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FEEL GOOD DO GOOD,


The Helping – Health – Happiness Connection


by Lisa Marshall


Among its other benefits, giving


liberates the soul of the giver.


~Maya Angelou


tion from his mother when he was feeling grouchy or under the weather. “She’d say, ‘Why don’t you go out and help someone?’” he recalls. “I’d go out and help Mr. Muller rake leaves or help old Bobby Lawrence fix his boat. Then, I’d come back feeling better, and feeling better about life.” Decades later, Post—a professor of


G


preventive medicine at New York’s Stony Brook University—is among a grow- ing contingent of researchers exploring just how such acts of generosity and the feelings (empathy, compassion, altruism) that prompt them may actually improve our mental and physical health. Recent studies have shown that


people that volunteer live longer, suf- fer less chronic pain, have bolstered


20 Rockland & Orange Counties naturalawakeningsro.com


rowing up on Long Island, New York, young Stephen Post often received an unusual prescrip-


immune systems, are more likely to recover from addiction, and experience an in-the-moment sense of calm akin to that which people experience during and after exercise. Scientists have yet to fully understand what the physiological underpinnings are of such health ben- efits, but early studies credit a cascade of neurobiological changes that occur as we reach out to help a loved one, or (in some cases) even cut a check to a stranger in need. Could generosity be the missing, of-


ten overlooked ingredient to a prescrip- tion for better health? Perhaps, says Post, author of The Hidden Gifts of Helping: How the Power of Giving, Compassion and Hope Can Get Us Through Hard Times. “This is a young science, but what we have begun to discover is that there is something going on, physi- ologically, in this process of helping


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