Helping others can improve your mental health

In this prolonged economic crisis and recession, it is easy to be consumed with worry about finances, relationship problems, and future directions. When we feel time pressures and stress, we tend to either get very busy to try to fix the problem or we get overwhelmed and “stuck”. That is when depression and anxiety can start to creep in. Anxiety about a situation leads us to “do” in an inefficient way, and depression leads us to “sit” in an overwhelmed way.

There are many ways to get out of this pattern, but one way may surprise you. Find something you can do each day (even if just for 5 minutes) that is for another person in which you don’t expect anything in return. Doing for another person causes us to focus our energy on something other than our own problems. It forces our brain to take a break from the stress and re-focus in a different way. Not only is this healthy for our body and for others in the moment, it also leads us to gain clarity and engage in more creative problem-solving with our own situations. And just think of what a different world this could be if everyone in it took 5 minutes a day to do something good for another person!