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Creative Wellness Newsletter

Creative Wellness

Newsletter - Winter/Spring 2009

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Giving Promotes Good Health

Everyone knows the importance of drinking plenty of water, eating whole foods, and exercising regularly. Current research also shows that doing good for others is as much a vital component of our health. Although we give because we want to help others, giving is an action with echoing effects that reverberate deeply in our lives and impact our health. Giving provides both immediate and long-term results, and it is something we are all capable of doing. Giving doesn't require material wealth, only compassion, and it is abundant in its supply. As the body, mind and spirit each play their part in helping to keep a person whole, giving connects us with others, it helps to reduce our stress, and it nourishes our healing. Reaching out to someone and giving something even seemingly insignificant is good for the person receiving. Mother Teresa said, “Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” Each one of us has received some gift at some point from someone, if only the gift of life. Giving connects us with others, and helping others reinforces our shared humanity. It empowers us when we have something to give, or some ability to share with someone in need. Just sharing our thoughts or feelings can be a powerful tool for boosting our health.

A major impediment to attaining good health is stress, but giving can help to minimize this. Giving provides the person giving with a sense of fulfillment and joy known as “helper's calm” or high. Allan Luks, previously the executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of Health, likens this feeling to the satisfaction felt after a vigorous workout. Luks states that, “In many cases, this ‘helper's calm' was linked to relief from stress-related disorders such as headaches, voice loss, and even pain accompanying lupus and multiple sclerosis.” According to the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, “Stress-related health problems improve after performing kind acts. Helping reverses feelings of depression, supplies social contact, and decreases feelings of hostility and isolation that cause stress, overeating, ulcers, etc.” Giving to someone else also allows us to concentrate on something other than ourselves. This in itself can be therapeutic by helping us to forget our anxieties, if only for a brief moment.

A person's health is greatly influenced by their emotional state. A person's life experiences, their environment and hereditary factors all play some part. It is not surprising, then, that healing, too, can be enhanced when a person has a positive and courageous spirit. In “Cancer as a Turning Point”, the work of clinical psychologist Dr. Lawrence LeShan supports this belief. He found that many of his patients who had begun volunteerism found a renewed sense of love and self, and while this did not heal them, it did support the healing process. In the preface to his book, Dr. LeShan writes, “What we have learned is that the immune system is strongly affected by feelings, and that taking certain kinds of psychological action can affect the immune system positively.” He is quick to point out that while we aren't responsible for becoming ill, we must be responsible for nurturing our healing, and one way to do so is by sincerely expressing concern for and helping others.

The ways to give are immeasurable and so are its benefits. As individuals we can give, as communities we can give, and even as companies we can give. We all have the capacity to give of ourselves, if even just a smile or a kind word. Some of us have skills we can share, others have material means to give. According to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, “Health emerges from hope, optimism, laughter, connectedness, support, commitment, self-worth, a sense of control, and perhaps something more: the perception that life has meaning and that each of us has some unique role that cannot be played by anyone else.” We each have the capacity to touch others in a significant way, and when we do so, we are doing something good for our health, as well.

 

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