Another important issue here is freedom—freedom to choose your cause and the extent of your commitment. When my husband worked for a consulting firm in Calgary, Canada, once per year their office participated in a charity event, such as building a house with Habitat for Humanity. It was noble and fun, yet likely didn’t benefit my husband’s health as much as it would have if he had chosen the cause himself. Simply put, the reward areas of the brain, the ventral striatum and septal area, activate more when we can freely decide to whom and how much to give.
This is why taxes as a form of pro-social spending are likely not as good for health as are voluntary donations, even if the amounts and the recipients are exactly the same. Moreover, perceived lack of choice could also explain why in some cases caring for ailing relatives may be detrimental to the health of the grudging caretaker. And if you want to encourage your kids to help others, avoid rewarding them for their good deeds—not with money, not with stickers. Kids who are promised something in return for volunteering may do the tasks more eagerly at first, but once the carrot is out of sight, their enthusiasm dies down much more than that of children who were never rewarded.
So how much should you donate or volunteer? In terms of financial contributions, it appears that the more the better. Gifts of time are trickier. There is no magic number of hours you should commit to reap the most health benefits—at least none that we know of. It seems that it’s best not to overdo on your engagements, as some studies find top wellness returns for under a hundred hours of volunteering per year, while others claim that number is a mere forty.
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We evolved to care. Our do-gooder ancestors, those who nurtured their infants well and who were eager to help others in the tribe—others who knew them and were likely to reciprocate in the future—had higher chances of passing on their genes.
Nature equipped us with systems that encourage giving. Benevolence is hard-wired into the reward areas of our brains, kickstarting the same networks that turn on when we reach for cigarettes or lottery tickets. Helping others also reduces stress, making it easier to offer care and setting off a cascade of physiological changes in our bodies that end up improving our health: reducing blood pressure, lowering inflammation, and, as a result, extending lives.
Although most of us never experience the powerful physical boosts through which altruism can turn us into car-lifting superheroes, we may still profit from the wellness benefits of helping others. Volunteering, random kindness, monetary donations, and caregiving—all these promote longevity at least as well as do exercise and nutritious diets, especially if you do all of them together (studies confirm the effects are cumulative). Find a charity you care deeply about and offer to help them with your time. Donate money to causes you think truly matter. Each day look for opportunities to be kind to others. Although treating yourself to an organic matcha latte could have some positive effects on your physical well-being, you’d likely benefit more by buying it for a friend at work and leaving it on her desk, no strings attached. As my own experiment has taught me, kindness can not only make us feel happier, it can also lower the levels of cortisol circulating in our bodies to calm down everyday stresses.
Of course, the health-boosting effects of random kindness or volunteering don’t mean you can now skip your hypertension medications or feast on junk food as much as you want and then just pick up litter in your neighbourhood to counter the damage. In a perfect scenario, you should still eat your five fruits and vegetables a day, do thirty minutes of physical activity Monday through Sunday, and volunteer, donate, and engage in kindness. But life is rarely perfect, so sometimes it may be easier to skip the gym and instead just do a few nice things for the people around you.
You can also try longevity multitasking and choose activities that combine exercise and volunteering (walk dogs for a local shelter, perhaps?) or kindness (stand up in a bus to give your place to someone else). Helping others is such a powerful health improvement tool—maybe one day we will see an official daily recommendations of benevolence? Maybe: “Perform three kind acts a day” or “Volunteer or care for others for a minimum of thirty minutes per week”? Certainly seniors could already profit from public health policies that would encourage them to engage in charitable work, preventing social isolation and physical decline—and, from a budgetary perspective, quite on the cheap, too.
Admittedly, the idea of picking up random kindness or volunteering simply for their health benefits might make some people cringe. But, as mentioned above, if some theoretical do-gooders were solely motivated by a selfish concern for longevity, their biological caregiving systems would likely not activate anyway and the health benefits wouldn’t materialize. It’s okay, though, both biologically and, as I believe, ethically, if the first impulse to rethink your helping behaviours comes from an egoistic desire to live longer. If it makes you take a closer look at how you contribute to your community and how you spend your money and time, and makes you commit more to altruism, both society and your body should profit in the long run. It may not be very idealistic, but it sure works. Here is a more idealistic thought, though: contrary to other health behaviours, philanthropy is very contagious, so by giving to others you will not only live longer, but you may also end up spending the extra years in a slightly better, kinder world.
For some of us, stepping up the do-good effort may be relatively easy. You may already be volunteering or donating money regularly. But in case your caregiving system does get a bit rusty, luckily there are ways to rev it up. One such trick involves working on changing your personality, since conscientious and extroverted people tend to volunteer more. And yes, personality can indeed be tweaked—with health benefits.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY
Activate your evolved caregiving system: donate to charity, care for others in your family, and volunteer for causes you truly believe in, be it investing in art, fighting rare diseases, or protecting the environment. Engage in everyday kindness—open doors for others, buy a coffee for a stranger, or leave a friendly note on a random car’s windshield. Placemake your community: encourage opening of community gardens and vote for pedestrianization of main streets. Shop in local stores, walk around, pick up litter, and talk to your neighbours.
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WHY PERSONALITY AND EMOTIONS MATTER FOR LONGEVITY
Don’t Worry, Be Happy—and Organize Your Sock Drawer
ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1930, Mother Mary Stanislaus Kostka, a plump, round-faced nun who was at the time the North American superior of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, sent a letter to the convents requesting that each novice write a short autobiography before taking her final vows. Soon, the handwritten life accounts started to pile up. And even though they were supposed to be concise and contain quite specific information (place of birth, school attendance, parentage), the biographies differed considerably in their delivery. One sister wrote, “God started my life off well by bestowing upon me a grace of inestimable value…The past year which I have spent as a candidate studying at Notre Dame College has been a very happy one. Now I look forward with eager joy to receiving the Holy Habit of Our Lady and to a life of union with Love Divine.”
Another young nun, meanwhile, recounted, “I was born on September 26, 1909, the eldest of seven children, five girls and two boys…My candidate year was spent in the Motherhouse, teaching Chemistry and Second Year Latin at Notre Dame Institute. With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order, for the spread of religion and for my personal sanctification.”
The differences between the two passages may be subtle, yet when you look at them more carefully, you may notice that the first nun’s writing is loaded with positive emotion. She writes about “a very happy” year and about her “eager joy.” The second woman, on the other hand, is more subdued in her accounts, dryly stating facts. For health and longevity, such differences matter. Many decades after Mother Kostka sent her call for autobio
graphies, three University of Kentucky researchers went into the convent’s archives and dug out handwritten bios of 180 nuns. They carefully analyzed the accounts, coding each word as either emotionally positive, negative, or neutral. Gratitude, hope, and relief would be marked as positive, for instance, while anger, disgust, and fear as negative. The scientists also checked which of the nuns were still alive, and at what age the others had passed away. The results were pretty clear: these sisters who were the most joyful and optimistic in their autobiographies were also the ones who lived the longest. Sunny disposition meant on average an additional ten years of life.
It’s not just nuns who reap longevity benefits from having a positive outlook—so do famed psychologists and orangutans. A decade after the convent study, a similar analysis of autobiographies of deceased psychologists, including such stars as B. F. Skinner and Jean Piaget, showed a connection between a penchant for using positive words and reaching an impressively advanced age. In zoos, meanwhile, happy orangutans are long-lived orangutans. And no, memoir-writing apes have not yet been discovered. Instead, zoo keepers in forty-two parks across the globe were asked to evaluate their charges, for example indicating how often each animal seems to experience positive versus negative moods. Once again the longevity differences were striking: about eleven extra years for the happy apes.
Humanity has long suspected that happiness extends lives. Already the Bible states that “the joyfulness of man prolongeth his days” (Ecclesiasticus 30:22), and according to Shakespeare, “Mirth and merriment…bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.” Science is now catching up with literature. Among over ten thousand academic publications that come out each year on the topic of subjective well-being, many are finding that positivity equals better health and a better shot at becoming a centenarian. It appears that happiness can add anywhere from four to ten years of life. One particularly well-done British study, in which existential enjoyment was measured every two years for six years in total, concluded that people who each time reported feeling full of energy, enjoying everyday things, and looking back on their life with a sense of happiness were 24 percent less likely to die than were their less cheerful peers.
But maybe it’s just that being in poor physical shape simply makes people miserable, and if you are in poor physical shape you die early—logical, right? However, such cause-and-effect issues can be fairly easily controlled for by taking into account initial levels of health when happiness is measured, and checking the physiological outcomes years down the road. Besides, we also have animal studies and experiments (yes, on humans too) that show that our moods impact our biology—for example by influencing inflammatory processes or DNA methylation.
Here is a thing, however: measuring happiness is a tough job. Are you happier than your parents? Than your neighbours? How do you know? It’s not like we can take someone’s blood sample and count the joy molecules floating in the serum. Even things like language can affect people’s reports of well-being. The French word for feeling happy, “heureux,” as well as the German “glücklich” or Polish “szczęśliwy” carry much more weight than does “happy.” You wouldn’t necessarily say eating ice cream makes you heureux or szczęśliwy (or it would have to be some freakishly good ice cream). What’s more, you may get positive moods from not very kosher sources—like cocaine or magic mushrooms. For these reasons, scientists these days like to talk about something they call “subjective well-being,” which basically covers joy, optimism, and general life satisfaction altogether.
To make things even more complicated, many psychologists also differentiate between hedonic and eudaemonic well-being—or in other words, between pleasure and meaning. Here is a thought experiment: imagine you could get connected to a futuristic machine that could make you experience any pleasure known to humans, from the delights of travel to the bliss of love. You would simply spend your days floating in a tank with electrodes connected to your brain, loading on fun. Would you plug in? Would such a life be truly happy?
The scenario in this thought experiment, designed by American philosopher Robert Nozick and hence called Nozick’s Experience Machine, has been proposed to hundreds of people in several studies, and in most cases, met with rejection. Somehow we instinctively feel that despite all the pleasures, life in Nozick’s machine wouldn’t be truly good. One major component that such existence would be missing is eudaemonic well-being: purpose, self-actualization, and a sense of meaning—and although in theory the machine could also simulate such feelings, our instincts go against having meaning in life that’s only virtual. Such lack of real purpose, in turn, could make life in Nozick’s contraption not only empty, but also short.
It appears that for health and longevity, having meaning in life may be more important than happy moods. In one study that directly compared hedonic and eudaemonic well-being, people with purpose in life had a favourable gene expression pattern related to the fight-or-flight response, while those fixated on the pursuit of bodily pleasures had an unfavourable one. In other words, people who have found meaning in their existence had more good genes turned on and more bad ones switched off. What’s more, finding meaning not only boosts our chances of becoming centenarians, it also lowers the risk of cognitive impairment—even in the face of Alzheimer’s disease. If a ninety-year-old with a clear purpose in life develops Alzheimer’s disease, they are likely to keep functioning relatively well despite very real pathological changes in the brain.
Finding meaning may be particularly important when “the excrement hits the air conditioning” (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut’s words from Hocus Pocus) or, less poetically, when things don’t go as planned. In lab experiments, when purposeful people are made to look at disgusting or disturbing pictures of violence and sickness, their amygdalae stay relatively calm and they recover from the unpleasant experience much faster than do people who don’t have much purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he wrote that “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” Besides, eudaemonic well-being means more grey matter in the insula—the reward-related brain area—and more grey matter in the insula can help us regulate emotions and deal with stress.
One way in which having purpose in life can translate into longevity is through its impact on our health-related behaviours. People who feel their existence has meaning are more likely to get their cholesterol levels checked or to have long rubber tubes inserted into their backsides on a regular basis (colonoscopy). But eudaemonic well-being seems to also have direct impacts on our biology, lowering the levels of cortisol and pro-inflammatory cytokines.
Now for the million-dollar question: how do you become happier and how do you find purpose in life? Many books and scientific papers have been written on the topic, and although no one has found a silver-bullet solution as yet, we do have some indications of what works and what doesn’t. I won’t go into details—my publisher wouldn’t be happy if I submitted a thousand-page book—but here are a few basic research-based tips. First, instead of looking for hedonic pleasures, try to find purpose in your day-to-day life. A good first step is to simply acknowledge that meaning is important and to spend time reflecting on it. Try to recognize your own character strengths and think about how your talents might profit others (in a charitable way). For more ideas, you may want to reach for such books as the classic Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl or the recent The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness by Emily Esfahani Smith.
Second, it’s important to remember that extra money is not really a solution, and it won’t make you happier. The more people tend to focus on their financial goals, the less happy they become—and this is true not only in the rich countries of the world, but also in the less prosperous ones such as Russia and India. Of course, for people who are struggling to meet their basic needs, a thicker wallet would mean higher well-being, but above a certain income level more dough does not necessarily equal more joy.
Richard Easterlin, a renowned American economist, explained that favourable effects of rising paycheques on well-being get erased because the more we have, the more we tend to want. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.” Lab experiments also suggest that when people fixate on money, they become less social and less helpful—and as we know from the links between sociability and health, this could potentially mean lower chances of one day getting that cake with a hundred candles on it. However, there are ways of bagging more happiness out of money. What works, for instance, is buying experiences instead of material goods (so yes to the family trip to an amusement park, no to the newest smartphone). Another thing is spending your bucks on others instead of yourself—donating to charity, lavishing gifts on your loved ones, and so on.
Third, don’t chase happiness at all costs—it will keep escaping. Just as with money, fixating on happiness as a goal can backfire and make you less satisfied with life. Remember FOMO from chapter 6? Although the word was only officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, it’s already such a big deal that the Anxiety and Depression Association of America has dedicated a website to overcoming FOMO.
FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” is a constant nagging feeling that others are enjoying themselves more, dining in better restaurants, visiting more fun holiday destinations, and going to more hip parties. And that you should be doing these things, too. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America recommends that you try switching off the chatter—so no Facebook or Instagram—and practise savouring simple daily experiences. Instead of fretting that you can’t jet off to the Maldives, enjoy camping in a nature reserve near your home. Instead of agonizing over which award-winning chef makes the best oysters in town and why you aren’t eating them right now, make the dish at home. But beware: eating raw shellfish could have unexpected consequences for your health and longevity—it could change your personality.
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