What Giving as a Lifestyle Can Do for Your Health, Happiness

Giving has been an important part of Christmas ever since the Three Wise Men presented

their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But sometimes it seems like receiving is the main point of the holiday, doesn’t it?

I get it. I like receiving gifts as much as the next person. But if you want to give yourself a real gift, try generosity toward others.

5 Research-Backed Benefits

Like expressing gratitude, there’s a lot of research demonstrating that generosity enhances our quality of life. Here are 5 ways generosity gives back to us:

1. Generosity makes us healthy. Chronic high blood pressure kills millions every year. But one study found generosity actually reduced blood pressure as much as medicine and exercise.
   And it’s not just blood pressure. Generosity also lowers the risk of dementia, reduces anxiety and depression, improves chronic pain management, and more. “If you were somehow able to package this into a compound, you’d be a billionaire overnight,” said Stephen G. Post of Stony Brook University School of Medicine.
2. Generosity makes us happy. Giving our time and money to others gives us an emotional boost. Why? According to researcher Christian Smith it’s because feeling good is a product of doing good. It’s built into our neurochemistry.
   Giving triggers feel-good chemicals like endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin. And it’s true across cultural and economic lines, too, according to a Harvard Business School study. It’s just part of being human.
3. Generosity lowers our stress. We don’t think of Scrooge as a mellow guy, do we? Here’s why. It turns out being stingy can actually raise our stress levels.
   After hooking people up to heart monitors, researchers found that when they felt they were giving too little in a transaction it actually drove up their stress. Being generous, on the other hand, kept stress down. It’s like the Golden Rule in action.
4. Generosity improves our relationships. In a study of generosity and its effect in marriage, researchers found that the recipient of generosity expressed high levels of marital satisfaction, but so did the giver.
   “[P]articipants’ reports of behaving in a generous fashion toward their spouse were linked to their own reports of marital quality,” said the researchers. “The extension of generosity toward the spouse was positively related to their own reports of marital satisfaction. . . .”
5. Generosity extends our lives. All this adds up to longer life-expectancy. In fact, one study of 2,000 people in Marin, California, found volunteering dramatically reduced mortality rates.
   “Subjects who volunteered for two or more causes had a 63 percent lower rate of mortality than people who didn’t volunteer during the study period,” said one report.

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