One of the main pieces of science that underpins The Science of Sin is that social isolation damages people’s physical and mental health (a fact of life first identified 40 years ago!). I also make the point that the seven deadly sins can be thought of as perfectly natural human inclinations that are useful in moderation, but inevitable damage social connections when they get out of control. Put this all together and what have you got? Well, the way I see it, it should be possible to motivate people to rein in their pride, greed, sloth, lust, gluttony, envy and wrath for entirely selfish reasons – with the primary aim of improving their own health.
This is where the inspiration for #SelfishlyHelpful came from. Something that I hope could motivate even the least likely people to start behaving more benevolently towards other. And for those who are already charitably-inclined, it might help them to find ways to motivate the more self-centred people they come across in life to look for opportunities to help other people in their community. As the weeks have gone by since this thought first occurred to me, the more I think about it – the more I stumble upon evidence of my own #SelfishlyHelpful behaviour. It turns out I’ve been doing it for years. I was just thinking of it more in terms of how intrinsically-rewarding acts of apparent altruism are. For example…
It occurred to me recently that for many years now I’ve been tweeting about interesting neuroscience articles I come across on a daily basis and writing a monthly blog for entirely #SelfishlyHelpful reasons. Yet I have never received a penny for the many thousands of hours of effort I’ve invested in these exploits, so clearly any reward I might gain is intrinsic (feels good) rather than extrinsic (for material gain).
I initially started doing these things because the TV agent that represented me 8 years ago told me that anyone who wants to be a successful TV presenter needs to have two things: 1) a Twitter account and 2) a website. When I asked why, she replied that she had no idea (!), but that people whose advice she trusted had told her so. The received wisdom was that these activities were vital to any 21st century broadcaster’s survival. That was good enough for me.
I arbitrarily set myself the goal of tweeting three brain-related articles that hit the lay press each and every weekday, plus one blog per month on a brain-related topic that had made me sit up and take notice. After a few years I started asking myself why I was bothering to stick to this quota like my life depended on it. There seemed to be no tangible return on my investment of time and resources.
Retrospectively I realised that what kept me at it was the impetus to keep checking the neuroscience newsfeeds on a daily basis as this habit helped me to stay abreast of the latest developments across many neuroscience sub-disciplines. And what kept me blogging was the opportunity to regularly explore certain areas of neuroscience in greater depth.
My tweets help others by drawing attention to brain-related articles that are usually a) interesting and relevant to people’s daily existence b) well-written and c) factually accurate. I know people find these articles helpful because people occasionally take the time to get in touch to thank me for making them aware of a tasty nugget of neuroscience. There is clearly a selfish benefit for me as well because, while I don’t get any financial remuneration for this kind of work, always being up to date on what’s going on across a wide range of brain research topics often comes in handy. When I’m asked a question by a client about the latest developments in neuroscience, whether it is a TV production company developing a series idea, a PR company I’m working with on a project for one of their clients, a host during a live TV or radio interview, or an audience member after one of my many annual keynote speeches, I can answer the vast majority of questions off the top of my head.
Similarly with the blog: people sometimes drop me an email out of the blue (usually when I’ve removed something they’ve come to rely on!) to say what a useful resource it is – so they clearly find it helpful. The selfish part is that, as I was effectively forcing myself to stick to a schedule of writing a science story once a month for 8 years, by the time I got the opportunity to write a book, not only did the publisher have a sense of what the end product would look like – but it also gave me the opportunity to develop my writing style so that, through trial and error, I could do the job adequately well.
My aim from here on is to encourage others to do the same, but in a wide variety of different contexts. Whether it’s volunteering in their local community with the express intention of helping others to improve their own social connections – with other volunteers, those that they benefit from their charitable enterprises and others they meet along the way. The basic premise is that the act of helping others naturally encourages those on the receiving end of the freely-given assistance to try to reciprocate: to do something to return the favour. If they’re unable to return the favour in some material sense, they should at least be willing show their gratitude in other ways. This gratitude is useful in the sense that it will go some way towards reducing the recipient’s baseline levels of psychological pain or, in more common parlance, the inner turmoil that we all experience each day.
A #SelfishlyHelpful act of community volunteering should not only reduces social pain (which I argue is generated in the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex, an area implicated in many of the seven deadlies) but also fosters an increased sense of feeling socially accepted as a member of a community. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll make a new friend every time you help others, but it increases the chances that someone might smile and wave from the other side of the road the next time your paths cross, which can bolster feelings of social connection in small but meaningful ways. Increasing a person’s sense of being socially connected to people in their community is the secret sauce that leads to incremental improvements in physical health and psychological wellbeing that have lead several recent meta-analyses to emphasise the importance to taking steps to reduce social isolation.
As someone who just received an email from a teacher from an East London state school I gave a talk at last week, saying that all the students were “really buzzing with enthusiasm” after the talk and that I’d “undoubtedly changed the path of many of their lives”, I can personally attest to the benefits of being #SelfishlyHelpful in terms of making people feel like trying to help others for zero remuneration is entirely worthwhile on a number of different levels. So as you mull over what you’ve just read, think to yourself… “where could I volunteer my services in the local community”? And bear in mind that, when you come to giving your time freely to others, it is you, not they, who will be the one that benefits the most…