Are you a nice person? You are more likely to suffer from THIS mental illness

People often say that do good for others and it will come back to you in unexpected ways. In fact, if you were lucky enough to have grown up with your grandparents, you are much likely to have learnt the art of practicing kindness and love.

As a result, you are always the first to lend a shoulder to cry on, the first one to sacrifice your own happiness for others and even the first one to volunteer to get medicines for a coughing coworker.

While all these qualities do make you a beautiful person to be with, being a nice person may not be all that good for your mental health. No, we are not joking.

According to a recent report published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, nicer people are more likely to battle depression. The study says that if a person is sensitive to unfairness, he or she is much more likely to get depressed when compared to someone who is not at all bothered (read selfish).

Researchers came to this conclusion by giving a personality test to 350 people to separate them into two groups. These two groups were “pro-social” and “individualist”, based on a person’s way of thinking. Being pro-social meant self-sacrificing and willing to promote equity and being an individualist meant being selfish and primarily concerned with taking care of themselves.

After this, the researcher’s also studied how much the participants wanted to financially help the needy or those less fortunate. To study the reactions, they examined the brains of the participants in both the groups by conducting an MRI to check which part of their brains lit up during the given situations.

The results were shocking, to say the least. The researchers found that the brain patterns for the two groups (pro-social and individualist) were very different in the situation where money was distributed unequally.

Those belonging to the pro-social group showed increased activity in their amygdala, (a cluster in the brain which is responsible for emotions including stress responses) while hilariously on the other hand, brains of the ‘individualist’ had increased activity in amygdala only when others got more money than they did.

To follow up the study, the participants were given a questionnaire about depression, known as the Beck Depression Inventory to determine whether those brain activities were linked to any symptoms of depression.

The results showed that those in the pro-social group (the nice people) were more likely to suffer from symptoms of depression.

The study does not prove that being a nice person will automatically cause depression but rather, that a caring person may be more vulnerable to depression, thanks to their empathetic nature and the ability to feel guilty about inequity and unfairness.