Imagine if no one else in the world took the time to help their neighbor when they needed it. Imagine that no one else ever did anything else for each other, and the world depended on being told or otherwise forced to help those around us. The world would be a sad, dark, lonely place.
However, fortunately for us, good Samaritans abound in the world today. Not all of us realize how important it is to help others and be kind to them, but for some reason, we do it nonetheless. If you weren’t convinced before, though, the side benefits of helping others might surprise you.
Why Is Helping Others Important?
There are far too many reasons that exist to answer the above question. We could spend this entire guide trying to explain every reason exhaustively, but we still wouldn’t get to them all. There’s no one reason why helping others is so important, either, though making the world a better place for all of us is undoubtedly the most common answer.
By nature, human beings are social. We work well together in groups. If we try to live solitary lives, we go through mental changes that distance us from our fellow humans; we become something a bit displaced from a normal human being.
As such, when we see fellow humans in need or in pain, we feel compassion and sympathy. We recall when we might have been in the same situation as them, and we feel the urge to help them out. This is something that’s hardwired into our DNA as well as taught to us by our parents; it’s weirder not to feel compassion for other humans than otherwise.
Surprisingly, we feel this same compassionate urge for non-humans, too. When we see abandoned or hurt animals, we feel sympathy and pain for them. Often, we want to help, even if we don’t know how.
It definitely seems to be a good thing that helping others is ingrained into us, both biologically and from a young age. Helping each other and banding together is what keeps our society strong. Rather than a community built on fear and tyrannical rule, the idea is to create one built on kindness and helping each other prosper.
However, helping others can be important for other reasons, too. While we can’t deny that kindness makes the world go ‘round, it also has a few more surprising benefits on the individual level.
Benefits of Helping Others
Helping others is great for the world at large, of course, but it can also have some benefits for you. To help others around you is a great reason to get started, but there are even more reasons to do so that you might not realize at first.
For example, did you know that helping those around you is proven to make you happier as an individual? If you’re having trouble finding fulfillment in life, a great place to look is to the people around you. Helping them not only makes you feel better about their situation, but it improves the world around you and makes you feel better about your own contribution, too.
When was the last time you helped someone without thinking about it? Did you help an elderly lady carry her groceries home or across the street safely? Did you shovel a neighbor’s driveway during the wintertime? Did you return someone’s wallet to them after they lost it without taking any money? These are all things that you wouldn’t necessarily be required to go out of the way to do, but that all improve your social and moral standing nonetheless.
How did you feel after helping these someones, though? Did you feel relieved? Happy? Inconvenienced? Overwhelmingly, we feel satisfied and happy with ourselves after helping someone other than ourselves.
One reason for this might be because we know we increased the amount of good in the world somehow. When we do a good deed for someone else, it’s widespread for that person to pass that good deed on to another person, if they can. As such, when you perform a good act, you can expect that that good deed will spread to several other people, rather than just the person you helped.
Another reason we might want to perform good deeds is that we were most likely taught to do it. When we were young, we were always taught to say please and thank you, hold the door open for others, and share what we had during playtime. As we got older, we were exposed to people helping others in movies, television, and media.
People who help each other exist all around us, and this is one of the benefits of a society that encourages assisting those around us. While we’re not required to help others, we’re encouraged to do so by popular media, as well as all of those around us. This perpetuates the habit of helping others until it turns into a natural occurrence rather than an artificial one.
When we help someone else, it makes our own hope for the world at large, and everyone inside it climb just a bit higher. After all, if we can help someone else unprompted, there have to be other people out there that can do so as well. This makes us feel more positive about life in general because we know that our good deed might make its way to deserving people (or even back to us) someday.
Feeling Happiness
Believe it or not, by serving those around us, we feel an automatic, innate sense of joy, even if it’s to our detriment. Even if the help we give is meaningless or just a drop in the ocean, such as handing a few coins to a homeless person, it makes us feel a bit better about us and about the world when we do so.
Why do we feel so much better about helping those around us? Even though we’ve done something about those in need who exist right before our eyes, there are billions of other people, creatures, and organizations in the world who could still use our help. Helping just one person doesn’t make a measurable difference in the happiness of the world overall, so why does it make us feel so good?
Well, as we mentioned before, humans operate in groups. We make friends with each other and become social in groups, and we eventually generate feelings for some of those people, too. Not only does helping those in need make us happy, but helping those close to us does, too.
All of us are willing and happy to help our friends when they need our help. This is, of course, because they mean more to us than the average stranger. With a friend, we know what kind of situation they’re in, what they’ve been through, and what type of help they need. We rarely know all this information about a stranger.
Of course, we care more about our friends than strangers, too. We also get to see the direct results of our actions when we help a friend rather than a stranger. If we go over to a friend’s house to make soup when they’re feeling sick, for example, we’ll get to see the gratitude of our friend first-hand and see the effect that our help has on them.
With a stranger, we might not be able to see the effects of our kindness right away, or we might doubt how effective it’ll be. Let’s assume that you handed a few dollar bills to a homeless individual, for example. While they might save up their money to try and turn their life around, they might also use it to buy alcohol, drugs, or worse.
Clearly, giving our time, energy, or resources to a friend is better than giving it to a stranger. But why do we feel happy when we’re able to do either one? There’s not a terribly good explanation for this our there, except that helping others simply makes us happier.
There are more ways to help others than we could possibly cover within one guide. However, we’ll do our best to cover some of the best ways in the paragraphs below.
Give Blood
While giving blood isn’t the most satisfying way to help others, it’s a niche area of the world where people are always in need of your services. Additionally, since giving blood (or even plasma) is such a structured activity, you can be confident that your blood will be going to someone who needs it to live. While handing money to a homeless individual might be satisfying, it’s not dependable in the same way that giving blood is.
Additionally, while there are many ways to help others, donating blood to someone just might make the difference between them living and dying. If a hospital doesn’t have enough donor blood on hand when someone needs a transfusion, that person could die as a result.
This is especially true if you have blood to give that’s particularly in-demand. This includes rare blood types, such as O-negative blood. While you should never feel pressured to donate your time or resources just because you have different blood than everyone else, if it’s a niche that you can fulfill easily, it’s something you may want to consider.
Visit a Nursing Home
One of the saddest realities of growing old is that, someday, you may no longer have any relatives to take care of you and visit you. Nursing homes are the most common place to find older adults in this situation.
Unfortunately, with the many health issues that come with the elderly, it can be a burden to care for them. Elderly individuals who no longer have any nearby relatives may end up in care homes by no fault of their own, or their own family may not be able to keep up with the level of care that they need.
While nursing homes provide the care that many elderly individuals require, they can be supremely lonely places. Many of the individuals who stay in nursing homes may not remember their previous lives, and they might not be great for conversation, either. There’s often not much to do, and the elderly are essentially left to wait for their lives to end, or for relatives to visit.
Of course, some relatives can visit more often than others. If you take the time to visit a nursing home, you might find that many of the individuals left there will appreciate it. The elderly are often the forgotten of our society, and unfortunately, even their family can forget them sometimes.
Even if you don’t have any relatives there, try taking the time to visit the elderly at a nursing home. The benefits of doing so are numerous:
- You’ll inject some much-needed variety and entertainment into the patients’ lives
- The patients can recall memories and previous fun times as they talk to you
- You might learn interesting things from the people you meet there
- You may make the patients happy if you remind them of their own relatives
Donate
Donating your extras to charity is a surprisingly easy way to help others. You don’t really need to go out of your way to do anything to help people with donations. All you really need to do is to take what you need to a donation facility and let them handle the rest.
While some people like to buy products to donate to facilities, such as razors, socks, and soaps, you don’t even need to go that far to make a difference through donation. The easiest and least expensive method you can employ is to look through your belongings for things you no longer need.
There are countless things you can donate to people in need! Besides money, which is the most obvious one, you can donate practically anything that’s non-used or gently used, and others can still benefit from what usage it has left. Some examples to consider include:
- Clothing
- Non-perishable food
- Windows (or other building products)
- Time
- Personal hygiene products
- Toilet paper
- Blankets
If you can’t donate something physical, consider donating your time. Another word for this is volunteering. By volunteering for a cause, you don’t have to go through your things to find something to donate, and you don’t need to buy anything new, either. Organizations across the country and the world depend on the time donations of volunteers to make a difference.
While donating your time might not sound like the most exciting experience, it’s still a good idea to consider it – especially if you don’t have money or objects to donate. In truth, there’s no excuse not to give something of yours to those in need if you’re really determined to do it! If you have no time, donate your money. If you have no money, donate your old belongings. If you have nothing physical to give, volunteer your time to someone in need.
Health Improvements
Believe it or not, helping others isn’t just a great way to make ourselves happier. Taking some time to help others can actually make you physically healthier as well as emotionally and mentally better!
While this phenomenon isn’t completely understood, helping others tends to relieve a lot of the stress we keep in our bodies. If you suffer from stress, pain, or even high blood pressure, the good feelings that accompany helping others can work to relieve that.
While we think that the reason why helping others is tied to better health is because it lowers stress, which can be the root cause of many illnesses (or at least a contributor), there are some other sources that we can consider, too.
For one, volunteering or donating your time to others is a great way to expand your social circle. By volunteering your time, you’re likely to meet other people who also frequently volunteer. Depending on how often you donate your time to other organizations, you might find yourself becoming fast friends with the people you meet through volunteering!
Next, volunteering is a great way o get up, get out of the house, and be active. While volunteering comes in many different shapes, sizes, and activities, the reality of it is that if you’re out of the house, you’re up and about, and you’re active somehow – even if that activity is simply standing at a counter and handing out food in a soup kitchen.
As such, it makes sense that volunteering might even be capable of extending the length of your life. If it can improve your health that much, it might logically be able to add a few months or years onto your life, too. If you can make some time in your schedule to help others, you might see it repaid back to you with a longer life!
Satisfaction
More than many other things in life, helping others has an uncanny way to make us feel satisfied and happy. When we help others, we feel like we’ve improved the world around us somehow, even if it’s in an incredibly small way.
When the daily grind of work, school, or taking care of family seems to lose its meaning, volunteering often holds purpose for us. Just like many people find purpose through faith and ministry because they believe they’re helping others that way, people can find the same satisfaction by merely giving their time and energy to others.
This is especially true for those that have lost an immense sense of purpose in their lives, such as:
- Parents who are transitioning to empty nesters
- Anyone retiring from a life-long job
- Anyone in a caretaker role who is losing the person (or people) they cared for
Choose Your Organization Carefully
There are hundreds of thousands of organizations out there that will appreciate the time and energy you can give to help others. However, the degree that each organization gives back to others can vary widely. As such, it’s important to thoroughly do your research on who you’re planning to help before you begin volunteering.
Small, local causes such as homeless shelters and soup kitchens are generally a great place to start. For the most part, it’s a good idea to stay away from large, well-known organizations unless you do thorough research first.
Let’s consider donation facilities, for example. Two of the biggest names in clothing and item donation are The Salvation Army and Goodwill. However, both organizations have some questionable business practices associated with them. Goodwill, which is actually a non-profit, not a charity, has been called into question over its low wages for disabled employees.
On the other hand, The Salvation Army, a Christian charity, has been known to discriminate against both women and the LGBTQ+ community. If either of the above bothers you, then you may want to consider donating to a smaller, more local charity.
Find Your Passion
Just because you’re volunteering to help others doesn’t mean you have to be miserable or do things you’re not good at. If possible, you should try to find something that you enjoy rather than powering through things that you don’t. Since the quantifier of “helping others” is so broad, it should be possible for just about anyone to find some kind of related activity that speaks to them.
Obviously, the easiest and most common methods of volunteering are donating your time, money, and belongings to organizations that need them. However, let’s imagine that you’re a fan of working with yarns or fabrics. If you can knit or crochet, consider making hats, scarves, or even blankets for the homeless or to donate to shelters.
Are you good at sewing? Perhaps you could create pillows, dolls, or even coats and jackets for those who might not be able to afford them on their own. Are you an extreme couponer that sometimes ends up with too much of one thing? Consider donating your extras to those in need, since they’ll be able to use them right away.
Are you a fan of cooking? Consider volunteering your services to a soup kitchen. While regulations for providing prepared, perishable food vary from place to place, you may be able to volunteer to cook a meal or two at the soup kitchen instead.
Do you love working with animals? Your good deeds don’t need to be constrained to people only, though the thanks you get from animals will be different than what you get from helping other people. There are billions of pets out there that need homes, and taking just a day or two out of your schedule to love them, play with them, and care for them can make all the difference to a lonely animal.
Helping Others and Growth
Helping others is an incredibly important part of growing and maturing as a person. Teenagers who are taught to help others and volunteer from a young age, for example, tend to be more confident than their peers. They tend to get better grades, too.
However, helping others isn’t just integral for child and teenage growth; it affects our growth through adulthood, too. While many might think that we stop growing once we reach adulthood, this is anything but the case. We continue to grow, develop, and change as we age, all the way up until the day we die.
It’s never too late to start helping others, but the sooner you begin, the better, of course. Helping others helps foster generosity, compassion, empathy, and understanding in us. While we don’t need to give all of our time to others – we should always reserve some for ourselves, of course – refusing to give any of our time to others is a bad sign, and it can often mean we’re emotionally unavailable or otherwise troubled.
Helping others doesn’t just help us grow as individuals, either. Believe it or not, when you help someone, your act helps more people around you than you might ever realize. Consider the following example:
- You pay for the meal behind you at a drive-thru window when picking up some fast food.
- The person behind you gets a free meal. To pay that forward, they hold the door open for people on their way into work.
- One of the people who had the door held open for them pays their coworker an extra compliment that day, lifting their mood.
- The coworker who was complimented feels energized and happy, and they make a special homemade dinner for their family that night.
The above example is simply a hasty picture that one act of kindness might paint for others. You can reorganize most of the steps in the image above, too, and the scenario will still function normally.
The above just goes to show how drastically one simple act of kindness can change how those around you feel. What’s more, kindness is contagious, too; when you perform an act of voluntary kindness for someone else, they’re far more likely to perform another unprompted act of kindness for another person. From there, more and more acts of kindness are brought into the world, and the whole world becomes a happier place.