You Can Be Too Selfless

Giving makes us happier than receiving. In fact, it can create a feedback loop of happiness in your life. Helping others reach their goals brings joy. Doing nice things for others today can literally make you happier for the rest of the week.
However, being a martyr stresses you out and is bad for your health. So don't spend too much time giving.
Via Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success: Research shows that on the job, people who engage in selfless giving end up feeling overloaded and stressed, as well as experiencing conflict between work and family. This is even true in marriages: in one study of married couples, people who failed to maintain an equilibrium between their own needs and their partner’s needs became more depressed over the next six months.
What to do? Do all your giving one day a week.
Via Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success: The chunkers achieved gains in happiness; the sprinklers didn’t. Happiness increased when people performed all five giving acts in a single day, rather than doing one a day. Lyubomirsky and colleagues speculate that “spreading them over the course of a week might have diminished salience and power or made them less distinguishable from participants' habitual kind of behavior.”
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