How Being Helpful to Others in Times of Need Makes People Feel Good About Themselves

In a reassuring animation, the gently insightful School of Life explains how the need and desire to be helpful to others in their times of need can help a person feel better about themselves. Additionally, they observe that most people have a powerful need to be needed, and with that, a desire to prove our worth through demonstrated action. This also means that feeling left out in any way can lead to self-doubt.

Not at all times and over all things, nor at the expense of our own critical needs, but fundamentally, we have a powerful urge to feel helpful. We need to be needed. All of us suffer from a fear of superfluity, which the requirements of others have a critical capacity to appease. … We rely on the needs of others to remind us of what we’re capable.