How giving may help with your anxiety
I’m not quite sure how December showed up so quickly when the rest of 2020 passed with the agonizingly slow pace of a three-toed sloth. But here we are, chest deep in the holidays and inches away from the new year.
For many of us, the typical stressors of this season are now riddled with even more anxiety-inducing considerations that come with a pandemic, job loss, health worries, and sociopolitical woes that will most definitely be studied by gobsmacked historians of the future. If you’re having a hard time feeling cheery, I’m with you.
The good news is that there may be small ways your holiday traditions are sprinkling a tiny bit of life’s-ok-sometimes sauce on your soul. Science shows that giving and altruistic behaviors can actually increase happiness and relieve stress, even if it’s just for a short while.
Giving makes you feel good
It’s a multi-step process, and the end result is what is known as the “warm glow” feeling: that fuzzy gooiness that makes you smile and pushes the suck away for a bit.
It starts when we decide to do something nice. A few years ago, two professors from the University of Zurich tested the relationship between the part of your brain that’s engaged when you make a decision to be generous, the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and the part of your brain associated with happiness, the ventral striatum. This is the part that gets an extra dopamine hit when you get a reward.
When we give, whether to charity, to our kids, to our siblings, or that odd dude two houses down with the poofy hair, we are committing to do a generous thing. Turns out, simply making that decision to do a generous thing is all our brains need to feel a little more happiness, even when it costs us something.
This is cool because it means that instead of thinking about the holidays as a whole - the cooking and wrapping and awkward conversationing - it may be helpful and more enjoyable to think about individual acts of generosity, commit to them, and make them the focus.
Being altruistic trains your brain to be less stressed
The second nifty thing that happens when we engage in altruistic behaviors is we begin to strengthen our positivity muscles, aka positive affect: your natural tendency to handle life’s challenges in a positive way.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls it the “broaden and build” theory of positive psychology. Basically, when you do something that boosts your mood and broadens your perspective, it leads to possibilities. Seeing possibilities leads to new resources, and new resources lead to the bright side.
When you behave generously more often, you eventually build more resilience to stress.
If you’re looking for ways to move into the new year with a little less stress and more warm gooey feelings, don’t stop giving when the holidays are over. Commit to doing something kind and generous once a week or once a month even. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to be a boon to your mental health.
Thus sayeth science.