Our Brain Drugs Us Into Bliss For Being Kind to Others

There are so many people who say that human nature is savage. That if we can rid ourselves of social constraints, we would become animals and literally eat each other alive. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. I think there are sides of us that are quite brutal and quite selfish but nature has given us many gifts. Among them, something called the ‘helper’s high’. The neuro-biology of helping others.

Literally acts of compassion, acts of kindness, when we submit, when we volunteer by our own volition to serve other people, to extend our hands towards one another, we get a biological reward. Our brain literally rewards a sick, creates pleasure chemicals, it drugs us into bliss to reward us for being kind to one another.

Our fundamental wiring is there to give us a prize,  to give us a reward to be kind and collaborative and cooperative with one another. This is known as the helper’s high. It’s what people say that nothing gives them as much satisfaction as helping other people. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that we would have inherited this biochemical reward for working and collaborating with other people because, we take care of our tribe and we’re more likely to survive by working together.

The science is there and i love it but it’s the metaphysical dimension that really turns me on. It’s turning through this wiring during moments of despair. When we think the world is going to hell, when we fear that what is out of sight is out of mind and we feel that the world perhaps lacks compassion. Watching the media these days, certainly makes you feel that way and I guess, what I’m saying is that it’s during these moments, that we might turn to this awareness and to this notion that our fundamental nature, our fundamental wiring is good.

It is it’s own reward. Do not seek external payment, trust in the inner satisfaction that you will get by offering your life to some higher purpose. Find the need that’s lacking in the world and turn your passion into a purpose. That’s the kind of thing that certainly makes me willing to get up in the morning to believe that by making a fundamental difference in someone else’s life, i’m also getting off and that’s not a bad thing.