The hospital where my dad is being treated has a host of volunteers. These are mostly white-haired women in green smocks who answer questions at the information desk, greet family members at the surgical waiting area, or sell plaster models of saints and angels in the gift shop. But there are youngsters, too, who transport patients in wheelchairs and deliver mail.
The volunteer in the waiting area I stepped into for a cup of tea this morning, asked me cheerfully, as they all do, how she could help me. In response to my off-the-cuff remarks about how many volunteers I’d seen and how much they seem to enjoy the work, she told me that she volunteers 3-days a week, and then said, “Not bad for an 89 year-old, is it?” She is eighty-nine (!), in great health, fully present, and happy to be out and about working with a team of men and women who want to serve.
In their book, The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama and his co-author, Howard Cutler, a psychiatrist, list kindness and compassion as important components of happiness. Cutler quotes the Dalai Lama: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
As with most sage advice, this is supported by psychological research. In fact a paper published just this morning (August 23) confirms it to a T. The authors review 40 studies from the past 20 years on the relationship between volunteering and health and conclude that volunteering increases happiness, decreases depression, and leads to longer healthier lives.
You may wonder whether it is simply the case that people who volunteer live longer happier lives than non-volunteers for other reasons, maybe because they are more likely to exercise, take vitamins, and the like. But one of the studies reviewed by Suzanne Richards and her colleagues randomly assigned some subjects (probably college students) to do volunteer work and others to do other activities. The volunteers had better results.
As you’d expect, psychologists have proposed lots of theories to explain these finding–volunteering gets you off the couch and into the world, etc.–but an especially interesting twist is that the volunteers who benefited most were those who did it in order to help others, not to help themselves. In other words, extending kindness to others enhanced these research subjects’ happiness and well-being, just as the Dalai Lama teaches.
I love it when psychology and other sources of wisdom validate one another.