Researchers have found that regular time spent helping outside the home significantly slows cognitive decline in middle-age and older adults.

The new study of more than 30,000 adults in the US looking at individuals over two decades found that the rate of cognitive decline associated with aging fell by 15%-20% for people who formally volunteer their services or who help in more informal ways with neighbors, family, or friends outside the home on a regular basis.

This cognitive benefit was consistently observed when individuals devoted about two to four hours per week to helping others.

The results appear in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

“Everyday acts of support—whether organized or personal—can have lasting cognitive impact,” says Sae Hwang Han, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences at UT who led the study.

“What stood out to me was that the cognitive benefits of helping others weren’t just short-term boosts but cumulative over time with sustained engagement, and these benefits were evident for both formal volunteering and informal helping. And in addition to that, moderate engagement of just two to four hours was consistently linked to robust benefits.”

The study is one of the first to look simultaneously at the impact of volunteering in the formal sense and more informal types of helping, such as assisting neighbors, relatives, or friends in need with things like getting to a health appointment, caring for children, lawn work, or preparing taxes. While about 1 in 3 older Americans are reported to engage in scheduled or formal volunteering, more than half manage to help other people in their lives regularly in this more informal way.

“Informal helping is sometimes assumed to offer fewer health benefits due to its lack of social recognition,” Han says. But in fact, “It was a pleasant surprise to find that it provides cognitive benefits comparable to formal volunteering.”

Read the full article about the benefits of volunteering and helping others at Futurity.