Learn the mental benefits of helping others

I am by your side, I am your friend, your partner, your family, the person who loves you, or I am a person you don’t know but who is willing to help you. Sometimes, we can distance ourselves or perhaps we don’t know each other, but the reality is that there is a bond that unites us, that it exists or that we can create, it doesn’t matter. If you fall I pick you up, I help you walk and if you can’t walk I sit next to you.

I understand you, I blend into your skin, into your thoughts, I know who you are and I do not reveal your secrets, you know me and you protect me, We feel the connection of our souls, we share a life, we smile just by looking at each other, We fall and we get up.

The meaning of giving love

If I see you crying, I tell you I’m sorry and I leave, I’m not giving you love. If I pay for my children’s studies but ignore them, I am not giving them love. If I see my partner with problems and I buy him a car, I am not giving him love.

Giving love means much more, it means that when you need it I also lift you up. Helping someone is putting yourself in their place, feeling their suffering, their sorrow, their sadness as something of yours. and let the other person notice that you are there, that you are going to prevent them from falling, and that if they fall you are going to pick them up. Helping another person must start from an altruistic gesture and designed for someone else, not for ourselves.

But love is not only given to who we know, but we can give it to other people who are unknown and need it. It is love like a hand extended in the form of help, support.

The benefits of helping others

Helping others not only benefits the people we support, but it helps ourselves. in many aspects and makes us evolve as people. Below we detail some benefits that occur when we help another person:

Extends life

According to a study published by the journal Health Psychology People who volunteer live longer than those who do not, as long as the reason they act is to help others and not “personal satisfaction.”

Sara Konrath and several of her colleagues at the University of Michigan (USA) reached this conclusion after studying about 10,000 people of different ages and verifying that within four years the chances of survival were 3% higher among those who They practiced volunteering.

The scientific basis that Konrath gave to explain the increase in longevity was that Worrying about others deactivates our body’s stress responses. and hormones such as oxytocin are released, which restores normal physiological function.

Causes mental well-being

Helping other people, as we said before, needs to be understood in a broad sense, that is, we should not limit ourselves to people we know but we can extend our help to other people we do not know and who need it.

When we do a leisure activity, we feel a well-being that remains in our body and mind for a while, but When we carry out an activity to help others, mental well-being is prolonged over timebecause the joy and gratitude that the other person will transmit to us is something that remains in the memory.

Increase self-esteem

When we help another person and feel their gratitude, our opinion of ourselves, our self-esteem, increases. It is immensely satisfying to feel how our help is valued and it is a gift for our self-esteem. We feel useful, we feel that we have done something with value.

Whoever helps becomes a more positive person

Helping others generates positive feelings of joy and happiness, to feel that the glass is half full and not half empty. Being charitable makes you a more optimistic person. The positive thoughts that are generated when we help someone are the source of our feeling of happiness.

Therefore, Helping others, extending a hand, helps others and also helps ourselves to be better people.to see the world from another perspective and to be happier.

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