Before you read the following, lest you have any doubt, let me be perfectly clear … I do not listen to PBS radio. However, my friend, Jerry, sent this from PBS Morning Edition of 12/25/24, and I felt that a lot of it was worth passing on, especially during this holiday season.
The title of this Morning Edition piece was:
When kindness becomes a habit, it improves our health
(What follows are a few snippets from the Morning Edition show.)
Research shows that people who volunteer regularly have a lower risk of mortality and better physical health as they age.
It’s that time of year when it’s customary to be a little kinder and do nice things for others. Research suggests that when we make acts of kindness a habit, it’s also good for our health. Whether it’s volunteering at a local food bank, or taking soup to a sick neighbor, there’s lots of evidence that when we help others, it can boost our own happiness and psychological well-being. But there’s also growing research that it boosts our physical health too, says Tara Gruenewald, a social and health psychologist at Chapman University.
Most of the evidence comes from observational studies of people who volunteer regularly. But there is also experimental evidence.
Other research has found that people who volunteer regularly have a lower risk of mortality and have better physical function as they age. “People are able to walk longer at older ages and have better balance and so forth,” says Laura Kubzansky, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Kubzansky studies the interplay between physical and mental health. Her research has found that people who engage in more volunteering and charitable donations have lower levels of physical pain.
She says researchers still don’t know the exact mechanisms by which volunteering and acts of kindness improve people’s health, but it is likely that multiple processes are at play.
Most of the research in this field has looked at middle-age and older adults.
But one study that really stands out involved high schoolers who were randomly assigned to volunteer for 10 weeks with elementary school kids. Compared to students in the trial who were put on a waitlist, the teen volunteers had improvements in several markers of cardiovascular health.
“Those students who were engaged in volunteering activities with younger students showed healthier body mass index, healthier inflammatory markers and healthier total cholesterol,” Boehm says. And the students who increased the most in empathy and altruistic behaviors, and who decreased the most in negative mood, also showed the greatest decreases in cardiovascular risk over time.
Given the findings so far, Kubzansky says she’d like to see health officials make research into the health benefits of volunteering and other acts of kindness a public health priority.
For what it’s worth I think that Kubzansky is right on, and I hope someone in the new Trump administration will follow up on this.
[On a completely different subject with no segue except for the title of this blog, “Good Morning,” I have a new book on Amazon, titled,”Good Mourning.”]
1/6/25