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Talk with the Doc: Volunteer work can help health

Perhaps the best definition of being a volunteer is as follows: A volunteer is a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself to perform a service willingly and without pay

The benefits of volunteering are beneficial for the individual, and will often benefit one’s family, and your community. The right match can help you to reduce stress, find friends, reach out to the community, learn new skills, and even advance one’s career. Giving to others can also help protect your mental and physical health.

The following is from a large study of U.S. people who volunteered to help many various organizations. They found that helping others increased happiness, as many other studies have also demonstrated. This study also found that the more an individual volunteered, the happier they were.

Specifically, they found that if a person volunteered once a month, their happiness increased 7 percent. Volunteering twice month increased happiness by 12 percent and weekly volunteers increased their overall happiness by 16 percent.

Many studies have shown that volunteering provides many benefits to the volunteer regarding both their mental and physical health. The following are just a few of these many benefits. Volunteering helps a person counteract the effects of stress, anger, and anxiety.

As noted above, volunteering will certainly contribute to a person’s happiness. Volunteering increases the self-confidence of that person. Volunteering provides that person with a sense of purpose. Volunteering also helps a person stay physically healthy. People who volunteer also tend to do more walking, and this will also contribute to their overall health.

Further, multiple studies over the past two decades has shown that volunteering not only provides individual health benefits, but volunteering also provides numerous social benefits.

Specifically, those people who volunteer have lower mortality rates, greater mental functional ability, and lower rates of depression later in life than those who do not volunteer. Further personal benefits of volunteering include pride in one’s self, a feeling of satisfaction and personal accomplishment.

It has also been shown that volunteering helps a person’s ability to solve problems, helps them connect to others, helps strengthen their communities, and can actually transform their own lives in a positive way as well.

Volunteering is a very unselfish thing for people to do in their communities. Volunteering also helps us to take a break from our everyday life to help others and this can certainly help us as well.

Let me close with the following two quotes:

“Volunteers do not necessarily have the time; they just have the heart.” — Elizabeth Andrew

“You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” — Winston Churchill

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Jim Surrell is the author of “The ABC’s For Success In All We Do” and the “SOS (Stop Only Sugar) Diet” books. He has his practice at the Digestive Health Clinic at U.P. Health System-Marquette. Requests for health topics for this column are encouraged. Contact Dr. Surrell by email at sosdietdoc@gmail.com.

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