From: BBC
Social Prescribing: Why Purpose Is Good for Your Health
In a bid to improve health and wellbeing, social prescriptions can cover everything from volunteering and art classes to support with household bills. But do they really work?
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Perhaps counterintuitively, prescribing “service” is proving to be one particularly effective form. Early studies have shown that those in nursing homes who are given choices and responsibilities to serve their surrounding environment (such as taking care of a houseplant) can thrive more than those who are simply there to be taken care of, not to do the caring.
“Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent,” writes American psychologist Ellen Langer, who led the house plant study, in her bestselling 2009 book Counterclockwise.
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