People who volunteer are healthier, happier, less stressed and live longer.
Help Others, Help Yourself
A volunteer vacation can leave you with much more than great memories. BY DINA MISHEV
“The best way to help yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” said Gandhi, but when faced with your own pain, the needs of others might be among the last things on your mind. After all, you have to take care of your- self before you can be of any use to others, right? Well, not exactly. Re- search shows that taking care of others can actually be a way to care for your- self. Cami Walker is a case in point. The Kimball, Nebraska New York Times best-selling author had been battling chronic pain for 15 years when she was finally diagnosed with multiple scle- rosis. Barely able to walk, taking opi- ates every day to manage her pain, and a frequent in-patient at the hospital for pain control and migraines, Walker initially thought it was ridiculous when her holistic health educator suggested
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giving to others be part of her treat- ment. “It wasn’t something I had ever heard of or considered,” recalls Walker, 39. Yet two months later she tried it by calling a friend she knew needed sup- port. After 14 days of giving in a differ- ent way every day— including phoning a friend who needed someone to talk to and giving spare change to a home- less person—“I was walking again and my pain was dramatically reduced,” Walker says. “I don’t understand it, but there is something about it that makes sense. Giving gave me a purpose and changed my focus from myself to oth- ers.” Walker continues to give some- thing of herself daily—reading a bedtime story to a cousin’s child; help- ing an elderly person navigate airport security—and feels great. In the two years since she began consciously giv-
ing, Walker has had only one pain flare- up that required she take opiates and has had only one migraine. It is the book she wrote about her giving expe- riences, 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life (Da Capo Press), that made her a best-selling author. (She also created a website to encour- age others to be more altruistic for their health: www.29gifts.org.) The phenomenon Walker experi- enced is what’s been called “helper’s high.” After analyzing surveys of thou- sands of volunteers across the country by Better Homes and Gardens magazine and the Institute for the Advancement of Health, researcher Allan Luks, a vis- iting professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Social Service and author of The Healing Power of Doing Good (iUniverse), found that people who regularly help others report better health. Half said they felt a pleasurable and euphoric emotion that included energy and warmth; more than 40 per- cent said volunteering left them feeling more energetic while over one-fifth felt calmer and less depressed; and 13