When Kathy Keating moved to a new town, she turned to volunteer work to help her meet people. But her experience volunteering with her hospice support foundation provided her with more than just a conduit for making friends. “She felt a little more three-dimensional,” says Keating, founder and president of ProsInComms, her Boston-area public relations firm for B2B technology companies.
How volunteering can help your mental health
Research shows that volunteering helps your mental health by reducing stress and increasing positive thinking. Last year, when the U.S. Surgeon General issued recommendations that Americans were becoming increasingly lonely and isolated, he cited volunteerism as a way to combat loneliness and strengthen social infrastructure.
“When we give back through volunteering, we feel valued. We feel like our lives have meaning,” says Dr. Deborah Heiser, founder and CEO of The Mentoring Project .
In fact, our brains create a chemical response to volunteering, increasing circulating levels of serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins in the brain, and activating reward centers associated with pleasure. “When you do something nice for someone else, even if they don’t acknowledge you or thank you, your brain lights up,” says author Natalie Silverstein. says. Simple Acts: A Guide to Giving Back for Busy Families.
People who volunteer have been shown to have lower stress levels and less depression and anxiety, which can improve their overall This is the reason why people’s health and life satisfaction improve. Florida clinic.
5 things to consider before volunteering to help your mental health
However, before you call your favorite local charity and offer your support, it’s important to think about what you want to achieve with your volunteering.
1. Do things that spark joy.
Volunteer work should be something you enjoy doing, not something that feels like a burden, Silverstein says. “At the end of the day, you should feel good. If you don’t, you’re probably not volunteering right.”
Sarah Agan recalls a volunteering experience that weighed heavily on her. Mr. Agan has been appointed acting director of a local non-profit organization. When the organization’s executive director left, Mr. Agan was required to lead a 13-person search committee for a new executive director. Soon, she began spending more time volunteering and turning down paid jobs as a leadership coach and consultant. She said: “At first she felt like she had something to contribute, but suddenly she… [I was thinking], ‘This has to be done. This organization needs this. What if I don’t do it?’ And I think that’s when it kind of became awful,” Agan says. She eventually resigned.
2. How to volunteer to support mental health: Set achievable goals
If you want to volunteer to support mental health, be sure to set a simple goal, McKinnell says. For example, he may want to volunteer 3 times a week, but realistically, he’ll probably only be able to volunteer once a week, or even once a month. . McKinnell explains that simple actions like donating food or shoveling snow from an elderly person’s driveway can give you just as much of a dopamine boost as volunteering for an organization each week. .
“One of the benefits of volunteering is that you can do useful, productive work without the stress and worry of being fired or having to work, and it also provides benefits such as sociability, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of mastery.” “It’s about enjoying the benefits of paid work: working eight hours a day and managing childcare,” says McKinnell.
3. Volunteer work can be a one-time event.
Volunteer work doesn’t necessarily have to be about quantity, Heiser said. The most important thing is quality.
When Julia Beck’s father was ill, she was spending a lot of time in Philadelphia, where her parents lived. Beck, founder of It’s Working Project, a consulting firm that helps create synergistic strategies for caregivers and their workplaces, has been working with children at the Ronald McDonald House in Philadelphia for treatment. I decided to plan an event for new mothers. Beck used her industry connections to arrange for new moms to leave with essentials like diaper bags, nightgowns, and toiletries so they could feel pampered.
Giving back made Beck feel better about his situation. “I felt like I was contributing, looking outward, focusing on someone else and someone else’s situation, and being aware of someone else’s needs,” Beck says. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t change the health of our children, but we could change the way they experience the world, even if it was only for 30 minutes or just a moment. It’s a moment of love and compassion. And it felt really good.”
4. Volunteer for a good cause
Volunteering can help you improve your teamwork, communication, and leadership skills, but your motivation for volunteering isn’t to add something to your LinkedIn profile or aim for a promotion. For volunteering to be meaningful to you and the organization, your motivation must come from the heart, Keating says.
If someone asks you if you want to volunteer at a soup kitchen, Heiser says you’ll probably say yes. But if someone asked you if you wanted to work for free at Starbucks, you’d probably say no. “In both cases, you feel like an asshole for going out there and spending your time handing out food to people who are hungry and thirsty,” Heiser said. To tell. She added that her volunteer work is really about her own perception of things, and motivation has to come from within.
5. It’s okay to set boundaries.
Give yourself permission to set limits on your volunteering, says Agan. “Be clear about the personal boundaries you need to set so you can make a difference and serve your organization in a sustainable way,” she says. Don’t add volunteering to your to-do list as another obligation or task.
Before signing up to volunteer, make sure you can commit your time. For example, if you’re caring for a sick parent or just got a promotion, now may not be the right time. “You should never think, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have signed up for this,'” Keating says.
Photo provided Dmytro Zinkevich/Shutterstock.com
Lisa Ravaska Lope is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC, who writes about gender equality, diversity and inclusion, and work culture.
