Doing small favours for other people made participants less depressed, less anxious and less lonely within two weeks. Doing nice things for themselves had the opposite effect on depression and anxiety, even though it felt better at the time.
The study comes from Maria Naclerio, Lee Lazar, Erica Hornstein and Naomi Eisenberger of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was published online on November 11, 2024, in the journal Emotion.
The authors set out to test the popular idea that self-care, or “treating yourself”, is the route to well-being, against research suggesting that helping others is good for us.
Three kind acts a week
In December 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the team recruited 999 US adults through the online platform Prolific. More than half were under stay-at-home restrictions at the time. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups.
The prosocial group was asked to do three kind things for others each week for two weeks, such as calling a friend going through a hard time, cooking and delivering food, or helping with childcare or shopping. The self-kindness group was asked to do three kind things for themselves, like taking a bath, buying themselves a gift or setting aside time for video games and TV. A control group got no instructions.
Participants completed standard questionnaires on depression, anxiety and loneliness before and after, plus weekly reports on their mood and stress. In all, 781 people finished the study.
Helping others helped, self-care backfired
The prosocial group showed significant drops in all three measures. Their depression scores fell by about 2 points, anxiety by about 2.5 points and loneliness by nearly 1 point. The control group showed no significant change.
The self-kindness group moved the other way. Their depression scores rose by about 11 points on a scale where the average starting score was 11, and anxiety rose by about 14 points. Loneliness did not change.
The effects held for men and women alike. Among self-kindness participants, the rise in anxiety was larger for those who were not under stay-at-home orders.
Enjoyable in the moment
The result is a paradox. People in the self-kindness group enjoyed their acts much more, rating them about 8.5 out of 10 against roughly 6.7 for acts done for others. During the two weeks, they also reported more positive mood and less negative mood than the control group.
People who helped others, in contrast, felt more socially connected while doing so. Further analysis suggested their drop in loneliness accounted for part of their improvement in depression and anxiety.
The authors suggest that focusing on oneself may feed rumination in people prone to negative thinking. They compare it to mood-repair habits such as eating fatty food or procrastinating, which feel good now but can cost well-being later.
They flag key limits. The study ran during a pandemic, when focusing on yourself and pulling away from others may have been especially harmful, and it relied on online self-reports from an American sample.
Even so, the contrast was sharp: two weeks of small favours for others did more for participants’ mental health than two weeks of treating themselves.
Study Details:
- Title: The well-being paradox: Comparing prosocial and self-kindness interventions for mental health benefits
- Authors: Maria E. Naclerio, Lee Lazar, Erica A. Hornstein, Naomi I. Eisenberger
- Journal: Emotion
- Publication Date: November 11, 2024
- DOI: 10.1037/emo0001460