Volunteering Can Help You Reclaim Your Humanity
For a mammal, helping others means taking care of oneself
As mammals, we’re wired for kindness and collaboration. But we don’t often think of ourselves as animals, do we?
We tend to believe that separating ourselves from our primal instincts was how we became “civilized.” But what if I told you that it’s precisely those instincts that could now move humanity forward?
One way to reconnect with them in the modern world is through volunteering. And it’s not just because this has proven health benefits. More importantly, volunteering helps us establish the mindset we need to tackle our biggest social and environmental problems.
Simply put, it helps us reclaim our humanity.
Why kindness is evolutionary rewarding for mammals
Kindness and collaboration define our species. We just got too immersed in our hyper individualistic culture to remember it.
Each of us represents the homo sapiens species belonging to primates, an order of mammals. This means we have characteristics that aren’t obvious in the rest of the animal kingdom. The ones relevant to this discussion are the presence of neocortex in our brain and the natural adaptation to live in collaborative groups.
The neocortex is a part of the evolutionary newest part of the brain. It’s unique to mammals and most sophisticated in humans. It’s responsible for sensation, action, cognition, and consciousness, and allows us to have experiences other animals don’t have access to.
One of them is the capacity to orient towards long-term benefits of our behavior — even if they are at odds with in-the-moment pleasure.
The latter is a game changer. Why? Because it contributes to our ability to collaborate and display pro-social behaviors.
Being able to see long-term consequences of our choices means we can forgo the immediate gain for the sake of bigger rewards in the future. Those rewards are often social — i.e. coming from a group we belong to. One example would be helping a neighbor instead of watching your favorite show. You might be missing out on the latest episode but at the same time, you’re building your social capital for the future.
For the last century, many people misinterpreted Darwin’s ideas of the “survival of the fittest.” We thought that evolution favored the strongest and most aggressive individuals. They were the ones who “win” in the competition for resources, right?
This makes sense — but only as long as you oversee that a strong group can provide resources one person would never be able to gather alone. Collaboration is what the evolution favors, really.
Dacher Keltner, author and psychology professor at the University of California, explains:
“[O]ur mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species — us — with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution — survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion — emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices.”
Let’s keep this in mind as we think of how volunteering impacts our humanity.
Volunteering is an expression of natural kindness
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty.” — Albert Einstein
Because we live in a hyper individualistic society, we may not have as many opportunities to display kindness as we’re built for.
If you live alone or just with your nuclear family, you may not have many opportunities to extend your kindness beyond a narrow circle of compassion. And as Einstein’s quote above suggests, the wider your circle, the freer you become.
I would also add that the wider your circle, the more human you become. By helping others, you give yourself more opportunities to act in accord with your nature — which is to look out for others, develop empathy, and simply care.
Volunteering is a pathway the modern world offers to do that. First, it has tangible benefits for your health, backed by science.
Second, it has the power to shift your outlook on life from individual to collective.
Volunteering improves your mental and physical health
Health benefits of volunteering are unequivocally confirmed by research. People who volunteer have lower mortality rates, greater functional ability, and lower risk of depression. There are a few reasons for that.
One is that helping others keeps you physically and mentally active. Especially for people approaching the end of their careers or those already retired, volunteering can provide a way to keep play a meaningful social role. It’s also a good shield from loneliness and isolation.
Another, even more straightforward reason why volunteering is healthy is that it elicits positive emotions. Helping others is pleasurable — that’s a fact. In one UK study, 93% of volunteers declared they enjoyed their volunteering activity.
Other studies showed more specific benefits, such as reducing chronic pain or decreased levels of disability. It also seems that health benefits were more significant for older people. Additionally, people remained in better shape as they grew older if they had experienced a period of volunteering earlier in life.
Volunteering develops interpersonal skills that you wouldn’t find elsewhere
Volunteering exposes you to other people — that’s obvious. But it’s not just that you meet more people you. You’re also more likely to meet people from outside your usual social bubble.
A study of UK volunteers found that 78% people declared they were “brought into contact with people from different backgrounds and cultures.” Sociologist Robert Wuthnow also found that those who volunteer tend to have bigger number of social contacts (for example, with neighbors and local government officials). It seems that volunteering positively impacts the number of interactions we have with others, as well as the diversity of people we come in contact with.
Especially the latter is invaluable for your interpersonal skills. It’s easy to see the point of view of people who are just like you. However, it takes skill to understand the world of someone who has a different background, upbringing, or level of privilege.
Knowing how to put yourself is someone else’s shoes helps you advance in both professional and personal life. And, it also makes a difference for the big picture.
David Brooks writes in his recent book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen:
“In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we’re trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust — who can say, at the very least, “I’m beginning to see you.” (…)
Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in.”
Volunteering may help us fix this. By exposing you to people who are very different from you, it teaches you the social skills required to navigate the diverse world.
Volunteering develops a sense of belonging and mindset of civic engagement
The biggest benefit of volunteering I experienced was the sense of belonging it gave me. The year I started helping at the local community center was the year my life turned around.
One tangible change was that I stopped needing paid therapy. The network of connections I was embedded in served as the best support I could imagine.
As you might have noticed, we’re living through a loneliness epidemic. For many people, even their closest connections and friendships don’t provide the sense of belonging they’re looking for. What’s missing is a sense that we’re a part of the bigger picture — and that we’re contributing to something worthwhile.
Volunteering is one way to find that. In their research article on social identity in volunteers, Debra Grey and Clifford Stevenson write:
“[V]olunteering and community empowerment can be mutually reinforcing, in the sense that volunteering is seen to result in higher levels of “connectedness,” greater trust in neighbours, and a generalised norm of reciprocity (i.e., “social capital”; Putnam, 2001). This in turn has the potential to lead to an improved sense of community that can encourage further engagement and involvement in volunteering (Casiday, Kinsman, Fisher, & Bambra, 2008; Omoto et al., 2010).”
Being a volunteer offers not just a meaningful social identity — it can also lead to positive behaviors. One of them is higher civic engagement.
Over the decades, it has been observed that high engagement in helping others — especially within organizations — usually correlated with higher engagement in politics and civic life. Political scientist Robert Putnam believes that the contribution of volunteering to civic participation can be explained by the common denominator of social trust.
The more we trust each other, the more we will trust the structures we’re creating as a collective. As a volunteer, you get a chance to create that sense of trust in everyday situations — for yourself, your peers, and your community.
Pass The “Volunteering Threshold” to Reap the Most Benefits
Volunteering has serious benefits — for your wellbeing, interpersonal relationships, and for the world.
We all have the natural capacity and need to be kind to each other. This is that how the human species evolved. Volunteering is the modern world’s way to offer the opportunities to practice our innate kindness.
However… There is a caveat. The review of research on the health benefits of volunteering by CNCS (Corporation for National and Community Service) reveals something they call the “Volunteering Threshold.” This is the number of hours you need to volunteer in order to experience significant benefits.
Researchers often cite 100 hours a year as a basic benchmark. The CNCS encourages at least one or two hours a week, which roughly amounts to 100 hours a year, too.
That’s what we’re trying to do at CivLead. We’re building movement of civic leaders who commit to two hours of community service a week, and one hour of self-care a day.
We believe this can change the world. Will you join us?
