newsminer.com

Many people say that doing good makes them feel good. It’s called the “helper’s high.” The exhilaration feels a lot like a “runner’s high.”

Neuroscientists are finding that putting the needs of others above your own activates a primitive part of the brain linked to other pleasures like sex and food.

Gloria was baby-sitting our dogs when my husband and I left town. When the dishwasher overflowed, she called the plumber.

“The guy who arrived was just a kid, and this was his first winter in Alaska,” she told me.

“At 25 degrees below zero, he was only wearing sneakers and a thin jacket.

“He ran out of gas about a mile down the road and had to walk back to the house. I got into my car, drove him to the gas station and back to his truck.

“He came back again when he ran his truck off the hill so I pulled him out.”

Gloria glowed with the “helper’s high.” She was in her 60s and exuded energy and good health.

The next day, she told me, she saw another car stuck in the ditch. She pulled him out too.

“I thought I had already built enough points in Heaven from the day before,” she explained. But Gloria couldn’t resist another opportunity to do good.

In “The Healing Power of Doing Good,” Alan Luks investigated the emotional and health benefits of acts of kindness.

Luks sent a confidential questionnaire to 3,300 volunteers at more than 20 organizations throughout the United States. Just writing a check to a charitable organization, he found, didn’t do anything much.

But face-to-face helping produced great benefits:

• Right after helping others, most people experienced an immediate euphoria, a burst of energy, or other heady feelings.

• When they remembered their acts of kindness later on, most people felt a warm glow, a greater sense of self-worth, and emotional calm.

• Many people who helped others regularly believed volunteering improved their health. They believed they had more energy, got fewer colds, and felt relief from their illnesses.

• Helping others once a week or more led to the greatest health benefits.

• The greatest effects came from helping people the volunteers didn’t know, not just helping friends and family whom they had to help.

Some people who have tried volunteering don’t report such positive experiences. When Luks gives talks about the benefits of volunteering, he gets comments like these:

“Being with sick people makes you depressed.”

“The person I tried to help didn’t want any help.”

“I tried to help but I didn’t get any results.”

“The person I helped didn’t show any appreciation.”

Gloria didn’t get much appreciation from the young plumber in tennis shoes, even though she had spent four hours helping him get gas and pulling him out of the ditch. The guy just whined about how much he hated Alaska. He couldn’t wait to go back to Arizona.

But that didn’t bother Gloria. The next day she saw another car stuck in a ditch — not even on the road she was driving on. She made a right turn onto the side road where he was stuck and pulled him out, too. Gloria gets pleasure from doing good.

This raises an interesting philosophical question: If doing good gives you pleasure, are you really being altruistic? Aren’t you just looking out for No. 1?

Not so! People can get pleasure from a lot of different things — buying the latest technological toy, going on a vacation, partying. Good people take pleasure in doing good.