There was Margot, a young girl who suffered from leukaemia and needed help to find a bone-marrow donor. Clark organized eighty people into a ‘help mob’ which dropped flyers around a local swabbing centre to find suitable donors. Margot found a donor, but her life could not be saved. Sadly, she died ten months later.
Helping people, listening to their stories and getting involved in their hopes and dreams and struggles bring both sorrow and satisfaction. When we get to know people, we start to care more. We take part in their victories – and share their defeats. Life is messy, and relationships are hard. The outcome of helping may be a mixed bag. Getting involved also means that we can get hurt from time to time.
But helping also brings a sense of purpose.
Eden, who was nine when Clark first met her and her mother, Trudy, has myoclonus diaphragmatic flutter. It is also known as belly dancer’s syndrome; a misfiring diaphragm causes spasms throughout the body, preventing speech and triggering seizures. It is such a rare condition that Eden is the only sufferer in the UK. The only specialist in the world was thousands of kilometres away – in Colorado, in the US. So Clark raised the ￡4,000 needed for flights, accommodation and initial consultations in Colorado through crowdfunding and by harassing journalists.
When I meet Clark in 2015, Eden is ‘doing really well’. For someone who wanted to earn a value that was measured in non-monetary ways, he seems to have found a new currency, one that is easily converted into happiness.
‘I think people have that assumption that London is expensive and you’ve got to focus on earning. But I think you can still find the time to help.’ However, the most common request Clark gets is ‘Can I help you?’ People want to help.
Helping has also changed Clark’s life. ‘My heart beats in a way that it never has. My life is vivid. Giving is happiness. The person who has been helped the most by this free help project is me,’ he says. He now works as a freelance business consultant, but has dropped the six-month time frame he gave himself at first and now wants to help for life, and he hopes the Free Help Guy will be kept alive after he is gone.
HAPPINESS TIP:
BE MORE AMéLIE
Find ways to bring happiness to others through acts of kindness.
In the movie Amélie, the shy waitress finds an old metal box of childhood memorabilia that has been hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier. Amélie finds the boy – now a grown man – and returns the box to him. She promises herself that, if it makes him happy, she will devote her life to bringing happiness to others. The man is moved to tears, and Amélie embarks on her new mission. She starts a romance between people. She persuades her father to follow his dream of touring the world. She escorts a blind man to the Métro station, giving a rich description of the street scenes they pass. I think, the world needs more Amélies. What if we all became secret superheroes of kindness?
FIVE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS TO DO THIS WEEK
1. LEAVE A GIFT ON SOMEONE’S DOORSTEP.
2. LEARN THE NAME OF THE PERSON AT THE FRONT DESK, OR SOMEONE ELSE YOU SEE EVERY DAY. GREET THEM BY NAME.
3. MAKE TWO LUNCHES AND GIVE ONE AWAY.
4. TALK TO THE SHY PERSON WHO’S BY THEMSELVES AT A PARTY OR AT THE OFFICE.
5. GIVE SOMEONE A GENUINE COMPLIMENT. RIGHT NOW.
HELPER’S HIGH: FEELING GOOD BY DOING GOOD
There is a Chinese proverb that goes
‘If you want happiness for an hour – take a nap. If you want happiness for a day – go fishing. If you want happiness for a year – inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime – help someone else.’
Altruism is concern for the welfare of others and it is one of the factors that explains why some countries are happier than others. According to the World Happiness Report 2012, a society cannot be happy unless there is a high degree of altruism among its members.
However, it is not just society in general that becomes happier through altruism. We feel personally better. Try to recall a time you did something nice for a stranger, not because you wanted to gain something from it, just for the pure purpose of helping somebody else. How did that action make you feel?
For me, it was something as simple as giving someone a banana. Walking home from the supermarket, I was waiting at a red light. Next to me was a mother with her kid, who was crying: ‘I am hungry.’
It was a quick fix. I broke one of the bananas I had bought off the bunch and handed it to the mother: ‘Would you like a banana for your kid?’ I had seldom seen anyone so grateful. She was happy. The kid was happy. I was happy. Here we are talking about affective happiness – our mood. My happiness was in part caused by helper’s high.
The term is based on the theory that doing something good makes us feel good, because the action produces a mild version of a morphine high. Our brain has something called the nucleus accumbens – also known as the reward centre – which is activated in response to food or sex.
Neurological research from the National Institutes of Health under the US Department of Health and Human Services finds that the area of our brain that is activated in response to food or pleasure also lights up when participants in the study think about giving money to charity. In other words, we are wired to feel good when we do something that makes our species survive. Cooperating is good for the survival of our species, so we are wired to feel good when we engage in it.
HAPPINESS TIP:
CELEBRATE WORLD KINDNESS DAY
Get your friends together and get creative on how you can celebrate kindness.
What better way to celebrate World Kindness Day than with kindness? World Kindness Day was introduced by the World Kindness Movement, a group of national kindness organizations, in 1998 and is celebrated on 13 November each year. In the UK, there is also a National Kindness Day – this year it was held on 31 March.
Get your friends together and form a ‘help mob’ (a helpful flash mob), say, for a charity or somebody who needs a hand with something; dress up as a superhero and perform random acts of kindness that day; or call or write to someone who has been kind to you in the past and thank them.
GIVE YOUR TIME
Not only can our current mood be improved by a helper’s high, but altruism can also affect our overall happiness and how we evaluate our lives.
People who volunteer are happier than those who do not, even after controlling for other factors such as socioeconomic status. Moreover, they experience fewer depressive symptoms, less anxiety and enjoy a more meaningful life. Part of the explanation may be that people who are happier tend to be more inclined to sign up for voluntary work. However, another part may also be that some groups may expose you to the way in which people who are less fortunate than you live and thus make you more grateful for what you have. Doing voluntary work may also have indirect positive effects.
When I was twenty-three I volunteered as a youth counsellor for the Red Cross. During the introductory course, we were told about jobs other than that of counsellor that were available. There was one that involved going around to high schools and giving presentations on teenage issues, empathy and how to be a good listener, and a PR group, which worked on communications. I started being vocally enthusiastic about the first group – but as more and more people seemed to become interested in it I started to speak positively about the PR group. A girl sitting next to me leaned in and whispered, ‘Let me guess. You want to join the presentation group, and you became worried that it would fill up. So you started promoting the PR group. Well played.’ Frederikke and I have now been friends for fifteen years.