improve health in a remote Indian community, Orissa, one of the poorest areas of India. Penn worked with colleagues from the Netherlands and Mexico to ease severe poverty and unsafe health conditions in Orissa's ignored community of "untouchables." Working as an effective team in Orissa made him a much more effective team leader back home. "I've raised my game in terms of how I approach what I do, " Penn says. "In my view, this is the best way to enjoy work, enhance your performance, and elevate all parts of your life as well."

You Stay Hopeful and Optimistic

"I've never felt such an amazing sense of community," says Amanda Anderson-Green, a then twenty-five-year-old medical researcher from Seattle who spent three weeks on a Cross-Cultural Solutions volunteer vacation in Ghana through Travelocity's Travel for Good program. Each morning, she loved walking along red-dirt roads lined with women and children who'd smile and greet her as she went to volunteer at a center with HIV-positive people and AIDS orphans. "I was struck by the simplicity of it. People talked with me as if I was their neighbor.

They were so open, friendly, and accepting. They'd put their arms around me and thank me for coming." Now back in Seattle, she says, "I am still receiving the gifts from my trip. I knew I would have a rewarding adventure, but I had no idea how much going abroad would impact my views of community, happiness, and service here at home."

You Gain Appreciation for Other People and Places

Jonathan Orc thought Africa was a very bad place: hot, poor, full of sickness and dirt. But he fell in love with people in Mali while teaching English and helping build a school. "We arrived at night, but they had been waiting for us all day long….I felt that I belonged there, like they were just saving a spot for me in their village the whole time.

I never really thought that they would spread their arms and accept us as family and not just as guests." Kids often approached Orc, offering him mangoes or help, even when he didn't need it. "Before, I used to see Africa as a crappy place, but now I see it at as a paradise… Africa is a beautiful and extraordinary place that changed my life."

You Connect with What It Means to be Human

When John Heineman learned that more than tens of millions of Americans were stranded in the boat of having no health insurance, he took to the waters, literally. After he graduated from the University of Iowa, and after intensive training, he swam the English Channel to raise money for the Iowa City Free Medical Clinic "The waves were so big that I could not see much of anything but water." And he was stung many times by shoals of jellyfish. Moved by Heineman's generosity, $19,000 in support for the clinic streamed in from around the country. Along the way, Heineman says he's met priceless people served by the clinic. Those people, he says, are "his exposure to humanity at its finest."