The ‘helper’s high’: why volunteering makes you happy

Common wisdom tells us that by giving, or giving our time, we receive something in return — tangible or otherwise. True to this principle, very often volunteers affirm that volunteering makes them feel happy. This positive effect of volunteering has been called the “helper’s high.”

But what causes this feeling? The field of positive psychology provides a compelling explanation with their research on happiness. Martin Seligman, the field’s leading figure and past president of the American Psychological Association, maintains that there are three types of happiness, or rather three kinds of happy lives:

• Pleasant life or life of enjoyment
• Good life or life of engagement
• Meaningful life or life of affiliation

Seligman outlines these modes of happy living in his books Authentic Happiness (2002) and Flourish (2011). The first mode of living involves the pursuit of pleasure and affords us only transient happiness. The second involves engagement in tasks in which we feel adept and is a source of durable happiness. The last involves participation in something larger or more permanent than ourselves and is also a source of durable happiness.

It’s the third type of happiness in Seligman’s model, that which derives from a “meaningful” mode of living, that is relevant to volunteering. For Seligman, this happiness stems from a sense of belonging, meaning and purpose. According to both a large body of research and volunteers themselves, volunteering frequently generates these very effects.

Volunteers obtain a sense of belonging from engaging with their community and expanding their social network, and a sense of meaning and purpose from their perception that they’re making a positive difference. Hence the sense of happiness, or this “helper’s high,” that so many volunteers report feeling.