Even if your initial reason for fixing your attachment style, practising empathy, or social grooming is simply your own longevity, the side effects can be quite potent. If we were all securely attached and more empathic, it would not only boost our individual relationships and health, it could also make our planet healthier, too—both socially and environmentally. If we cared more about how our actions impact others, if we were more tolerant and open-minded, there would be less discrimination, less conflict, and less greenhouse gas dumped thoughtlessly into the atmosphere. Think about it: you can prolong your life and make the world a better place in one go.
And when you translate your empathy into sympathy, action directed at improving the lives of others, volunteering, and simple, everyday kindness, your health may profit even more.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY
Check your attachment style. If you find it’s insecure, consider therapy: secure attachment style is directly linked to better health. Next, work on your empathy—the perfect anti-loneliness drug. Watch empathy-boosting movies and read empathy books. Each day, try to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Forget Botox. Turn off your phone. Take empathy classes and sign your kids up for them.
Do things in synchrony with others. Sing and dance. If you do sports, choose ones you can do in sync with friends, such as jogging, rowing, or spinning.
8
HELPING OTHERS HELPS YOUR HEALTH
Superheroes, UNICEF, and Random Kindness
ERIC HEFFELMIRE WAS IN the garage tinkering underneath his silver GMC Sierra when the jack propping up the car suddenly slid out. The massive frame of the truck pressed Eric to the floor, crushing his chest and shoulders. Small sparks flew off the car and ignited gas that had been leaking from an old freezer. Flames burst up, sending noxious clouds of black smoke into the air.
It was then that the garage doors swung open and Eric’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, stormed inside. Shocked by the sight ahead she ran toward the truck, grabbed its front, lifted it, and freed her father, saving his life. Somehow the slender five-foot-six teenager managed to hoist the five-thousand-pound truck. “It was some crazy strength,” she recalled later, in an interview for a local Virginia radio station.
Stories of such superhuman strength, known as “hysterical strength,” are not uncommon. In Oregon, two teenage sisters managed to heft a three-thousand-pound tractor off their father. In Quebec, Lydia Angiyou, a middle-aged mother, fought a polar bear to save her young son and his friends. In Kansas, thirty-something Nick Harris lifted a Mercury sedan off a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter. The list goes on. Although these superhero people usually just prop the bulky vehicles a little off the ground, they still end up lifting hundreds of pounds. Meanwhile, the current deadlift world record—set, by the way, by the actor who played “the Mountain” in Game of Thrones—is a “mere” 1,041 pounds. How is it possible, then, that an ordinary teenage girl can suddenly appear as strong as the Mountain? The answer lies most likely in the extra physical power we get from helping others in need, and when that need is particularly great, so is the extra power. After rescuing his young neighbour, Nick Harris tried lifting cars without the added motivation of saving anyone’s life and discovered he couldn’t.
Most of us don’t find ourselves in situations when we need hysterical strength to help others, but even everyday kindness or volunteering for a local charity can boost our physical capabilities and, as a result, our health. The first inkling that caregiving improves fitness came, unexpectedly, from a 1950s study of housewives. Assuming that parenting equals stress and that more stress equals earlier death, researchers from Cornell University followed over four hundred mothers to see whether the most fertile ones would also live the shortest lives. Yet not only did the scientists fail to discover such a connection, they stumbled on another powerful health driver—volunteering. Over the course of the study, half of the women who didn’t belong to a volunteer organization fell victim to a major illness. Among those who volunteered, that number was just 36 percent. The researchers were intrigued.
By now we have a hefty pile of studies documenting how powerful benevolence can be for our centenarian potential. Controlling for things such as marital status, religiosity, or social connections, volunteering reduces mortality by 22 to 44 percent—about as much as eating six or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day. What’s more, volunteers may have 29 percent lower risk of high blood glucose, about 17 percent lower risk of high inflammation levels, and spend 38 percent fewer nights in hospitals than do people who shy from involvement in charities.
These effects are not restricted to rich countries, either; they show up in places as diverse as Kuwait, Malawi, Kyrgyzstan, and Bolivia. Of course, one could argue that maybe people who are in better health to begin with are simply more likely to pick up volunteering. Imagine signing up for work at a soup kitchen with flared-up arthritis. Yet studies that control for initial health confirm the wellness benefits of volunteering. And if that isn’t enough, there are plenty of lab experiments to explain the specific biological mechanisms through which helping others boosts our health.
What Parenting and Cigarettes Have in Common
In 1961, Michio Ikai of the University of Tokyo and Arthur Steinhaus of George Williams College, Illinois, conducted an unusual trial—it involved firing guns near unsuspecting volunteers who signed up for the study. Each of the study’s subjects was seated in an armchair, one person at a time, with one of their wrists fastened to the chair with a special belt. They were instructed to pull against the belt as hard as they could whenever the second hand of a clock in front of them crossed the one o’clock position. And so they did, again and again. Then, on one of the attempts, an experimenter would hide behind the armchair and pull out a .22-calibre starter’s gun. Right before the volunteer was to strain against the wrist belt, the scientist would fire the gun, startling the unlucky person seated in front of him.
When Ikai and Steinhaus analyzed the data, they discovered that the shock of gunfire pushed up the strength of volunteers by an average of 10 percent. Obviously, 10 percent extra power is still a far cry from being able to tilt a five-thousand-pound truck off a relative. It’s just that when you find your loved ones in danger, the hormonal boost your muscles receive is far more massive than in a scenario involving a researcher wielding a starter’s gun. The mechanisms, however, are likely the same: they involve the stress response and our evolved caregiving system.
Humans like to pretend we are unique in truly caring for others. As the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal said in his book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society:
People willfully suppress knowledge most have had since childhood, which is that animals do have feelings and do care about others. How and why half the world drops this conviction once they grow beards or breasts will always baffle me, but the result is the common fallacy that we are unique in this regard.
In reality, altruism and helping behaviours are far from rare in the animal kingdom. Just google “animals saving other animals” and your screen will be flooded with cute videos of hippos rescuing drowning baby zebras, horses feeding their hungry neighbours, and baboons chasing off leopards to save antelopes (warning: procrastination danger). If that’s not enough to convince you, rest assured that proper scientific studies also find genuine altruism in many animal species, from capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees to ravens and rooks. Rats, for instance, will jailbreak their mates out of their cages even if it means delaying getting to treats as tempting as chocolate chips — and having to share them.
Yet there do exist some evolutionary reasons why human altruism should differ from that of other species. One popular hypothesis states that caring for others developed from parenting behaviours. Since human babies are born particularly vulnerable (thank you, big brains), they require unusually high amounts of care—just ask any under-slept new p
arent. To ensure that mothers and fathers won’t abandon these little needy creatures, nature equipped us with two systems: one reward-inducing and the other stress-reducing.
Jim Jefferies, an Australian comedian, once summed up the experience of parenthood in the following way: “I love my son! I love my son the same way that I love cigarettes. I like to hold him for five minutes every hour, and the rest of the time, I’m thinking about how he’s fucking killing me.” Jefferies might have been on to something. Neurobiologically speaking, caring for others seems to tap into some of the same brain reward systems as tobacco.
Snug in the middle of our brain is a grape-sized area known as the insula. If you are a smoker and you want to blame something for your addiction to Marlboros or Camels, blame your insula. What’s more, damaging that little grape of brain tissue would also quite likely put an end to the habit. Besides addictions, other things that turn on the insula are helping others, donating money to charity, and yes, you’ve guessed it, caring for kids. Additional reward-related brain areas, the septal area and ventral striatum—the very same ones that light up when you find a winning scratch-and-win card—also buzz with more activity when you take care of others. By wiring parenthood to the reward system, nature assured we wouldn’t run screaming from poopy diapers—at least not permanently.
To make caregiving a bit easier still, evolution also linked it with mechanisms that dampen stress. That works in homo sapiens and other animals alike. For female macaques, grooming their mates lowers the levels of stress hormones as measured in the groomers’ feces. For elderly human volunteers, caring for infants reduces cortisol levels in the saliva (which could translate into health benefits for the seniors). In general, the more stress people experience in their daily lives, the more beneficial influence helping others exerts on their cortisol.
One way in which caregiving may inhibit stress is through dampening the activity of the amygdala, the fear centre, and disrupting its connections with the fight-and-flight response. Remember the fearless woman called “SM” whom I described in chapter 2? The one who, due to her busted amygdala, was so lacking in fear that she walked up to an obviously sketchy-looking man in a deserted park at night? Although to my knowledge no one has researched SM’s levels of benevolence, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were particularly into volunteering or donations—people with damaged amygdalae tend to be do-gooders more often than the rest of us.
What’s more, when animals hear the whimpers of infants of the same species, the activity of their amygdalae tempers down, too, allowing them to care for the little ones without being freaked out by these weird, needy creatures. Same thing happens with us. Show parents a photo of their baby and their fear centres quiet down like a newborn with a pacifier. The reward-centre septal area may also inhibit the stress response through its action on the HPA axis and the sympathetic nervous system. All in all, helping others calms us down. This dampening of stress in caregiving makes biological sense. To be able to properly care for someone else, you have to take a deep breath and step back from your own issues. Also, to help others in distress, you simply can’t be too affected by their suffering. Otherwise your anxiety could make your hands shake and muddle your thinking.
Activating the caregiving system—whether by volunteering at a soup kitchen or by doing shopping for a neighbour—could also boost health through affecting the vagus, that long snake of a nerve bundle that connects your brain, heart, and gut, and which calms down your body after stress, helping you relax. In a way, the vagus is also the nerve of compassion and caring. Have you ever felt your heart go all warm when you saw a puppy rescued from a shelter or heard some uplifting story of human altruism? That was likely your vagus turning on. When people engage in activities that make them experience compassion, the activity of their vagus goes up, too—which could help keep the nerve in shape. And as you may recall from chapter 3, a vagus in tip-top condition keeps your fight-and-flight response in check and your heart rate variability high (a good thing).
Down the road, this altruism-related turning down of the stress response has an impact on our immune systems and inflammation. People who frequently volunteer have lower levels of C-reactive protein—a marker of inflammation. If your blood is teeming with C-reactive protein that’s a bad sign, suggesting you may be headed toward developing health problems such as cardiovascular disease. Experiments confirm that it’s volunteering per se, and not some other characteristic of people who tend to sign up for unpaid work, that keeps inflammation at bay. At one public high school in western Canada, students were divided into two groups. The first group was to volunteer at a nearby public elementary school helping kids in after-school programs. The second group was wait-listed. When blood samples from all the teens were compared, a clear image emerged: those who had already volunteered had significantly lower levels of an inflammatory marker called interleukin 6. And yes, elevated levels of interleukin 6 are generally bad for you—they can even mean double the risk of dying within the next five years.
Although caregiving in general reduces stress, superhero-style car-lifting works in the opposite way, yet still on the same systems: the amygdala and the fight-and-flight response. Admittedly, it’s basically impossible to see what’s happening in the bodies of people in the midst of hysterical strength—no ethics commission would approve experiments involving placing people’s loved ones under cars. Yet the likely explanation of the superhero effect lies in the workings of the sympathomedullary pathway—the fear-shaken amygdala sending a message down to the adrenal glands, which flood the body with adrenaline, amplifying the power of the hero’s muscles.
Besides these outright physiological changes that helping others may elicit—buffering stress, lowering inflammation, or boosting the vagus nerve—volunteering can improve health indirectly. It can make you more socially engaged and help you find new friendships. It can fill your life with meaning and purpose. And, rather prosaically, it can get you off the couch and keep you moving.
But what if getting off the couch is not a problem for you? Maybe instead you wish you could spend more time on the said couch instead of running around the whole day, working, taking care of the kids, the house, the everything? What if you simply can’t imagine finding enough time for handing out leaflets on deforestation in the Amazon? The good news is that monetary donations, informal caregiving, and even simple, everyday kindness work well for our health, too.
What Would You Do If You Found $20?
When Lara Aknin was about eight years old she used to trick her younger brother out of his allowance. She would tell him that Canadian nickels were worth more than dimes, because they were bigger, and in every other scenario bigger coins meant more money. She would then have him trade his dimes for her nickels. “He thought he was getting a steal of a deal,” she recalls, laughing. “I ended up with double my money and would walk down the street to our corner store and buy all this candy with it. I was really motivated by candy.” Years later, when Aknin was doing her PhD in social psychology, she realized that besides being ethically dubious, her childhood thinking was all wrong. Her eight-year-old self would have turned out far happier had she used the dimes to treat her brother instead of herself. By now, Aknin has spent over a decade doing research at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, proving that although people believe we gain the most happiness from buying stuff for ourselves, in reality we end up better off if we lavish money on others.
Imagine you’ve found $20 on a deserted sidewalk, so there’s no point looking for the owner. What would you do with it? Buy yourself some fancy chocolates? Give the lucky find to a beggar? In one experiment, Aknin and her colleagues handed volunteers either a $5 bill or a $20 bill, then instructed half of the participants to blow the windfall on their own pleasures and the other half to go spend the gift on someone else. Later in the day, once the money had been spent and everyone’s moods had been carefully evaluated, Aknin discovered that those who used the mo
ney to please others ended up significantly happier than the rest.
It’s easy to see how the Bill Gateses of the world might derive psychological benefits from donating their fortunes. Curiously, however, the connection between donations and happiness holds true even for those of us who struggle to have enough dough on a daily basis. When Aknin analyzed pro-social spending across the globe and ran it against happiness levels, she found that the more money inhabitants of a particular country give to others, the more they end up satisfied with life. This was as true in rich nations such as Australia or Germany as it was in poorer ones, such as Ethiopia, Algeria, and Afghanistan.
To confirm the finding, Aknin went back into the lab. She randomly assigned volunteers from two countries, Canada and South Africa, to either purchase a goody bag filled with treats for themselves or to get one for a sick child at a local hospital. Once again, those who spent money on others ended up feeling happier—even though a fifth of South Africans participating in the study reported that sometimes they didn’t have enough money to buy food.
Yet a pleasant mood is not the only benefit we may derive from treating others. The gains can be as varied as better sleep, better hearing, stronger muscles, and lower blood pressure. When seniors suffering from hypertension were handed $40 per week for three consecutive weeks to either spend on themselves or on someone else, those who donated the bonus saw their blood pressure drop as much as if they had picked up a healthier lifestyle or started some new medication. And guess what—no side effects!
Charity can also make your muscles stronger. If you are about to try your strength at arm wrestling or would like to impress someone at the gym, just go online first and give $10 or $20 to a charity. In one such experiment, scientists stopped passersby near a subway station in Boston asking if they’d like to try their muscles with a five-pound weight. The task was to hold the weight away from the body, with a fully extended arm, for as long as possible. After the first attempt, the participants were given a dollar, and half were asked if they’d like to donate it to UNICEF. Then everyone was asked to try themselves with the weight once again. The second results were improved—but only for people who had donated the money. Those who gave away their dollar could hold the weight 15 percent longer than those who kept the money to themselves. This may not be as impressive as lifting a GMC Sierra, but still (and no, donating $100,000 won’t make you Schwarzenegger-strong in an instant—sorry). The researchers behind the experiment, which was aptly named “The Power of Good,” concluded that simply thinking of ourselves as moral people boosts our physical strength.
Growing Young Page 18