People Who Volunteer Are Happier With Their Work-Life Balance
New York Magazine:
If you feel that your job is eating up your life, then you probably also feel like you can’t take on any additional commitments — even though you know you probably should be volunteering at your kid’s school or a soup kitchen or something. Who has the time? Actually, you do, or you’ll feel like you do once you start volunteering, suggests a new study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Its authors found that people who volunteer are happier with their work-life balance than those who don’t volunteer, even when total actual free time is controlled for.
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And this isn’t the first study to suggest the time-stretching powers of volunteering; a 2012 paper in Psychological Science reported that when people volunteered their time to help others in some way, they reported a greater sense of “time affluence” compared to those who spent those same hours doing something to make themselves happy. Giving your time away doesn’t exactly work the way you’d expect it to.
Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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