“Less than a week until Christmas.” Just those words alone can cause even the calmest people you know to completely stress out. In this article, Mary Jo DiLonardo of Mother Nature Network offers some helpful advice on how to keep your stress level down during the holidays by keeping your focus on helping others.
You’re decking the halls, wrapping presents, baking cookies and you still have a billion other things on your seasonal to-do list. No wonder you’re super-stressed and hardly in the mood for anything jolly.
A new study suggests a surprising cure for easing your skyrocketing stress levels: Add one more thing to your overflowing plate. If that sounds counterintuitive, hang on a second. To feel less frazzled, you need to be utterly selfless. Take some time to help someone else.
For the study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University School of Medicine, sent more than six dozen adults daily questionnaires for two weeks asking them to rate their mental health for that day and to report any positive or negative emotions they experienced. Then they were asked to also report any “prosocial” or helping behaviors they took part in. That could be anything from holding a door for someone to helping with schoolwork, reports Business Insider.
The results showed that helping others seemed to protect against the negative effects of stress.
On days when study participants were more helpful than usual, they showed no drop in the quality of their mental health or positive emotions. However, when they were less helpful than usual, they experienced higher negative emotions in response to stress and lower mental health overall.
The researchers wrote: “Results suggest that even brief periods of supporting or helping others might help to mitigate the negative emotional effects of daily stress.”
