Boost Your Mood & Fight Depression: 3 Ways Helping Others Helps YOU!

TRIPP

May 31, 2024

Boost Your Mood & Fight Depression: 3 Ways Helping Others Helps YOU!

We are kicking off our final week of Mental Health Awareness Month with the instruction to help your friends. Now keep in mind we know how simple our instructions are. That’s the point. Making small incremental daily changes in your life can make huge differences in how you are feeling about yourself, your community, and your life. Try it for a month and let us know if anything shifted in you. Want to know the science behind it? Keep reading! Here are three ways helping others will help you.

1. The Health Benefits of Giving to Others One of the earliest instructions we are given as children is to share with others. Whether it’s siblings or other kids, the idea that sharing your possessions, food, and toys is a fundamental introduction to being a member of society. As you get older, and the world gets more complicated, we can often start thinking of life as more transactional. But science would indicate that giving to others actually brings you health benefits. First of all, what is giving? While we often consider giving to be a charitable donation, it can be so many other things. Gifts or needed items can be purchased, but an act of service is also a way to give. Being there to help someone else accomplish a goal, aiding physical and emotional support, or solving a problem for someone using your own skills and knowledge is also giving. The Cleveland Clinic looked at what happens in the body when you give a gift or help someone and discovered some wonderful effects. Serotonin, Oxytocin and Dopemine, also known as “feel-good chemicals” are released into the bloodstream. These feel-good chemicals are important ways that the body can fight depression.
2. Having Friends Keeps Us Healthy According to the American Psychological Association, friendships can keep us healthy by being a buffer between us and our life stressors. Friendships protect us by changing how we respond to stress. In one study, people who had a friend beside them while completing a difficult task showed lower blood pressure and less heart rate reactivity. Another study had people judging a hill to be less steep when a friend was beside them. People who were alone or friendless, or had poor-quality friends, were shown to die more prematurely in another study. We know that social behaviors are very complex and multifaceted. Stress affects our bodies in many different ways. However, studies by the APA generally state that friendships can keep subjects healthy because they help their brain and body deal with stress better.
3. Playing Pro-Social Video Games can Help Increase Empathy and Reduce Schadenfreude There have been abundant studies created to examine the negative effects of violent video games, but what about pro-social video games? A pro-social game is a video game where one must cooperate and help others succeed. When a study examined the differences between people playing a neutral video game and a pro-social one on students, they saw an effect on the players that left the interior world of the game. Pro-social players were more likely to be more helpful and supportive of their fellow students. They were more likely to intervene if they saw the harassment of another student. We are inherently social creatures, and when we see the benefits and rewards of our kindness, we are more likely to extend that kindness to others, even from the metaverse into real-world situations. Now, why would you want to play prosocial games to increase your empathy? As we age, we can often feel more cynical and we are less open to trying new things. We can use simple tools like games to keep our minds and hearts more open. As we already know from the previous two parts of the list, it puts us in a position to be healthier people and also connect better to others as we age.

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Let’s talk a little bit about how you define the word “Friend”. One can easily define friendship as people who you know, trust and love. A friend is someone you might call to check in on or think to invite to an event. A friend is someone you’ve shared experiences with that are joyful or very difficult. Oftentimes your friend is your spouse or your children or part of your family. We would like to challenge you to expand your definition of friendship. Imagine all the people you consider a friend as a list in your hand. Now add all the people to that list who used to be your friends and for some reason or another, you aren’t in touch anymore. The list gets bigger. If you could see into the future, you might have a whole new list of friends that you’ve never met before on that list. You can imagine that list getting bigger and bigger. If you could see into other timelines or universes, you could see a whole new list of friends who you would have known if you had the time to do other things, like take a different class or walk a different route to the store. If you could be in any country or any other part of the globe, could you imagine all of the new friends you would make? Can you imagine all people everywhere as a possible friend? Can you connect in one way or another to people all over the world and see them as potential friends? In this way the idea of helping your friends becomes so much more expansive than who is in your phone or your house right now. If you can expand your definition of a friend, you can also expand the ways you can help a friend and reap the benefits described in this blog.

In conclusion, many studies show that connecting with people, increasing your bonds and friendships, and giving to and helping others can lead to a healthier brain and body. Your body’s natural defenses against depression and stress are activated, your outlook on life is more positive and you’re more likely to believe that you can achieve your goals. As we discussed there are many ways to help people and many ways to define who a friend is. Can you think of one thing you can do today to “Help Your Friend”? Can you do this daily for a whole month and see how you feel?