Wonder Drug
7 Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself

A pair of doctors team up to illuminate, via neuroscience and wonderful stories from their clinical practice, why focusing on others—and pitching into the world in general—is a secret superpower.

You may have heard that teaching someone else strengthens your own knowledge, or that the first-born child in a family often has a higher IQ than the younger ones because they’ve taken time to figure out how to transmit what they know to their siblings. Part of it is that figuring out how to explain something clarifies thinking, but part of it is the power of understanding how another person learns. In other words: getting outside our own heads, outside the swirl of self-concern that dominates most people’s mental chatter, is, ironically, one of the best things we can do for ourselves. Thinking of others feels good.

In Wonder Drug, Trzeciak and Mazzarelli cut through lofty notions of what an altruistic life looks like to focus on the varying meanings of giving in real people’s actual daily lives. They demonstrate that—despite the popularity of old saws like “He’s too mean to die”—kinder people live longer, and live healthier. The “Me” culture whose seeds in the baby boomer generation morphed into a relentless self-focus for the millennials is partly to blame. But this generational trend can be easily bucked by any one of us right now, with simple prism changes: start small, be thankful (and express it to someone else), seek common ground, really listen, understand the power of every one of us to change someone else’s day for the better.