Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine in US conducted a 14-day study on 77 adults, ranging from 18 to 44 years.
The participants received an automated phone reminder every night that prompted them to complete their daily assessment.
They were asked to report any stressful life events they experienced that day across several domains (eg interpersonal, work/education, home, finance, health/accident) and the total number of events comprised the measure of daily stress.
They were also asked to report whether they had engaged in various helpful behaviours (eg held open a door, helped with schoolwork, asked someone if they needed help) that day.
More From This Section
The results indicated that helping others boosted participants' daily well-being. A greater number of helping behaviours was associated with higher levels of daily positive emotion and better overall mental health.
Participants' helping behaviour also influenced how they responded to stress. People who reported lower-than-usual helping behaviour reported lower positive emotion and higher negative emotion in response to high daily stress.
In other words, helping behaviour seemed to buffer the negative effects of stress on well-being.
"Our research shows that when we help others we can also help ourselves," said Emily Ansell of the Yale University School of Medicine.
"Stressful days usually lead us to have a worse mood and poorer mental health, but our findings suggest that if we do small things for others, such as holding a door open for someone, we won't feel as poorly on stressful days," Ansell said.
"And there was only a slight increase in negative emotion from stress if the participant engaged in more prosocial behaviours," she said.
The findings were published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.