RuPaul (a personal icon of mine) is famous for saying, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” It’s catchy, it’s empowering, and it feels like a perfect summary of the modern wisdom towards improving your happiness.
But today, I want to flip it.
What if the path to loving yourself doesn’t start by focusing on yourself, but on others? What if Ru had it backwards? Because here’s a thought: If you can’t love somebody else… how the hell you gonna love yourself?
That’s what this blog is about: the unexpected happiness that comes from helping others and making a difference in the world. And I’m not talking about just giving your attention to and being aware of the problems in the world, but giving your time and money, strategically and generously, to actually solve those problems for others. I want to share with you a radical view that helping others might just be the thing that helps you to improve your happiness.
Improving your happiness through giving
In a clever paper released in 2008 by Dunn, Aknin, and Norton, the researchers approached University of British Columbia students participants on campus and gave them a small sum of money; either $5 or $20. They were randomly assigned to either spend the money on themselves or on someone else by 5 p.m. that day. At the end of the day, those who had spent money on others reported being happier in the evening than those who spent it on themselves.
This finding has since been replicated across cultures and contexts. In Canada, Uganda, South Africa, and India – rich or poor, rural or urban – people tend to get a bigger boost in wellbeing when they give to others rather than buy things for themselves. In one meta-analysis of 201 studies on prosocial behaviour (including charitable giving), prosociality was reliably linked to increased happiness, life satisfaction, and psychological wellbeing.
So yes: we enjoy helping others. But here’s where things get weird (and more interesting).
Why don’t we give more often?
Dunn and her colleagues were amazed that a mere $5 given to charity could have an impact on someone’s happiness for the day. Most students surely had $5 they could spare, so why then didn’t they make these small changes to their spending patterns?
To understand this behaviour, they ran a survey in which they described their experiment and had participants guess which condition they thought would make them happiest. A significant majority of the students surveyed thought spending money on themselves would make them happier than giving it away.
In other words, we actually get more joy from helping others, than focusing on ourselves, but we don’t expect this. We have a cognitive blind spot about how much happiness altruism gives us. The obvious suggestion? We should help others more. It’s good for us and good for them.
Where to start giving to improve your happiness
There are many places you could give your time and money to make a difference, so how should you pick to maximise the happiness effect for yourself?
Well, one piece of advice is to make sure you understand the impact you are having. Evidence from a 2013 study showed that participants felt happier when the charity they donated to explained the tangible and clear impact they had rather than just using a broad, vague appeal.
So giving to a highly effective charity doesn’t just do more good for others – it may do more good for you, too, in terms of improving your happiness.
If you want a good place to start, you can check out our recommended charities. We explain in detail what a charity does, and what your money can buy for others to help make the difference you are making concrete.
How to give effectively to improve your happiness
Here’s the simple, science-backed formula:
- Give. Even a small donation can increase your happiness.
- Give regularly. Building a habit of generosity helps sustain wellbeing over time.
- Give effectively. Use recommendations from charity evaluators like Happier Lives Institute, GiveWell or ACE to find high-impact charities. If you are interested in how these different evaluators differ, you can check out our blog post on this.
You can even go further and pledge to give a portion of your income to effective charities each year. We think giving 1% of pre-tax income for most people in developed countries seems like a reasonable starting point, though we know many people who are proud to give 10% or more.