The most effective fuel for the production of joy hormones is generosity and the ability to help strangers.
It turned out that generosity and altruism are responsible for the neural connection between the areas of the brain called the temporoparietal node and the ventral stratum.
Money can't buy euphoria
What do you lack for happiness? Do not rush out of habit to say: "Money!" Psychologists, among them Professor Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British Columbia (Canada), noticed that today income growth has ceased to have such a fundamental impact on people's feelings of happiness. Why did this happen? It turned out that money plays the role of emotional doping only at a certain stage of life: when your wallet is empty and you can hardly make ends meet. And if basic needs are satisfied - there is a piece of bread and a roof over your head - then material prosperity, of course, remains a pleasant thing, but a full refrigerator no longer causes euphoria. Otherwise, why are the magnetic strips with the inscription "Do not eat at night!", Which are hung on the doors of these very refrigerators, are so popular?
Many will now begin to be indignant: they say, there is a crisis in the yard and there is no money … Subjectively, of course, life is always hard. But if you compare the living standards of people in a long retrospective, you get a fairly optimistic picture. So the economist Max Roser from the University of Oxford conducted a large-scale study, during which he compared the dynamics of changes in the standard of living of people over the past 200 years - from 1820 to 2015. According to him, at the beginning of the 19th century, 94 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty (less than $ 2 or 120 rubles a day). In 1950, 75% of humanity was forced into poverty. In 1981, this figure was 44%, and in 2015 - 9.4%!
As we can see, the real incomes of people around the world have increased dramatically over the past few decades.
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Souls beautiful impulses
However, as Elizabeth Dunn claims in her work, the level of happiness, in contrast to the standard of living, is now practically not growing even in the most prosperous countries.
- This is due to the fact that people by inertia continue to spend surplus income on what brought happiness in times of general poverty - that is, on the purchase of expensive consumer goods, - explains the professor. - But, this is a dead-end path, because aspirations grow along with income. Ironically, the costs of pampering your loved one are far from the strongest source of positive emotions. We found that the most complete feeling of happiness comes from altruistic actions: when you help your friends, donate to charity, work as a volunteer. It is these types of behaviors that are closely related to happiness.
It would seem that this theory is contrary to common sense. After all, a person obsessed with generosity, committing all these altruistic follies, causes himself a direct loss ?! And your own shirt, as you know, is closer to the body.
But research has shown that beautiful impulses of souls really have the property of paying off handsomely. Dunn and her colleagues spent a year analyzing the spending structure of a focus group of 632 Americans. Psychologists have divided their spending into 4 categories:
1.taxes, loan payments, food expenses, utilities and other mandatory payments
2. gifts for yourself
3.presents for other people
4. donations to charity
The first two categories were combined into “personal spending,” averaging $ 1,713.91 per month. The last two positions were attributed to "altruistic expenses" - the participants in the experiment spent on them an average of $ 145.96 per month. In parallel, the participants regularly filled out a questionnaire, where they assessed the level of life satisfaction. For example, they answered the questions: How happy were you yesterday? How much, how strongly do you feel that your life is not devoid of meaning?.. The intensity of sensations was evaluated on a 10 scale, then these data were summed up in a certain way and the index of happiness was calculated.
It turned out that the realization of "private ownership instincts" had practically no effect on life satisfaction. Relatively speaking, if the state of absolute euphoria is taken as 1, then personal consumption expenditures affected the happiness index with a scanty coefficient of 0.02. But altruistic spending could increase the feeling of happiness by 0.11 - more than 10 percent! Therefore, you can become a happy person by killing an egoist in yourself.
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How an altruist brain is different
And the international team of scientists led by the psychologist Soyung Park from the University of Lübeck (Germany) went even further. Experts decided to investigate the neural mechanism of the brain that pushes us to act generously. To do this, they recruited two groups of volunteers and promised that each of the volunteers will receive 100 Swiss francs within the next four weeks. The participants in the experimental group made a commitment to spend the money that fell from the sky on other people - they could invite their friend to dinner or buy a small gift. The volunteers from the control group had to spend this amount on themselves. They were then asked to reflect on how they would spend their bonuses, while their brain activity was measured using magnetic resonance imaging.
Scientists reasoned that in order for a person to overcome his selfishness and be able to feel a feeling of happiness from philanthropic actions, zones associated with the reward system should be activated in the brain. It turned out that generosity and altruism are responsible for the neural connection between the areas of the brain called the temporoparietal node and the ventral stratum. The temporoparietal node plays a key role in moral decision making. And the ventral stratum controls motivation, this area is well developed among outstanding athletes, scientists, musicians. After all, without crazy motivation, they would not have been able to reach prohibitive heights.
Most importantly, those volunteers who pledged to spend money to please other people had higher communication activity between these zones. This in turn led to more hormones of happiness and pleasure. Probably, this mechanism of reinforcement began to form in ancient times, when the survival of an individual depended on the cohesion of the entire group. And this prompted our ancestors to be generous and altruistic in relation to their relatives. However, even now good deeds help a person earn respect in the eyes of others and take a higher place in the social hierarchy.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV