Is helping others good for me?

Candyce Kroenke, ScD., MPH. “The helper’s high” is a term that has been used in the media recently to describe that phenomenon of when people provide support to another person and they experience that feeling, those feelings of well-being that come from helping somebody else.

Dianne Shumay, PhD. What’s really very cool about providing social support to somebody is that you benefit too, and that translates in research to better mental health and better physical health for us. So, living in line with your values, stepping up and doing the right thing, doing the thing that lines up with who we want to be, what matters to us, and who matters to us, that does good for us. Research has shown that when we engage in altruistic behaviors, when we provide care to others, when we provide care, even care that we ourselves don’t benefit from, we do better on some of those physiological measures of physical well-being.