Volunteer Work Is Good for Your Brain via Mercola

Volunteer Work Is Good for Your Brain

Mercola: 3.15.2018 by Dr. Mercola

Only about 25 percent of Americans volunteer, despite the fact that doing good for others stands to benefit everyone involved. Volunteer work is unique in that it often involves social, physical and cognitive dimensions, and research has shown that retired seniors who engage in activities that require moderate effort in two or more of these dimensions slash their risk of dementia by 47 percent.

“An active and socially integrated lifestyle in late life protects against dementia and AD [Alzheimer’s disease],” the researchers wrote, and volunteering is one way to achieve this. Since volunteers are needed in a seemingly endless variety of organizations, from animal shelters and schools to food pantries and youth services, there’s a volunteer opportunity to appeal to virtually everyone. It costs you nothing, save for some time, and while giving back to those around you you’ll reap impressive benefits to your brain.

Volunteering Lowers Your Risk of Cognitive Impairment and Decline

The brain benefits of volunteering are so great that researchers writing in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggested doctors should start writing their senior patients prescriptions for volunteer work. They found that in individuals aged 60 and over, volunteering regularly decreased the risk of cognitive impairment over a 14-year period.

Volunteering May Buffer Daily Stress, Benefit Your Heart

Exactly how volunteering helps brain health remains to be seen, although it’s been suggested that the social element of helping others, along with the stimulation of learning new things, could be factors. It’s also quite possible that the brain benefits stem, at least in part, from other bodywide benefits that volunteering offers. Volunteering can lower your risk of depression and anxiety and even boost your psychological well-being.

Volunteering to help others can even lead to a so-called "helper's high," which may occur because doing good releases feel-good hormones like oxytocin in your body while lowering levels of stress hormones like cortisol. 

Impressive, Whole-Body Benefits of Volunteering

Volunteering’s many benefits are not limited to one area of the body like your brain or your heart but rather appear to extend bodywide. Volunteerism is linked to lower all-cause mortality in older adults, for instance, and additional benefits such as the following have also been noted:

➤Greater life satisfaction

➤Greater self-esteem

➤Increased personal control

➤Fewer depressive symptoms

Delaying the onset of functional limitations that predict psychological distress among older adults

Meeting the ‘Volunteering Threshold’

It’s unclear exactly how much volunteer work is necessary to reap its physical and mental rewards. However, some findings indicated that volunteering for about 100 hours a year may offer the greatest health advantages, and CNCS states that “it is not the case that the more an individual volunteers, the greater the health benefits.” Instead, they suggest there is a “volunteer threshold” that must be met — volunteering at least one or two hours a week — and after that no additional health benefits are gained from volunteering more.  READ MORE >>