Some years ago, I delivered a speech in a Manhattan hotel to a group of bereaved widows and widowers. The subject was how helping others allows the helpers to overcome grief more quickly than non-helpers. I told a few stories about kind giving, and described some of the research that confirms these findings. It went well, but at the conclusion, a widower in the back of the packed ballroom stood up and yelled, “I don’t care what you say, buddy. I don’t do nuthin’ for nuthin’!”
This critic required a diplomatic and compassionate response: “Does life for you boil down entirely to the art of the deal?” I asked. With the other attendees all ears, he acknowledged that he approached every interaction with this transactional mindset, but added that he had never been a very happy person.
I suggested that he might try replacing this “I don’t do nuthin’ for nuthin’” at least in his personal life with an opposite sentiment: “I give and glow.” Inwardly, givers are better off emotionally and physically, whether people return the kindness or not. Although you can never count on reciprocation, you can always count on the meaning and the inner glow of giving, and that can more than suffice.
“Glowing” is my synonym for well-being and inner peace. Maybe the word “radiance” captures it just as well. A lot of things can make us glow — a baby’s smile, a majestic mountain, being fully present with a loved one. But very often, glowing is a paradoxical or unintended byproduct of giving with kindness.
Giving From The Heart
The proven truth is that we can glow anywhere if we are helping others. This is the one source of resilience in our lives that we can most depend on and that is always available for the choosing. I know because giving and glowing is the general subject of more than fifty scientific papers I’ve had published in medical and psychology journals over the past four decades. It is also how I survive life’s biggest challenges.
Holocaust survivor and author Victor Frankl is a well-known example of giving and glowing even in the most difficult of times. When I was in college, I heard him deliver a speech about how even when he was in a German prison camp with his fellow Jews, he found meaning, hope, and resilience in sharing his very meager bit of food with other prisoners who looked even more emaciated than he was. His book Man’s Search for Meaning remains an inspiring classic to this day.
Kind giving is a great way to expand the canvas of our lives in difficult moments, turning negatives into positives, heartaches into peace. The volume of our generosity in time or dollars does not matter. Small helping acts are as beneficial to the giver as big ones because it is not how much we give that creates inner peace but how much kindness we pour into it.
Hitting The “Helper’s High”
The most noticeable marker of kind giving is the increasing radiance it creates in the giver. Kindness is something we can actively do — rather than something we passively swallow, like a pill. Psychologists distinguish between “active hope” and “passive hope,” the former being beneficial, and the latter not so much. When we are active agents, generating our own hope, we’re much better off than when hoping someone “out there” will come through for us.
To emphasize, it is not the case that the more one gives the better one feels. This illustrates a well-established (James-Lange) theory of emotional change through action, which states that emotions are caused by the brain’s interpretations of bodily actions. This is why people suggest you smile even if you are not happy. Simple acts of loving-kindness can transform us emotionally when we might otherwise get sucked down into despair and resentment.
Emotions often follow actions, just as actions follow emotions. We have known this for more than a century. You do not have to go up to the highest mountain and meditate to find that inner glow. Modern psychologists have since 1992 demonstrated that if you perform kind acts, you are likely to experience the famous “helper’s high,” an emotional transition from negative states such as hostility and anger to positive states.
Human Evolution Favors Kindness
The world becomes so much more interesting and engaging when we seek the happiness, security, and well-being of another. Selfishness and unkindness are just plain boring. But it is impossible to be bored if you love your neighbor and are busy helping them.
Kindness to others is a source of hope. When we use our strengths to make a difference in the life of another, we have greater confidence in shaping the future. This is an active hope, rather than that passive variety that just waits around.
Kind giving also creates dignity and worth. Our dignity is ours to claim when we treat another person with love. Human dignity lies chiefly in expanding the range and power of our greatest asset. We find significance in our lives in kind giving.
The best news is that kind giving is not reserved for a few altruistic souls. Everyone is called by nature to give and glow, and hence, take the path to fulfillment. Give and glow is an inalienable and irreplaceable path of human fulfillment, inner freedom, and inner peace.
This can be explained partly by our having evolved as a species in groups, where feelings of fulfillment would naturally evolve because helping behavior has a selective advantage in contributing to group functionality and success. Charles Darwin, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, realized that our inclination to help and serve others with kindness and compassion was the result of evolutionary competition between groups. Human evolution, he recognized, is not just between individuals competing for some desired object. The more internal kindness and helping a group has within it, the better off it will be.
Our biochemistry responds favorably to our actions of kind giving. Since 2000, robust research literature has demonstrated the health benefits of giving. But more than biology may be involved. For according to most spiritual traditions worldwide, when we help others, we are also helping ourselves, simply because we are all interwoven within the one mind, or consciousness. Kind giving goes with rather than against the grain of both group evolution and consciousness itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “No man [or woman] can sincerely help another without helping himself.” Or as Oscar Wilde put it, echoing Plato, “To be good is to be in harmony with oneself.” Thoreau wrote, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” This wisdom is universal. It’s good to be kind, and science says it’s so.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Pure Unlimited Love ©2025 Stephen G. Post, Morehouse Publishing, New York, NY 10016.
Stephen G. Post, PhD, is among the world’s leading scholars on altruism, love, compassion, and the science of giving. He is a best-selling author, professor of preventive medicine, and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
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