Giving Heart. M. J. Ryan

a tiny baby in her cart, and it was clear she didn't have enough money to pay for all the food she bought, so she went off to make a phone call, presumably to ask someone for money.

      While she was gone, I asked the cashier to total up everything and tell her that she had enough money. I would make up the difference when she left. The cashier asked me if I knew her—I didn't—and then if I were wealthy. “Yes,” I replied, thinking of my beautiful daughter, the roof over my head, and the privilege of doing work that I loved.

      When I left the store, I realized I was singing along with the radio and feeling remarkably good. The best part of the situation was that the woman never realized what I had done. A bit puzzled, she had gladly wheeled her cart away. I smiled to myself. Reaching out to her had reset my mood, and I felt like I was in love with the whole world.

      Helping others really is like a “feel good” pill. When I was doing the research for my last book, 365 Health and Happiness Boosters, I realized that making someone else happy creates happiness the fastest. Lending a hand, making someone smile, or being of use to someone other than ourselves helps us stop focusing solely on our own difficulties and gives a larger perspective to our days. This is what Karl Marx meant when he said, “Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.”

Giving Can Heal

       There is a wonderful, mystical law of nature thatthe three things we crave most in life—happiness, freedom,and peace of mind—are always attainedby giving them to someone else.

      —ANONYMOUS

      During the break-up of a fourteen-year relationship, I was in terrible pain and leaned heavily on the love and advice of my friends, including author Daphne Rose Kingma, who flew up from Santa Barbara to sit with me for a few days. When she was about to leave, she gave me a tiny piece of paper, her prescription for my healing: (1) Go to therapy; (2) Meditate; (3) Reach out to others in pain.

      I'm glad to say I did all three items. At the time, though, I didn't see why helping others would help me. I understood the benefits of therapy—working through the grief, coming to see my part in the break-up, and understanding the relationship dynamics I tend to encounter. I saw how meditation might work—tapping into the sense of peacefulness and wholeness beneath the pain of my situation. But giving to others? Wasn't this a time to focus on myself?

      Once I began to volunteer at a “Meals on Wheels” organization for people with AIDS, I learned that giving to others was also a way to help myself. Helping others forced me to notice something other than my own misery, which was a great gift. Rather than wallowing in all the ways I had been mistreated and abused, I could turn my attention to someone else. As months passed, however, I discovered something else. Walking the halls of the welfare hotel where most of my deliveries were, I stopped being so attached to my particular wound and began to see that suffering is part of life. All kinds of terrible things happen to people, often for no reason, and I was not specially singled out for victimization.

      While it wasn't true for me in this situation, giving when you are feeling hurt often makes meaning out of your suffering. The person who's paralyzed by a gunshot wound and then becomes an advocate for gun control, the woman who finally escapes from her abusive husband and works to set up a shelter for battered women—these are individuals who reach up out of the particulars of their individual tragedies to ensure that others will not have to suffer the same fate.

      You don't have to be suffering from some specific hurt to reap the benefits of giving. Any time we reach out to others—in our hurt or with our love—we feel better.

Giving Is Good for Our Health

       It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

      —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

      Ihave a friend who has had a terrible case of lupus for nearly twenty years. She has been hospitalized many times and is constantly on medication that has horrible side effects, including cataracts. She had to quit her job as a graphic designer and now is completely supported by her husband. She can get really down about her life. Recently she decided to become a volunteer at a soup kitchen. She goes when she feels up to it, and she's started to discover that the more she goes, the better she feels—emotionally and physically. Her arthritis (a consequence of lupus) isn't as severe and she has more energy.

      Helping others can not only make us feel good about ourselves; it can also increase our physical well-being. The mind and body aren't separate. Anything we do to elevate our spirits will also have a beneficial effect on our health. A recent study by Cornell University found that volunteering increases a person's energy, sense of mastery over life, and self-esteem. Other studies have demonstrated that such positive feelings can actually strengthen and enhance the immune system. Positive emotions increase the body's number of T-cells, cells in the immune system that help the body resist disease and recover quickly from illness. Positive emotions also release endorphins into the bloodstream. Endorphins are the body's natural tranquilizers and painkillers; they stimulate dilation of the blood vessels, which leads to a relaxed heart.

      While we don't quite understand all the reasons why giving creates good health, many studies have documented generosity's positive effects. Michigan researchers who studied 2,700 people for almost ten years found that men who regularly did volunteer work had death rates two-and-one half times lower than men who didn't. In a separate study, volunteers who worked directly with those who benefited from their services had a greater immune system boost than those whose volunteer work was restricted to pushing papers.

      Harvard researchers also conducted a study that showed how giving is such a powerful immune booster that it can be experienced just by watching someone else in the act of giving! In this well-known experiment, students looking at a film of Mother Teresa as she tended the sick in Calcutta—even those who purported to dislike Mother Teresa—got an increase in immune function.

      Psychologist Robert Ornstein and physician David Sobel are well known for their examinations of the health effects of altruism. In their book Healthy Pleasures, they describe what they call the “helper's high,” a kind of euphoria volunteers get when helping others—a warm glow in the chest and a sense of vitality that comes from being simultaneously energized and calm. They compare it to a runner's high and claim it is caused by the body's release of endorphins. Because of all these health benefits, as Stella Reznick says in The Pleasure Zone, “the one who ends up getting the most from a good deed may, ultimately, be the good Samaritan.”

Generosity Alleviates Fear

       It is expressly at those times when we feel needythat we will benefit the most from giving.

      —RUTH ROSS

      I've never had the privilege of meeting writer Anne Lamott, but I have loved her books, particularly Operating Instructions. Her emotional honesty leaps off every page—here is a woman who is not afraid to show herself, warts and all. In admitting her vulnerabilities, she makes it okay for us to be just who we are too.

      In an interview, she was asked about her relationship to money. As a single mother living off her writing, her financial security has been precarious at best. She spoke of having survived, at times, off the generosity of friends, and then said something that leaped out at me. “I know that if I feel any deprivation or fear [about money], the solution is to give. The solution is to go find some mothers on the streets of San Raphael and give them tens and twenties and mail off another $50 to Doctors Without Borders to use for the refugees in KOSOVO. Because I know that giving is the way we can feel abundant. Giving is the way that we fill ourselves up…. For me the way to fill up is through service and sharing and getting myself to give more than I feel comfortable giving.”

      To me, a person who has a great deal of fear when it comes to money, the thought of giving money away precisely when I felt like clinging to it seemed terrifying. Sick of constantly being fearful about money, I decided to give it a try. Amazingly, it really works. I feel less afraid the more I give.

      It's