Assessment
Lend a Hand to Help Protect Your Brain
How volunteering may protect the brain from age-related declines
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- Volunteering may help the brain by decreasing stress levels, depression and anxiety, and boosting your overall satisfaction with life.
- Studies have shown that volunteering may improve brain function and could be particularly beneficial to women.
It makes you happy, helps reduce your stress and just plain feels good. But volunteering has another big thing going for it: It can offer brain benefits.
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“Volunteering has been shown to decrease stress levels, depression, anxiety and boost your satisfaction with life,” says Susan Albers, a psychologist for Cleveland Clinic. Just how does earmarking some time each week to work on a cause you care about — from feeding the homeless to cleaning up local beaches to fostering a shelter animal — provide so many potential benefits for your grey matter? Taking the focus off yourself by lending a hand activates the reward center in your brain and releases serotonin, dopamine and endorphins, Albers explains. Those three are known as the feel-good hormones.
Video: Inspired by Mom, Retiree Devotes Second Act to Service
Volunteering also appears to benefit certain brain functions. A study reported in 2023 by researchers at UC Davis looked at the volunteering habits of nearly 2,500 older adults with an average age of 74. Forty-three percent of participants reported volunteering in the past year. Volunteering was associated with better baseline scores on tests of executive function, the higher-level cognitive skills that help you set and carry out goals, and episodic memory, the ability to form, store and recall memories of specific past events along with contextual details associated with those events (i.e., where you parked your car this morning or what you had for dinner last night). Those who volunteered several times a week had the highest levels of executive function.
The researchers concluded that volunteering later in life may help to protect the brain against cognitive decline and dementia.
But this isn’t the only study to link volunteering with brain benefits. In a 2023 analysis of 14 studies published between 2017 and 2021 both in the United States and overseas, researchers in Germany investigated the connections between volunteering and cognitive health. The systematic review also set out to identify influencing factors, including gender. The average age of study participants was between 61 and 74.
“Nine of these studies reported a positive correlation between volunteering and brain functions such as thinking, perception, attention skills and language ability,” explains Anne Keefer, research associate in the Digital Dementia Registry Bavaria project.
Volunteering specifically had a positive effect on the cognitive health of women. This is worth noting, since women are more frequently affected by dementia than men. In fact, around twice as many women have Alzheimer's disease – the most common type of dementia – compared with men, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.
So, if you’re looking to improve your quality of life and possibly reduce the risk of cognitive decline at the same time, devote some time each week to doing something to help others. They’ll appreciate your time, while you reap the potential brain benefits.
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