It’s a simple fact that every nonprofit organization knows: volunteering makes you feel better. But did you know that the anecdotal stories about volunteering health benefits have been backed up by science and peer-reviewed research?
Today, we are exploring the health benefits of volunteerism and sharing the latest studies that show that volunteering isn’t just good for your community; it’s good for your health, too.
Who Can Experience the Health Benefits of Volunteerism?
Volunteering offers health benefits for individuals of any age, ethnicity, gender, or physical ability!
- Children: Volunteering gives children a chance to explore their community, build healthy habits, and learn about diverse perspectives.
- Teens: The teen years are turbulent, but volunteering can help. When teens work with a nonprofit organization, they get opportunities to self-actualize, learn from mentors, and build skills for college and beyond.
- Adults: As career, family, and adult responsibilities start to pile up, many adults will struggle to make time for themselves. By connecting with causes they are passionate about, adults can serve both themselves and others.
- Seniors: Seniors are at a much greater risk of social isolation, and if they don’t keep active, they can unwittingly accelerate age-related mental and physical decline. Volunteering gets seniors out of the house, gives them a vibrant social life, and helps them maintain a sense of purpose.
Volunteering can be particularly helpful for individuals who struggle with loneliness, apathy, stress, stagnation, or low self-esteem. However, anyone can experience the health benefits of volunteerism!
Mental Health Benefits of Volunteering
When it comes to volunteering health benefits, mental health is typically the first thing that comes to mind. While it is easy to recognize that volunteering improves your mental well-being, it can be harder to quantify exactly why. That’s why there have been so many scientific studies into the links between volunteering and mental health.
Interpersonal Connection
Humans are social animals; even the most introverted person needs a friend. Volunteering gives you access to a whole new community of people: other volunteers, community members, beneficiaries, and nonprofit leaders. Volunteers are 29% less likely to report disconnection from their friends, so it’s no surprise that 35% of volunteers say that socialization is a major motivator for their service.
When you volunteer, you have the opportunity to forge strong bonds with people who share your values—helping you build community, make friends, and feel less lonely. The social benefits of volunteering make it a particularly powerful activity for anyone who lives alone, has just moved to a new area, or simply wants to make new connections.
Sense of Purpose
When you feel like you are making an impact on the world, you feel happier, more energetic, and more engaged. And there’s no better way to make a difference than volunteering. Volunteering gives you hands-on experience and the opportunity to directly see your impact, making it a much more satisfying experience than more passive ways of supporting a nonprofit organization, like donating.
Volunteering has been proven to give individuals a strong sense of purpose and mitigate the effects of mental illnesses like obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Studies have also shown that a sense of personal accomplishment is especially beneficial for seniors, who experience improved mental and physical health from the sense of purpose that volunteering provides.
Stress Reduction
Stress is unpleasant, to say the least, but it can also increase your risk factors for other conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, high blood sugar levels, and irritable bowel syndrome—which makes stress management a major priority for both your mental and physical health.
Volunteering reduces stress by encouraging you to stay physically active, building a strong support network, and putting your experiences into a greater perspective. Research from the University of Ghent has also found that volunteering releases the hormones oxytocin and progesterone, which are both associated with stress reduction.
Mental Acuity
Learning new things doesn’t end when you graduate, and when you volunteer, you take an active part in the educational process. Volunteers learn new things about organizations, causes, and beneficiaries, and they often share that knowledge with others.
Learning new skills is fun, but it is also critical to brain health. The information you learn and share through volunteering improves mental acuity by encouraging you to utilize your memory and critical thinking skills. Exercising your brain in this way can help prevent dementia and other aging-related forms of functional decline.
Self-Confidence
Improved self-confidence is one of the most commonly reported health benefits of volunteering. It is often easier to put yourself out there if you are campaigning for an organization or cause instead of yourself, but the experience of speaking up for someone else makes it much easier to speak up for yourself. Volunteering allows you to express yourself, take direct action, and practice advocacy—which will directly boost your own self-confidence.
Improved Mood
Volunteers often report a “helper’s high” after participating in an event, but volunteerism offers much greater mood benefits than just temporary elation. Volunteering for at least 1-2 hours a week has been linked to improved mood and higher happiness levels. One study followed individuals for 20 years, and over the course of data collection, they found that volunteers weren’t just more likely to be happier; their levels of happiness actually increased the longer they volunteered.
Lower Rates of Depression
Volunteering doesn’t just boost your mood; it has been clinically proven to lower depression rates. In a study from Northumbria University, subjects who volunteered reported a significant improvement in feelings of depression, and research into patients with chronic pain showed that volunteering mitigated the depression they felt as a result of their conditions.
Why? Volunteering involves a variety of activities that are known to help treat depression, including physical activity, social interaction, and community engagement.
Physical Health Benefits of Volunteering
The health benefits of volunteerism are not limited to your mind; they extend to your body, too.
Physical Fitness
Volunteering has been shown to increase physical activity and fitness, and it has been linked to improved health outcomes, especially among seniors. After all, many volunteer tasks require you to get out of the house and onto your feet, from handing out flyers to working events to giving tours. Even this light physical activity can play a major role in improving flexibility, increasing circulation, boosting mental health, and reducing the risk of injury and certain health conditions.
Lower Blood Pressure
Did you know that volunteering, in any capacity, can lower your blood pressure? A study from Carnegie Mellon found that 200 annual volunteer hours reduces your risk factor for high blood pressure and hypertension by 40%. The researchers concluded that the specific activity did not matter; the simple act of volunteering made the difference.
Decreased Pain Levels
Volunteering has been linked to decreased pain levels, especially among patients with chronic conditions. A study from the University of Kentucky followed 200 women over the age of 50 who experienced chronic pain. When the women volunteered, they reported a 9% decrease in their pain levels. That means that volunteerism helps ease pain within vulnerable populations—both among beneficiaries and the volunteers themselves.
Heart Health
Your heart is the most important organ in your body, so you have to take care of it. Volunteerism reduces stress, keeps you active, and lowers your blood pressure. Together, these volunteering health benefits decrease inflammation and directly correlate to a stronger, healthier heart and a decreased risk of heart disease.
Longer Life
All of the cumulative health benefits of volunteerism combine to result in an extended lifespan. With greater social interaction, less stress, improved mental health, better physical fitness, and a stronger heart, you are much more likely to live longer.
However, these findings aren’t just anecdotal. A wide variety of studies have been conducted to investigate the correlation between volunteering and longer life spans.
- One study found that volunteers are 30% more likely to get flu shots and 53% more likely to get mammograms and x-rays—preventative measures that result in longer lives.
- A study published in Health Psychology established a definitive link between altruistic volunteering and living longer.
- Research from Harvard showed that individuals who volunteered 100 or more hours a year (approximately 2 hours per week) were 44% more likely to be alive after a 4-year period than individuals who didn’t volunteer at all.
The science is clear: volunteering is good for you!
Engage More Volunteers with VolunteerHub
VolunteerHub makes it easier for your nonprofit to share the health benefits of volunteerism with as many people as possible. VolunteerHub is the premier volunteer management software solution, offering a robust suite of features that keep your volunteers active and engaged.
Leveraging VolunteerHub’s intuitive platform can allow your nonprofit to:
- Recruit new volunteers
- Streamline training, scheduling, and hour-tracking processes
- Improve volunteer engagement and retention with rewards and recognition
- Automate volunteer communication
- Manage multiple events at once
- Consolidate data management
- Generate actionable reports
VolunteerHub doesn’t just increase volunteer engagement and retention; it also saves your organization time, money, and energy to ensure the best return on investment possible.
