First Reason Why We Should Practise Giving

I'm going to focus on the benefits of giving for the giver in my next few blogs, and later on I’ll talk about the obvious benefits for the recipient as it enriches their lives, and the not-so-obvious benefits in triggering a positive shift in mentality.

Negative

I've been researching and writing on the marginality of sub-Saharan Africa in the international environment over the last couple of years or so and am keenly aware of the negative effect that aid giving has had on the people of that continent as can be said of the way in which some people have used the welfare system over the years in the UK and the rest of the western world. But I think that’s a separate discussion altogether.

Positive

Sticking with the positive, my first point is that giving actually makes the giver feel happy in the same way that a number of other activities (and here I’ll let you work out what those activities are) bring happiness. A well documented neuroscientist at the National Institute of Health in the United States, Jorge Moll, confirms this in a research he and his colleagues carried out on their research subjects when they were asked to think about giving money to charity. The brain scan data revealed that the thought of giving altruistically activated regions in the brain that are associated with pleasure releasing endorphins that gave the subjects a ‘high’ feeling. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist at the New York Times, suggests that we are ‘hard-wired to be altruistic’.

Choice

Giving makes us happy! Several other researchers have made the same link: Jason Marsh and Jill Suttie, from the Greater Good Science Centre at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Norton and colleagues at the Harvard Business School; and Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California, Riverside. So why do so many people avoid and even resent giving to charity and missions if it stimulates health and happiness in the giver?