Helping Others Can Reduce Stress: Study

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There's no singular way to beat stress, but the good news is there are little steps to take within one working day to lessen the effects of stress to one's body. In fact, Refinery 29 reports that according to new research, one simple way to lessen the effects of stress is to help out others.

EurekAlert reports that the research was published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, and was conducted by researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine. Laboratory-based experiments showed how providing support may help people cope with stress and increase their feelings of positive emotion. They wanted to apply this in the context of everyday functioning in the real world, so they enlisted 77 adults with ages 18 to 44 years old to participate in a two-week long study. Individuals who were substance-dependent, diagnosed with mental illness or cognitive impairment were not included in the study group. The participants used their smartphones to report details about their feelings and experiences in daily life. They were instructed to report any stressful life events they experienced. The total number of events became the measure of daily stress, and they were instructed to report on whether or not they engaged in helpful behaviors such as holding open a door for others, helping with schoolwork, or simply asking someone if they needed help.

Positive and Negative Affect Scale (a 10-item short form that validated the measure of experienced emotion) was also completed by the participants. Participants were then asked to rate their mental health for a particular day using a slider on a scale with 0 equivalent to poor and 100 equivalent to excellent. Results showed that helping others actually boosted the daily well-being of the participants. The more helping behaviors they had, the higher levels of daily positive emotion and better overall mental health they also had.

Researchers also found that the helping behavior of the study group influenced how they responded to stress. Those who had lower-than-usual helping behavior had lower positive emotion and higher negative emotion in response to high levels of daily stress. On the contrary, those who had higher-than-usual levels of helping behavior showed no changes in positive emotion or mental health, and lower increase in negative emotion in response to daily stress.

Medical Xpress reports that according to study author Emily Ansell of the Yale University School of Medicine, "Our research shows that when we help others we can also help ourselves. Stressful days usually lead us to have a worse mood and poorer mental health, but our findings suggest that if we do small things for others, such as holding a door open for someone, we won't feel as poorly on stressful days."

Ansell also has advice for this holiday season: "The holiday season can be a very stressful time, so think about giving directions, asking someone if they need help, or holding that elevator door over the next month. It may end up helping you feel just a little bit better."