Helping others lessen the effects of stress in daily life

Feeling down? Just move out and help strangers or known people and there goes your stress away, say researchers armed with new findings in a study. Elizabeth B. Raposa (UCLA and Yale University School of Medicine) and Holly B. Laws (Yale University School of Medicine) conducted a study in which people used their smartphones to report on their feelings and experiences in daily life.

Every night during the 14-day study, each participant was asked to complete an assessment of their day, reporting any stressful life events that may have occurred, with the total number of events giving the researchers a measure of daily stress.

A small gesture, such as holding a door open for a stranger, can create a “pay it forward” effect, as long as the giver shows an effort.

The researchers found out that helping others boosted an individual’s well-being. So, they recommend anyone to be more mindful towards their peers such as holding doors open for them, asking them if they need any help, or help them with their work.

‘It may end up helping you feel just a little bit better’.

The benefit of receiving social support during time of stress is well documented.

Study author Emily Ansell said these were the “strong and uniform” effects across the participant’s daily experiences.

Each evening for two weeks, participants received a reminder to complete a series of questionnaires. They reported stresses they experienced that day in the interpersonal relationship, education, workplace, family, health, and finance among others – a combination of these experiences made up the stress for the day. Another asked participants to indicate any prosocial (helping) behaviors they’d demonstrated, from holding open a door to helping out with schoolwork.

pedrosimoes7 via flickrGo ahead and tend to your sulky friend – helping others can protect you from the negative effects of stress, research suggests. “For example, if a participant did engage in more prosocial behaviors on stressful days there was essentially no impact of stress on positive emotion or daily mental health”.

And participants’ helping behavior also influenced how they responded to stress. And they had lower increases in negative emotion in response to high daily stress. Their mental health was also less likely to be affected by daily stress.

The researchers noted that it would be interesting to study the effects of prosocial behaviors on mental health and emotional wellbeing if people are told or recommended to engage in them.

The findings are limited by the fact that all the study participants were Caucasian, and Ansell plans additional research involving more ethnically and culturally diverse populations. A shorter form of the Positive and Negative Affect Scale was used to measure their experienced emotions.

“It may be particularly relevant for people dealing with a lot of stress who are at risk for depression relapse”, she said.

This study has been published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.