"But I like helping"

There's a deeper objection than any so far, and it's about who you are.

You may have read the last six chapters with growing unease. You're someone people can rely on, and you like being that. You were brought up to muck in. When you think about the people you admire, they're the ones who turned up with a casserole and a van, and you don't want to become someone who weighs up every request and asks what's in it for them. If that's what this book is selling, you'd sooner keep the tombola.

It isn't, and I think the research is on your side here, so let me set it out.

Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan ran four studies on helping. In one, people kept a daily diary of the helpful things they did, their reasons, and how they felt. In the others the researchers arranged for some people to help by choice and others to help under pressure. The results pointed the same way throughout. Helping went with better wellbeing for the helper when it was done willingly, because the person wanted to or thought it mattered. Help given because they felt they had to didn't show the same benefit. The part I find most telling is that the same held for the person on the receiving end. Being helped by someone who chose to do it did the recipients more good than being helped by someone who'd been pressed into it.

So the casserole counts for more when it's freely given, and the person eating it can tell.

A second line of work comes from Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz. They drew a distinction between two things that look alike from outside. One is a warm concern for other people. The other is a focus on other people to the exclusion of yourself, where your own needs never make it on to the list. Reviewing the research, they reported that the first isn't linked to psychological distress and the second is, including symptoms of depression. These are associations, so they can't show which causes which. Even so, the distinction is worth having. Caring about people is not the problem. Leaving yourself off the list is.

What this book is after is a small thing. It's the unwilling yes, the one you'd have ticked as a no. It leaves every willing yes alone, including the hard ones. If you removed every unwilling yes from your last year, you would still be the person with the casserole and the van. You'd have dropped a committee, two leaving collections you organised because nobody else would, a weekend minding someone's dog, and the tombola.

And I'd go further. I think you'd be a better helper. This is my own view and I can't point to a trial of it. Time and good temper are limited, and unwilling yeses are paid for out of the same account as willing ones. On the Sunday after the fair you were too flat to ring your father. The month you ran the collection was the month you never got round to visiting a friend who'd just had a baby. Your father and your friend didn't ask. The people who matter most to you often don't, which means that a habit of giving your time to whoever asks hands it to the askers and takes it from the ones who never do.

You were asking whether saying no makes you less generous. I'd turn it round and ask who your generosity is going to at the moment, and whether you chose them. If the answer is that it goes to whoever happens to catch you at the bins, then saying no to some of them is how you get to decide who you help.