Most advice about loneliness focuses on receiving company: call a friend, join a group, spend time with family. A 2025 trial tested a different angle entirely — what happens when you give your time to someone else instead.

What researchers did

The HEAL-HOA trial randomly assigned 375 adults, aged 50 to 70, into one of two groups. One group took part in structured volunteering. The other received general psychoeducation — helpful information, but no direct volunteering role. Loneliness was measured before and after using two well-established scales researchers use specifically to avoid relying on a single, possibly misleading, measurement.

What they found

The volunteering group showed a significantly larger drop in loneliness than the psychoeducation group, on both loneliness scales. Being useful to someone else — not just receiving support — moved the needle in a randomized comparison, which is a meaningfully stronger kind of evidence than a survey asking people whether volunteering "feels" helpful.

Why this is worth knowing

It reframes what "working on loneliness" can look like. The instinct is often to seek out more company for yourself. This trial suggests being needed by someone else is its own distinct route to feeling less alone — not a replacement for close relationships, but a genuine second path, and one that does not depend on any one specific person being available.

Clubs on Mind Vitality often end up working this way in practice: a host keeping a thread welcoming, a member answering a newer member's question — small acts of being useful inside Clubs: Finding Your People, not just showing up to receive something.

What we won't claim

This is one trial, with a specific age range and a specific kind of volunteering — it cannot promise the same result for every person or every form of giving time. What it does offer is real randomized evidence that helping others is not just a nice idea layered on top of loneliness advice — it is, in this trial, one of the things that actually worked.