Charity
Givers are happier people than non-givers. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, a survey of 30,000 American households, people who gave money to charity in 2000 were 43% more likely than non-givers to say they were “very happy” about their lives.
Similarly, volunteers were 42% more likely to be very happy than non-volunteers. It didn’t matter whether gifts of money and time went to churches or symphony orchestras — givers to all types of religious and secular causes were far happier than non-givers.
According to the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics, people who gave money away in 2001 were 34% less likely than non-givers to say that they had felt “so sad that nothing could cheer them up” in the past month. They were also 68% less likely to have felt “hopeless,” and 24% less likely to have said that “everything was an effort.”
15% of Americans donate blood at least once each year.
According to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, in 2002, 43% of the American adults who gave blood 2 to 3 times during the year said they were very happy versus only 29% of those who did not give blood.
Researchers have conducted experiments in which people are queried about their happiness before and after — sometimes long after — they participate in a charitable activity, such as volunteering to help children or serving meals to the poor. The result: giving has a causal impact on happiness.
In one 1998 experiment at Duke University, adults were asked to give massages to babies — the idea being that giving a baby pleasure is a compassionate act with no expectation of a reward, even a “thank you” — in return. After they performed the massages, the seniors were found to have dramatically lower levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine in their brains.