What is the WeHelp Mindset?

Our mindset is our habits of thought, feeling, and behavior. The brain consumes 25% of our glucose so to conserve energy most of what we think, feel, and do are done on auto pilot. Think about an existing mindset you are familiar with such as the victim mindset. With this mindset all you see are victims. Alternatively,

With the WeHelp mindset all we see are opportunities to help other people.

Imagine seeing a cute dog, or a messy room. What are your habits of feeling? Did you smile? Now imagine helping someone or seeing other people help each other. Most likely your reaction will be positive as WeHelp has been built into us by evolution.

WeHelp is baked into us

We're social creatures and we evolved this way because our ancestors had to work together to survive. Evolution isn't magic - it had to find a way to get us to take care of our kids, our family, and our community. How did we evolve to become social creatures? How does it work? Consider the following:

Reciprocity. When you help someone they immediately gain the WeHelp Mindset - they are thinking about how to help you back or how to pay it forward. We didn't learn this - its just part of who we are. Consider how you feel when someone smiles and thanks you. Thanking is a way to give back.

Evolution also uses the carrot and the stick on us.

The carrot. Helping other people feels awesome. I mentored kids in China for 15 years and it feels amazing. My major motivation for WeHelp has been to give this feeling to you guys. When we take care of each other or even just imagine or remember doing so our bodies make us feel good. Research has shown that helping other people raises our baseline level of happiness - chasing happiness in other ways simply gives us emotional ups and downs without moving that baseline level.

The stick. Our bodies can't just rely on the carrot - they have to give us the stick as well when we're doing the wrong thing. In fact evolution wants to take us out of the gene pool if we're doing the wrong thing. Have you ever felt lonely? Social isolation is far worse for our health than smoking, obesity, not exercising, or a poor diet. Loneliness is a major cause of both anxiety and depression. This is the stick - our bodies are telling us to stop doing whatever we're doing.

WeHelp is a foundational mindset

When you adopt the WeHelp mindset, 'WeHelp' becomes a filter which applies to all your other mindsets and habits. Essentially you start saying 'Is this helpful?' after your other habits of thought feeling and behavior. This causes your thoughts, and behaviors to shift towards those that help you and the people around you.

How does the WeHelp Mindset help with the problem?

Social support reduces the risk of, and alleviates the symptoms of depression, anxiety, obesity, and loneliness. When we start to see opportunities to help each other all around us we are creating that social support.

Research has shown that preverbal infants want to help others AND prefer to be with people they have seen helping others. This is because helping is a prosocial behavior that is built into us. Due to this the WeHelp Mindset is actually a critical part of our individual and societal health. We evolved the WeHelp Mindset because it helped us deal with shocks - imagine life fifty thousand years ago and all the shocks our ancestors went through and survived together.

How do we adopt the WeHelp Mindset?

The magic here is that you already have it. We were designed to help our kids and our community. As you get older if you aren't helping you will feel something missing which is why we talking about finding a 'meaning and purpose' to our lives. By giving it a name however we can be more conscious of developing the WeHelp Mindset in ourselves.

Asking for help

Interestingly the easiest way to adopt the WeHelp Mindset is to ask for and receive help from someone else. As noted above reciprocity is built into us. This creates a virtuous circle of helping in our community as everyone helps each other a little more. All started from you asking for help.

Changing our habits

This is a huge topic, so lets stick to one tip. At the end of every habit our brains go through a correction step to make sure we did the right thing. To change an existing habit just ask yourself 'Is this helpful?' after your thoughts and behaviors. A negative evaluation will allow you to replace your current habits of thought with more helpful ones.

Forming new habits

New habits are formed easily when we experience strong emotions. Start a WeHelp club and celebrate the little wins together and you'll find them quickly stacking up.

Spreading the WeHelp Mindset

Finally the best way to adopt the WeHelp Mindset is to spread it. Help others, tell them about the idea, form a WeHelp club, join our community, etc. We all love to see people helping each other so the more WeHelp in your community, the more it becomes a habit in all of us.