If You Fall I’ll Pick You Up, And If Not, I’ll Sleep With You

I am by your side, I am your friend, your partner, your family, the person who loves you, or I am a person you do not know but who is willing to help you. Sometimes, we can distance ourselves or perhaps we do not know each other, but the reality is that there is a bond that unites us, that it exists or that we can create it, it does not matter. If you fall I pick you up, help you walk and if you can’t walk I sit next to you. 

I understand you, I melt into your skin, into your thoughts, I know who you are and I do not reveal your secrets, you know me and protect me, we feel the connection of our souls, we share a life, we smile just by looking at each other,  we fall and get up.

The meaning of giving love

If I see you crying, I tell you I’m sorry and I’m leaving, I’m not giving you love. If I pay my children for their studies but ignore them, I am not giving them love. If I see my partner in trouble and I buy him a car, I am not giving him love.

Giving love means much more, it means that when you need it I also pick you up. Helping someone is putting yourself in their place, feeling their suffering, their sorrow, their sadness as something yours and making the other person notice that you are there, that you are going to prevent them from falling, and that if they fall, you are going to pick them up. Helping another person must start from an altruistic gesture and intended for another, not for us.

But love is not only given to those we know, but we can give it to other people who are strangers and need it. It is love like a hand extended in the form of help, support.

The benefits of helping others

Helping others not only benefits the people we support, but it helps ourselves in many ways and makes us evolve as people. Here are some of the benefits that occur when we help another person:

Lengthens life

According to a study published by the journal Health Psychology, people who practice volunteer activities live longer than those who do not, as long as the reason they act is to help others and not “personal satisfaction.”

Sara Konrath and several of her colleagues from the University of Michigan (USA) reached this conclusion after studying some 10,000 people of different ages and verifying that within four years the chances of survival were 3% higher among those who they practiced volunteering.

The scientific basis that Konrath gave to explain the increase in longevity was that when we worry about others, the stress responses of our body are deactivated and hormones such as oxytocin are released that restore normal physiological function.

Causes well-being on a mental level

Helping other people, as we said before, is necessary to understand it in a broad sense, that is, we should not stick to people we know but we can extend our help to other people we do not know and who need it.

When we do a leisure activity, we feel a well-being that remains in our body and in our mind for a while, but when we do an activity to help others, our mental well-being is prolonged over time, because the joy and gratitude that we going to transmit the other person is something that remains in the memory.

Increase self-esteem

When we help another person and we feel their gratitude, our opinion of ourselves, our self-esteem, increases. It is an immense satisfaction to feel how our help is valued and it is a gift for our self-esteem. We feel useful, we feel that we have done something of value.

Whoever helps becomes a more positive person

Helping others generates positive feelings of joy and happiness, to feel that the glass is half full and not half empty. Being charitable makes you a more optimistic person. The positive thoughts that are generated when we help someone are the source of our feeling of happiness.

Therefore, helping others, reaching out, helps others and also helps ourselves, to be better people, to see the world from another perspective and to be happier.