Do Something for positive benefits

Kristen Hamling Photo/File

I have been reading a lot lately about the benefits of positive emotions to health, creativity and longevity.

Decades of research has shown that positive emotions such as optimism, joy, contentment and happiness, can lead to longer lives, creative thinking, improved social relationships, and better coping with stress. Feel good moments seem to accrue over time and lead to far reaching benefits in most aspects of our lives.

Bear with me here, but after watching Nigel Latta's recent Killing our kids - which highlighted the problem of a community with insufficient work to go around - I started to wonder if there was a way of keeping people engaged in life even if they can't get jobs.

The slide into unhealthy lifestyles often occurs when there are no meaningful activities to keep people happy and engaged. If we can get more people to participate in healthy activities that increase their daily positive emotions, then I suspect we would have stronger and happier communities.

My husband proposed a brilliant idea a number of years ago on how to boost engagement in a town that had high unemployment. Incidentally, his idea won him an award in a competition at the time so it isn't just me who thinks his ideas are fantastic! His idea was a "Do Something Allowance". The idea was to free the unemployed from the charade of looking for work that simply wasn't there, or for which they were never going to be suitable, a pursuit that can be very demoralising.

Instead of having to look for work those on the Do Something Allowance could choose whatever they liked and would be supervised through to various levels of mastery, and encouraged to develop the activity as far as possible.

An example used by my husband at the time was directed towards the so-called surf-bum (we were living in Australia at that time). These people are, by and large, living a healthy, active life and not causing too much trouble for anyone. They are fit and healthy, doing what they love and likely to be experiencing a ton of daily positive emotions. In this way, they are unlikely to be a drain on the health care system, likely to be contributing in other valuable ways within their community and more likely to be a good employee when meaningful work becomes available.

This same scenario could be applied to sports. If players could be paid to train, play for a local team, and/or coach others as part of a Do Something Allowance, how big an impact would it have on grassroots rugby? Much better than looking for work that simply isn't there.

Yet other examples might include the arts (giving exhibitions or lessons), musicians (entering competitions) or writers (publishing articles or interesting items in a blog).

We should encourage people wanting to Do Something to focus on something they are good at and something they love; secondly to receive mentoring so they can take their activities to as high a level as possible; and thirdly pass on their learning to others. In this way we see positive emotions generated, which studies show can lead to improved self-esteem and optimism.

I can only imagine the benefits to communities and individuals if people were experiencing higher self-esteem, rather than low self-esteem coming from unemployment.

The more populated the world gets, the more technology strips away jobs and the ever growing divide between the rich and the poor, suggests we need to think differently about how our community functions. The Do Something Allowance is one way of bringing out the strength in a community.

A registered psychologist with a masters in applied psychology, Wanganui mother-of-two Kristen Hamling is studying for a PhD in positive psychology at AUT.