The Law of Karma scientifically proven: Helping others brings success to you!

Most people believe that happiness is the result of success, but Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, and writer of the How To Happiness book (2008), among others, as well as co-writer of the paper Does Happiness Promote Career Success (2008), has proven through an experiment that happy people tend to become more successful in their professional and personal lives. Therefore happiness is the cause of success and not the other way around.

So, by this we have determined that by becoming happier you can bring success to you. The only thing needed now, is to prove that by helping people we can become happier.

Now, that is a tricky one. Again most people believe that it is the happy and rich people that help others, because they are the ones that have the time and the means to do so. Well, that is just an excuse of course, as helping others doesn’t necessarily mean spending money, as for the time… well we all have just twenty four hours a day, neither more nor less.

Elizabeth W. Dunn Ph.D. of the university of British Columbia in her research described on Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness (2008) proved not only that spending money on others promotes your own happiness but also that the amount of money spent has practically nothing to do with the amount of happiness you receive.

In Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations (2007), William T. Harbaugh proves that whenever somebody spends money voluntarily or not (i.e. through taxation) in helping others, then some areas of the ventral striatum of the brain are being activated, which are also the ones that are activated when one receives a reward, when one feels valued by others as well as when our basic needs are fulfilled. And so by activating these areas of the brain the feelings generated are the same as if the cause (that is receiving a reward etc) is present. And so, by giving money to others you are becoming happier because of the way your brain works.

Now, even before all these, in 2005 Lyubomirsky in Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change show that non-financial acts of kindness had the same results. Worth mentioning that one group of the participants increased their happiness by 40% in six weeks. Isn’t it good enough for you?

The Endless Knot a traditional Symbol of Karma the interlinking knots symbolize the endless interaction of cause and effect, an everlasting circle of events caused by us

And so now we have proven that by helping others one becomes happier, and as proven before, by becoming happier, one becomes more successful. Therefore, by helping others one becomes more successful, which is just as the Law of Karma suggests.

So do you want to increase your happiness by 40% to welcome more success in your life? Then you may do as the mentioned group of participants of the experiment of Lyubomirsky did. For six weeks perform five (non-financial) acts of kindness each week, but do them all in the same day. (The other group that did their acts one a day increased their happiness by a smaller percentage).